“It showcases that the American justice system works the way the American justice system always has,” said Ameshia Cross, a Democratic Strategist.
It does not come as a shock to some that the U.S. Department of Justice handed down its harshest sentence in the Jan. 6 prosections to Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader charged for leading the 2021 violent and deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross told theGrio it is not “surprising” that Tarrio, an Afro-Cuban, received the highest penalty out of all of the insurrectionists charged and sentenced for crimes committed on Jan. 6 in an effort to stop the certifying of votes in the 2020 election that declared Joe Biden the 46th president of the United States.
“It showcases that the American justice system works the way the American justice system always has – by penalizing people of color, Black and brown people, at much higher sentencing or sentencing guidelines than they do anyone else,” she said. “This is not something that’s new in this country.”
She added, “All that this shows is the truth behind the fact that justice does choose which color gets the lowest amount of sentencing if they get sentenced at all, and we’ve seen that with the Jan. 6 rioters and orchestrators.”
On Tuesday, Tarrio, 39, was sentenced to 22 years behind bars and 36 months of supervised release for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the Jan. 6 attempted coup.
In 2020, it became public knowledge that the Proud Boys were tied to former President Donald Trump when he called them by name and gave them a directive during a presidential debate to “stand back and stand by.”
Tarrio answered Trump’s call, and although he was not at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, he organized the attack from a hotel in Baltimore.
Cross told theGrio that people of color like Tarrio follow Trump and join white supremacist organizations because “part of it is getting caught up in the moment,” calling it “somewhat groupthink.”
“To be a white supremacist, you don’t have to be white,” she asserted. “You can believe and posture yourself outside of the group that you look exactly like…because you have distanced yourself far from them.”
Two days prior to the insurrection, Tarrio was arrested for setting a Black Lives Matter flag on fire outside a church in Washington, D.C. He was ordered out of the city, which subsequently precluded him from partaking in the U.S. Capitol attack.
During Tarrio’s trial, his legal team tried to convince the jury that he was a patriot who had simply lost his way and deserved a lesser sentence. However, those efforts fell on deaf ears.
Stephen Piggott, program director at Western States Center, which tracks the activity of anti-democracy and white nationalist groups, told theGrio that although justice must be served, sending members of the Proud Boys to jail will not solve America’s issue with white supremacy.
“A lot of the people that showed up on Jan. 6 were not members of a group,” said Piggott. “They weren’t members of Proud Boys. They weren’t members of Oath Keepers.”
He continued, “They were there because they either were looking at stuff online or they were compelled by the former president’s words to come to D.C.”
Pigott told theGrio that the country is still seeing an uptick in white supremacy since Jan. 6, 2021. “We continue to see waves of violence directed toward people of color, [and] directed toward the LGBTQ community across the country,” he said.
Piggott added, “When you look at what’s going on the ground right now and the kind of white nationalist movement in the United States, I don’t think” that the DOJ’s efforts to hold domestic terrorists accountable “has really slowed down the activity of any of these groups or individuals.”
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