An increasing and understandable anger has been growing in middle America. There has been a mounting sense of unfair treatment within the shrinking middle class. When inequality exists, anger will grow, and anger always needs a target. Although the reasons for the inequity are complex and many—jobs that have been moved overseas, tax cuts passed to favor the wealthy, legislation that protects corporations but not workers, inescapable student debt—many long for simple explanations. When angry, we look to blame someone and when a leader gives us simple explanations for our pain and a target to blame for our pain, it’s easy to buy in.

Throughout human history, we have been vulnerable to someone who says they can take away our pain. A lack of fair and equitable treatment creates a longing for someone to make things better—someone who will promise us a fix and return us to better times. A return to a time when white, middle class people were prosperous and upward mobility was available. A return to a time when white people felt like they are at the top of the heap, not only in America, but in the world. This false promise spurred thousands of “law-abiding” citizens to trek to Washington, feeling justified in storming our nation’s Capitol with violence and disregard for those who attempt to protect it. 

But American’s attack on their own government that day wasn’t the only the horror to be witnessed that day. The blatant lack of preparation for protecting our Capitol and our Congress  was shocking. Weeks of warnings on social media from white supremacists and those who answered to a racist president, were largely ignored. Protection of the U.S. Capitol was hugely understaffed, not for lack of knowing about the oncoming threat, but because these threats were coming from white people. These were folks who followed a “law and order” president, except when they didn’t like the outcome of an election that was dictated by law and was orderly. 

The contrast could not have been starker in the strength of resistance in police protection that are rendered for Black Lives Matter protests and the shameful lack of resistance and understaffing of police protection that took place on Jan. 6 when it was known that thousands of angry white protesters were going to storm our nation’s Capitol. It takes no imagination to know that an angry protest by black people would never have made it close to the Capitol and would have been met with brutal force. This took place in the “Land of the Free,” where our U.S. Declaration of Independence proclaims that “all men are created equal.” Our empty platitudes about equality were completely undressed that day as the naked lies they are. There were no shadows to hide the racism that divides this country. And we cannot unsee what we have seen.

It’s always hard to see the potential for good in a traumatic event. And yet, the rioters who were intent upon terrorizing Congress on that fateful day in January, have inadvertently provided us with an opportunity change the paradigm of racism by peeling away any denial or doubts we might have had about racial disparity in this country. Let’s be clear and make no excuses. Racism was on full display that day. Period.

We now have a choice in front of us, a really important one. There is a groundswell of support for righting the racial inequity in this country and for creating a society that puts feet to its professed belief that all people are created equal—regardless of skin color, religion, sexual orientation, or gender. Let’s make America greater than it’s ever been by becoming better than we have ever been. Let’s topple the paradigm of racism that has forever poisoned our country. We can do it. We must.