Jenna Ryan deserves better. She knows it in her heart.
It is unlikely any Black Lives Matter supporters near The Mall on Jan. 6 screamed “GET A JOB!” at Ryan or at the crowd of nice, white insurrectionists on their way to storm the Capitol on a weekday afternoon. It might have happened. But not likely.
White conservatives are usually the ones screaming at browner, leftier demonstrators. Because if Black people are out in the streets on a weekday, white hecklers assume they are lazy, feckless, and unemployed. Not decent, hard-working Real Americans™.
What is more likely is had the angry crowd on Jan. 6 been overwhelmingly Black instead of overwhelmingly white, the security planning for the “situation” would have been dramatically more muscular. That much we know from law enforcement’s treatment of BLM protesters in Washington, D.C. and across the country last summer. Law enforcement would have given a Black crowd a much more hostile reception.
Mistreatment of peaceful BLM demonstrators by NYPD officers last summer prompted a lawsuit this week from New York state Attorney General Letitia James. “As the demonstrations continued, the very thing being protested — aggressive actions of law enforcement — was on public display,” James told a news conference.
Police shootings of unarmed Black men, BLM protest coverage, and cell phone video have begun revealing to nice, white people the very different, more-hostile world non-white Americans inhabit. A kind of parallel universe exists alongside the orderly one middle-class white Americans assume everyone nonwhite lives in too. A New Yorker cartoon decades ago satirized this in depicting two white women atop a ski slope. One says, “I wonder where the poor people ski?”
“White privilege” makes people like Jenna Ryan bristle. How dare you suggest they did not achieve their level of comfort through anything more than their Protestant work ethic? Or that they started on third base and think they hit a triple? Or that they do not deserve everything they have in life? Of course, they do. If you don’t believe Adam Smith, well, the Prosperity Gospel tells them so.
The occasion for this riff on white privilege (not my first) is a video posted Friday night of Texas realtor Jenna Ryan, the woman who with several friends hired a private plane to fly them to Donald Trump’s overthrow-the-government party. The FBI arrested Ryan on Friday — “They’re very professional” — without her being pepper-sprayed or thrown to the curb, one presumes.
No, I don’t mean the video Ryan filmed of herself (below) participating in insurrection against the United States government, the video in which she takes a break from the revolution to promote her real estate business.
This video. Caution: swallow your coffee first.
After her arrest, Ryan tells CBS 11 (Dallas-Fort Worth):
“I just want people to know I’m a normal person. That I listen to my president who told me to go to the Capitol. That I was displaying my patriotism while I was there and I was just protesting and I wasn’t trying to do anything violent and I didn’t realize there was actually violence,” Ryan said. “I’d just like to apologize for all of the families that are affected by any of the negative environment and I’d just like to say I really love people and I am not a villain that a lot of people would make me out to be, or people think I am, because I was a Trump supporter at the Capitol.”
[…]
“I don’t feel a sense of shame or guilty from my heart. I feel like I was basically following my president. I was following what we were called to do. He asked us to fly there. He asked us to be there. So I was doing what he asked us to do,” Ryan said. “I do feel a little wronged in this situation because I’m a real estate agent and this has taken my company. This has taken my business. I am being slandered all over the internet, all over the world and all over the news and I’m just like a normal person.”
Ryan is the victim here. She wants you to know she trusts Jesus and believes she does not deserve a prison sentence for her actions. In fact, “we all deserve a pardon” from Donald Trump. She will also need a job.
Ryan’s presumtion of blamelessness has nothing whatsoever to do with her being white.
UPDATE: It was “poor people” in the cartoon. Corrected.