The Arthur Ashe statue on Richmond’s fabled Monument Avenue was recently defaced with the slogan “White lives matter”. Ashe’s statue is the only one of a Black man, a counterweight erected on a 5 mile boulevard of prominent Confederates, capped by an elaborate memorial to Robert E Lee. All of those had been defaced with BlackLivesMatter graffiti. The graffiti on Ashe’s statue was written over with BLM, but one white man returned to doggedly assert his position, “you destroyed my statues; I’m going to destroy yours.” We are still fighting the Civil War in little daily skirmishes.
It’s as if the Confederate States of America had won the war, for what nation erects thousands of memorials to traitors intent on destroying it. Is there any such nation on the planet? Have other Americans thought to ask these questions? No. Because the Confederacy lost the fighting but won the propaganda war and the right to control the lives of Black folks which was after all the purpose of the Civil War in the first place. Their triumph is a testament to the national desire for that same control. Monument Avenue is a monument to the right to control Black lives. Financed by the Daughters of the Confederacy in the 1890s to give physical form to their campaign to convert traitors to heroes, it is a reminder to both Black and white residents alike that Black lives do not matter at all.
The 1890s saw the consolidation of White Redemption to end Reconstruction; the infrastructural manifestation of the political deal that left the north guilt free to abandon the formerly enslaved in an effort to heal the country’s postbellum wounds. It was the sacrifice of Black bodies on the altar of White American unification, knit together in the common belief that Black people ain’t shit. This is also why the battle to keep these memorials standing in public places has remained so fierce, particularly heralded by political figures. Monument Avenue is emblematic of the American imperative to control Black bodies. These statues are tributes defined as “an act, statement, or gift that is intended to show gratitude, respect, or admiration”; they are not an accurate representation of history, as supporters claim, because their very understanding of history is an illusion with little basis in fact. Noone is going to forget the role that Confederate dignitaries played in the Civil War, the most seminal event in the history of this young democracy that cost 1.5 million casualties or 5% of the US population and killed 20% of southern white males, even if there is not a single public marker in all the land.
That White lives matter more than any other is so obvious, it goes without stating. It is the summation of the country’s history. White lives stole the land from the tribes of indigenous people living here, using tactics like smallpox infected blankets, violent murder of men, women and children, dishonest treaties and forced resettlement to name only a few. None of these tactics was considered honorable against other white forces. The only unintentional tactic was death from microorganisms to which native tribesmen had never been exposed, a concept of which white settlers were totally ignorant. These diseases literally wiped out whole villages without a single shot.
Spokesmen of the time made no secret of the idea that whites, a term that began to be substituted for Englishman on American soil in the early 1600s after Africans were introduced into Virginia. They wrote explicitly that Black and native men were lesser than whites and therefore dispensable, in order to cover the brutal usage of both as laborers and justify the use of force to keep them in line. Landed Englishmen presumed their entitlement by virtue of their existence. To be sure, class underpinned their thinking as well. They viewed the poor, white criminals and misfits who were imported for indentured labor as lesser than themselves as well but they keenly understood that even the treacherous Irish and Scots could be more easily controlled if color was used to differentiate them from the Africans. Africans would soon be considered the best laborers because their color made them easily retrievable if they escaped, unlike the whites who could dissolve into the general population. Thus color became ascendant and the bulk of the intellectual propaganda targeted the dehumanization of Africans and their descendants.
The power of white lives matter more than any other is so omnipresent that only a powerful rejoinder like BlackLivesMatter can grab attention. The hashtag garnered outrage and mimickers, the naked WhiteLivesMatter, BlueLivesMatter and the most disingenuous AllLivesMatter among others. Each is shorthand. BlackLivesMatter means they matter as much as white lives, the dominant force that values none but their own. It is a plea for the ideal. AllLivesMatter is a utopian statement of a world that has never existed, not even in the first social groups of Homo sapiens. BlueLivesMatter reaffirms the value of enforcers in controlling all nonwhite lives.
That WhiteLivesMatter more is a historical given. Until white Americans are willing to place less emphasis their own lives; to understand their own role in devaluing the lives of nonwhites; to empathize with the plight of those dehumanized by their actions; and to formulate solutions that allow nonwhites to assume their rightful place in humanity, white lives will continue to matter more. As the unquestioned commanders of both minds and the apparatus of power, only whites can change that. Power does not yield power willingly.
On June 21, 1940 Jesse Thornton, aBlack man is lynched in Luverne Alabama for calling a white policeman by his name without using “Mr”
Maybe it’s because I woke this morning to this narrative on NPR radio that it slammed me in the gut. Maybe if I had waited to have my coffee I would have been less emotionally devastated, given my seasoned cynical nature. I know there are a lot of people who won’t get the frustration that underlies Black protests over the killing of George Floyd. It is a life lived under the shadow of fear that every African American has felt multiple times in their lives. That fear of being seen by a group identity first by every other non-Black person rather than as an individual. In a country built for white men, they are the people that count the most; even the lowliest white man has power over us.
It seems that there are people who don’t believe that it isn’t right that some people have to fear harassment every time they step out of their door. That some people can literally be shot to death for jogging. Or ejected from a store for wearing a mask, even though wearing a mask is the recommended public health practice for COVID-19. It’s impossible to understand how any sentient human being can believe this is how things should be. Perhaps because this is always the way it has been.
The narrative in question came from Political Rewind where Brian Robinson, a Southern accented white Republican, formerly communications director for former Georgia governor Nathan Deal began his remarks by saying he wasn’t sure if an honest discussion about race could take place. He felt pressured not to express an opinion that “doesn’t meet the orthodoxy of the moment” because he risked being shamed and having his career endangered if he did.
Unpacking that a little, did he mean that he feels ashamed as an acknowledgement that there is something wrong for which one must make amends. That is what Brian Stevens of the Equal Justice Initiative calls the first step in truth and reconciliation if the nation is ever to heal racial wounds. Rather, it sounds as if he means the ridicule and name calling that one is forced to endure on Twitter, even when their point is valid. At least a Twitter thing lasts for only a couple of days until a new target pops up. That doesn’t sound worse than being called a coon, or a “ni***r” because I can tell you from personal experience, you just get used to that after the first few times and move on.
Brian went on to say that he sees universal horror [among his white friends] about what happened to Ahmaud Arbery and that reform is needed. But, he hoped that the progress that has been made would not be lost. For him, progress is encapsulated by the decline in the number of police killings of African Americans since 2015. In 2019, there were 9 cases of unarmed Black men killed by police officers. For the record, the Washington Post database of on duty police shooting lists 8 African Americans in Georgia in 2019 and 236 in the US. He added that in each case, it was an officer facing a dangerous situation and it wasn’t always a white on Black situation.
Another brief aside. How is the color of the policeman relevant? The police are supposed to protect citizens equally, so what is the difference who is in the blue uniform? The skin color of the offending officer is relevant only if one assigns a herd identity to it. By this logic, a Black officer would give the benefit of the doubt to “a brother”; a Latinx officer to “his amigo”, etc. This tinge of racial hocus pocus ignores the commonality of police training that emphasizes the Black man as the enemy and the police brotherhood culture where one is considered suspicious if they don’t demonstrate that “they have their brother’s back”. Black cops have to work twice as hard to show that they aren’t like those thugs in the street, so they are probably even quicker to become aggressive than their white counterparts.
Back to the main point. To envision 9 lives as progress, there must be an acceptance of the antecedent history; that there is a rightness to a standard that any number of lives should be ended. In fact, Brian gave no mitigating remarks, like tragic as it is. If progress implies acceptance, this would seem to imply that each one of these human beings is easily discarded and in fact, there are more who can be sacrificed as we inevitably wind down to exactly what number that is acceptable. 5,3,1? Except there is no guarantee that the number will not shoot up (pardon the pun) next year and the year after that. Has there been a target number or minimum goal established?
Brian wanted to emphasize that each police situation was dangerous. Perhaps he has special access to body cam footage or police reports. But the word dangerous is critical because an officer’s actions are automatically considered appropriate if they fear for their life. And yet, danger is in the eye of the beholder. Police see danger everywhere there is a Black face because their training reinforces their implicit racial biases accumulated through a lifetime of stereotypic images in every societal medium. Throw in any of their lifetime experiences and stories from others on the job, filtered through their predisposed biases and bundled in a neat little trigger: black=weapon=danger.
A Black face is inherently dangerous only in myth. Officers of the law carry around in their heads the notion that EVERY Black person is armed even though African Americans are less likely to own a gun than whites. They’ve been trained to associate brown skin with criminal activity. If a crime has been reported in the vicinity, skin color is the main descriptor. There is considerable evidence that whites have trouble distinguishing individual features of African American faces and see them as larger, heavier and older than they actually are. They don’t understand the subtlety of brown shadings but neither does the white or Asian person who called in the incident, so descriptors often don’t help. So the cop has to check everyone who they identify as negroid. In truth, and police will admit this, they often use a reported incident as an excuse to randomly stop Black boys, when no such incident has been reported. They only see that every African American is a threat to their life, from the 12 year old boy to the 60 year old man.
When people are under the influence of 45’s black magic spell of an alternative universe, we can’t have a conversation about race. They can’t hear me or see me. We don’t have common words or definitions. We don’t have a common cause in justice for all.
And so, they are fearful of every encounter which they insist on creating because they have been taught that this is the proper method to police neighborhoods. Black ones, not white ones. They don’t routinely patrol white neighborhoods because as former mayor Mike Bloomberg said, the ghetto is “where all the crime is”. White neighborhoods call the police as needed; the wealthy have abandoned public police protection for their own private security patrols, having long ago acknowledged the police’s inability to prevent or solve crime.
At no point does a law officer see an innocent youth, a neighbor, a team mate of their son. Because they don’t live in the neighborhood and their children don’t go to school with any Black kids. They see a sea of sharp toothed piranha ready to tear them apart. It’s kill or be killed. Brian Robinson defines the situation as dangerous from this same vantage point. It’s a potential Black criminal because every Black in that neighborhood [not his, mind you, because he doesn’t have any Black neighbors] is a potential criminal.
So Brian is content to let the arc of justice slowly bend. There’s no urgency in it for him because the status quo is essentially working for him and his kind. They aren’t facing any danger day to day. It may hurt his sensibilities that somewhere out there, there’s a problem for someone else, but it’s not a priority because he has life to lead. For Black people, it is the life they lead. Not for one second can we relax our guard against microaggressions. For a Black youth, their life is more precarious because they have to guard against random police harassment, humiliation, search, and ultimately a taser or a bullet. It’s not even that any of those things will happen; it’s the possibility of any of those things that keep mothers and fathers up at night.
I don’t know that Brian can understand that. Without understanding, it is difficult for him to empathize. Perhaps if he had an experience like a group I travelled with to northern Ecuador in 1968. The region is close to the equator and residents are descendants of the enslaved who escaped from ships that wrecked on the coast. There were 16 members in our group, 8 white, 8 Black. As we drove north, the people outside the bus looked darker and darker skinned, so when we disembarked in the town square, there wasn’t another white face in sight. For the first time in their lives, the white members were an isolated minority. Their situation was exacerbated by their inability to speak Spanish in this foreign country. The terror was evident in their eyes. The others of us who were Black and spoke Spanish were luxuriating at the surprise of these Afro-Ecuadorian people with a common heritage of enslavement. Yes. Black is Beautiful! As it turned out, a break in the music late into a town festival brought a drunken focus on the American visitors that ended in our being chased back to the hotel. Most of the people in the crowd did not immediately identify us as Americans. They had never seen Afro-Americans before and believed that we were held in the US in “ghettos” unable to leave the country, like Native Americans were held on reservations. Of course we joined the rest of the group, after all, they were our ride. We knew intuitively that no harm would come to us without triggering an international incident. But the presence of a crowd of “big bad black bogey-men” with no other white people anywhere in sight fired all of the white members’ racial prejudices into a terror storm that likely soiled some underwear. They had never been the minority before in their lives but more importantly they had lost the privilege of whiteness that had always allowed them to dictate the conditions of the lives of other minorities. They had lost the “right to exclude and control nonwhites” as described by Jamelle Bouie that they had always taken for granted.
That was a 2 day excursion which probably left some residual trauma. An alternative for Brian might be a simulation with him as a white man enslaved by a Black one as perhaps a sex object. Of course he has a lifetime of assumptions that would have to be broken down for it to be impactful, but interrogation techniques have shown it doesn’t take a long time to make an experience traumatic. Any simulation has to be traumatic to reproduce the lives of Black Americans in white America.
Unless Brian can understand, he can’t make the connection between the anxiety of being Black in America and weathering, the physiologic process that causes advanced aging from the stress of racism. And further, from weathering to the higher rates of hypertension among African Americans that puts our health at risk, leading to at least a 3 year shorter life span for Black men nationally and an even larger disparity within individual regions and states. The component parts of the picture include housing, employment, wages, wealth accumulation, education and healthcare, all areas with racial disparities.
The evidence is there, but only for those who don’t refuse to look. There are some like Brian who can create an alternative explanation for disparities that attributes them to something lacking in colored people that has determined their fate, a narrative that includes the travesty of Democratic liberalism that leaves people in Black communities sucking at the government teat. [Their words, not mine] That’s his party’s position, even as he supports the president who is bold enough in his rhetoric to call us undeserving thugs who should go back to where we came from, as if it wasn’t his own birthplace. While Brian is under the influence of 45’s black magic spell, he remains in that alternative universe.
That fantasy landscape makes it difficult to have an honest conversation with Brian. We don’t have a common vocabulary or common definitions; we can only have cross talk. Brian emphasized that we are all Americans and we have to live together. I have only questions for him. Is there anything wrong with having disparities in the lives of different groups? What problems does he see? What is his understanding of the problems based on? Is there a reason to change? But he can’t hear or see me. His is a black heart invested in allowing just enough tinkering to quiet down the noise so that he can continue to live his life of white superiority. He said he wants “to get past where we are right now” which means some illusory machinations that will leave him and his party led by old white men in power. I can’t empathize with that.
On June 6, 1966, James Meredith was ambushed and shot during his one-man “Walk Against Fear” through Mississippi. He survived.
The murder of George Floyd is not an exception, it’s as American as apple pie. There was Breona Taylor in Louisville, murdered in her own home days earlier on March 12 when police crashed the wrong address for a drug raid. The public is so secure in the routine that white individuals have weaponized the 911 call for their own purposes. The Central Park dog walker dripped with white privilege as she threatened a Black bird watcher with a 911 call. He had politely asked her to observe posted leash laws for the safety of birds in the area. She worked a script that included emphasizing the words African American several times and raising her voice as if “the Black man” was approaching her. She had enough gall to tell him what she was doing. The cruelty embodied by her careless disregard for a person that she hoped would be demeaned, hassled, cuffed and possibly tazed, arrested or even shot should put all Americans to shame. If only they felt it. Luckily, the birdwatcher was also armed with an iPhone and her gambit went viral, resulting in the loss of her job and her dog, cruelly being yanked around in the video. Or maybe the dog’s behavior was its protest against her unruly behavior. If only those consequences would spur her to examine her own racial biases, but probably not. She is more likely to take her shenanigans out of camera range next time.
Back in Minneapolis, a white man questioned two Black men working out in their WeWork building’s gym. There’s something audacious about a random white man questioning 2 men in their own gym in the building where they work. Both the building and gym can only be accessed with key cards. It’s the essence of white supremacy to expect that they should answer any questions at all, let alone identify themselves and justify their presence. His presumptuousness arises from what can be characterized as America’s unspoken racial contract by both Adam Swerer and Jamelle Bouie. “Freedom from domination and control is one aspect of the meaning of whiteness. The other aspect, in a kind of ideological inversion, is the right to control the presence and the lives of nonwhites . . . It was, as Harris notes, the right to exclude as well as the right to discipline; to punish those who violated the terms of the racial order.”
Mr White Guy expected that the 2 Black men would answer his queries and vacate a space where he belonged. He called 911, an inherent threat, particularly deadly in Minneapolis, and the 2 men stood their ground and began filming him. Ultimately, he was escorted out of the building, not them. But why should they have to justify their presence in a space where they belong to anyone, let alone the police? Would the same thing happen to a white man?
The hits are coming so fast that the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Aubrey has faded from view. Aubrey too fell victim to the white right to exclude and discipline nonwhites with the full cooperation of Georgia’s law enforcement and legal systems. The names of other Black people killed in encounters with law enforcement that weren’t videoed or didn’t go viral are unknowable. However, the Washington Post maintains a database of fatal on duty police shootings since 2015. There have been 422 such shootings this year to date.
Yes people are angry and frustrated, but beyond self expression, the connection between the streets and the goal of simple equal justice is not an obvious one. The prosecutor, the key to every criminal prosecution, is subject to no political pressure. Their process is secret, grand juries are secret and prosecutors have no obligation to inform the public about anything. In cases where some information about cases of cops who murder Black victims has leaked, the prosecutor has simply presented a case that favored the cop after deciding what evidence to present and what to exclude. They decide on witnesses and how they are questioned. Sure, elected prosecutors may come before voters, but they can do a lot of damage in between. While they are critical, they are only the first hurdle. There are the judges whose decisions determine the rhythm of trials, charge the jury and if they miraculously return a guilty verdict, the judge determines the sentence and where it will be served.
Of course, the jury is an almost insurmountable hurdle. They are almost always white because the jury pool is made up of registered voters, and fewer African Americans are registered for a variety of reasons. Defense attorneys scrupulously weed out people of color having concluded they can’t be objective if the victim is Black and they are inherently prejudiced against the police.
For a white juror, their policeman is their protector against all elements, imaginary and real. They fear handicapping their cops’ room to maneuver; they worry that they will hesitate in the face of an unarmed Black man instead of shooting first and asking questions later. It is better to face the jury box than a pine box, cops say. It is better, because juries find them not guilty. White jurors believe that their policemen, despite being armed to the teeth, share the same deep seated fear they themselves have of Black men, so of course their cops have acted appropriately.
The inherent favoritism of white jury persons for their police is undergirded by the understanding that the police force, evolved from early slave patrols, has been their bulwark against the dark skinned. It is worth noting that only 4 policemen have been convicted of murdering a Black victim; of those, one was Somali, one was Latinx and one was a white female. That leaves only one traditional fraternal member of the men in blue among those convicted for these kinds of murders. This is a societal problem, not confined to the courtroom.
Ultimately, one has to ask if freedom of speech is for whites only too. Again, the treatment of MAGA demonstrators versus today’s demonstrators. Civil Rights movement demonstrations. The murders of Megar Evers and countless others. Colin Kaepernick. Tommie Smith and John Carlos sent home from the Olympics for raising a fist. The assasination of Martin Luther King. Returning Black WWII veterans who were beaten and lynched for wearing their uniforms on return home. Even Emmet Till should have had the right to speak to anyone he pleased. The crimes in this list have gone unpunished, including probably MLK’s murder.
Police brutality is so acceptable that the 911 call has been weaponized by whites to dominate Black Americans
The violence surrounding the marches has diverted some of the discussion from equal justice to law and order because white America would rather talk about anything but race. But racial policing has been laid bare across national TV coverage in the police reaction to multiracial peaceful marchers. When white protestors dripping with automatic weapons, MAGA hats and Confederate flags menace state capitals, the phalanx of shielded cops decked out in riot gear armed with tear gas and batons is missing.
In contrast, live coverage of the over reactive police brutalization of Black bodies is playing across TV screens daily. Importantly, white demonstrators, known as “nig**! lovers” in the past, have fallen prey to the baton and tear gas. In some cases they have shielded people of color from the police by standing in between them and demonstrators or forming a front line. The reality is that in America, whites react more to problems among their own than they ever have to the burden of blackness. The contrast in reactions to the crack epidemic, so punitive from the federal government that introduced crack to the ghetto through Iran-Contra, and the opioid epidemic centered among whites is only one example.
It was perhaps a bonus that on orders from Attorney General Barr, demonstrators were cleared from Washington DC streets with rubber bullets and tear gas so the president could walk across the street to a church following an address in the Rose Garden. Aptly previewed from the Rose Garden with the flare of reality TV, the carefully crafted photo op featured a man fumbling with a bible as if it were an unknown foreign object, only to hold it up as if he was hawking it on QVC. It’s difficult to discern the expression on his face. Was it an attempt to appear omnipotent? Certainly it was cold but the overall effect was most sad for the sheer distance between the man and the country he governs. The presidential bunker isn’t necessary to isolate 45 from the nation; he carries that hardened enamel around in his head.
But El Trumpe may have finally gone a step too far in his race to a banana republic. Now even some Republicans are worried that he will introduce active military forces into American cities. Throw in the white nationalists in the guise of defending equal justice for their kind, perhaps shooting officers or troops to provoke their race war, and we could have all hell break loose. Others are speculating about this kind of reaction to either prevent elections, intimidate voters or even declare the results invalid in the event that the various GOP manipulations didn’t secure a victory. What will his generals do?
While police officers are people too, who panic in ways we have seen often, we can also see how their sense of entitlement allows their muscle memory to automate abuse even as cameras are rolling. They’re flaunting their impunity, if not complete then maybe just a reprimand. Maybe some change has already occurred. The Louisville Chief of Police was fired after a demonstrator was shot, although he should have been canned for Breona Taylor. Two Atlanta officers were fired for tasing and roughing up a Black couple who were just driving to pick up food around the edges of a demonstration. They broke the car windows and dented the car as they struggled to pull the two out. The county DA is moving to press charges against all 6 officers involved unbeknownst to the Atlanta Chief of Police who immediately balked at that move. We have to see if these meager efforts actually become a trend, or the fired cops just move on to other jobs in other jurisdictions and their departments remain the same.
Critical to the discussion also has been the arrests of reporters and shootings with rubber bullets in the midst of peaceful demonstrations with no attacks on police or looting. Both Black and white reporters have been intentionally targeted, one reporter blinded by a rubber bullet. Video of an Australian news crew intentionally rammed by a police shield and beaten with batons near the White House demonstrates the intentionality of these attacks. Cops in their leisure time have incorporated the GOP attacks on the press which they’ve rolled up into their implicit biases. While the press has no higher freedom than the freedom of speech and assembly in the First Amendment for any individual, the disrespect for a free press so prominent in the narrative coming from the White House has been given boots on the ground, easily slipped into an “emergency” response.
Has the looting and fires delegitimated the cause? Consider this from one demonstrator who agreed with “burn it down”. She understood that her body had no value for people in charge but she knows that property is valued. That concern for the businesses, mostly large, that were burned and looted was clearly evident in the reporting when the call to beat “demonstrators” rang out. So she wanted to hit them in the wallet where it hurt, not just to get their attention but because they have been hurting her for much of her life.
Some of the activity has targeted institutions like the College Football Hall of Fame which has memorialized the enslavement of Black athletes for the enrichment of coaches, colleges and alumni and CNN a media giant critical to the propagation of stereotypes about African Americans.
Property rights are important to people who own things. In fact society has been structured around rules to protect property, back to the Ten Commandments, because the world is filled with more who don’t have than who do. But haven’t many of those possessions accumulated at the unfair compensation of those who have produced them. Haven’t owners cheated buyers with over pricing and scams and bogus claims for magical solutions to problems people don’t have. Haven’t unscrupulous lenders cheated people out of their money and then their property? This is the sanctioned theft on which capitalism has been built. The have nots are expected to respect property rights more than the haves because that is the only way the haves can retain their minority status.
So can anyone blame a single mom who has lost her job from walking by broken windows to go in and grab what she can, even if it’s a computer screen in a restaurant to resell on eBay? Or a kid who had to make do with knockoffs of high priced sneakers to grab a few pairs from sporting goods stores. If these people didn’t break any windows at Target, they sure wanted to get in on the booty that was available.
While property has been elevated to a status above personhood, looting is not violent. It is theft, but no person has been injured. And most losses will be covered by insurance so businesses don’t lose either. Arson is not violence either. A building can’t die because it never had life. It too can be replaced by insurance. Looked at from the perspective of many a conservative, the fire generated construction jobs and building supply purchases. This is not to say that some small businesses won’t suffer and perhaps never recover.
But many of the elements who did not demonstrate peacefully have nothing to do with demonstrations against racial injustice. These developments should have been anticipated; it goes without saying that whites would co- opt Black activity and turn it back on them. Some of it is innocent adolescents, like the suburban kids looking to make eye popping TicToc posts and Facebook live streams witnessed by one leader in Colorado. Some of it is opportunist freeloading, like a group of white youths escaping a Patagonia store in Long Beach with surfboards under their arms. Their response to a question from a reporter about BlackLivesMatter was, “hey man, we’re just surfers”. Some of it is outright criminal activity, taking advantage of police diversion to rob jewelry, cell phone and high end merchandise stores.
In the 60s, the most radical elements were often FBI infiltrators; that element is likely at play here as well. These provocateurs may be embedded in some of the organized elements, left and right. There is no dearth of white supremacist groups who want to spark “race wars” and we now know that one has been masquerading as an Antifa group. Since the White Nationalist in Chief has demonstrated a penchant to glorify and not pursue those who share his philosophy, government agents are more likely to be placed on the left. 45 and Bill Barr have focused on Antifa which they characterize as radical left because it leaves their white supremacist allies out of the spot light and no one really likes them.
There is much the administration doesn’t understand or wants to ignore about Antifa, a convenient propaganda tool. Antifa is not an organization but a loose collective of thugs who like to beat people up. Some are anarchists, some believe in fighting fascism, thus the name, and some simply experience an adrenaline rush from violence. They just show up when they know violence is in the air as when white supremacists face off against anti-racism demonstrators.
What was clear in Atlanta is that social media organized groups had specific targets, used diversionary tactics like fires and firecrackers and disabled police vehicles to divert police from their vandalism, much like movie robbers take hostages in a diner to divert police from a big museum heist. They brought big rocks in backpacks to break windows; they shot BBs at fire fighters and vandalized their trucks so they couldn’t respond to the fires they set in swanky Buckhead locations. What was equally clear is that at least some of them were from somewhere else because they got lost as they tried to move between areas in the city.
Marchers should stop providing cover for rioters and looters who are decimating the communities they either have no investment in or will leave behind when they go back to wherever they came from. Demonstrators are letting these rogue elements place their lives at risk, in part escalating a tense situation with peaceful demonstrators through the fear that “any moment now”, some projectile will be launched against them. As police become more hostile, the demonstrators are angered or fearful and respond with more threatening behavior. Deescalation is hard in riot gear. Whoever these people are, they are working their own agendas, whether it be to alienate the “public” against demonstrators in order to discount the message through a long tradition of chastising African Americans for not delivering it in the appropriate form.
Of course, the irony is that the looting and the violent police reaction is what has kept the media broadcasting continuously because it makes audience pleasing visuals. But the broadcasts have spotlighted more the chaos than the case for criminal justice. To ask more, like an end to racism, is even more far fetched. Not even Martin Luther King Jr believed he could march racism away.
Back in Minneapolis, neighborhoods have become food deserts, with grocery stores destroyed and groups organized to distribute food. Many businesses, including Black owned ones, struggling to recover from the COVID-19 shutdown have been devastated. Likewise in Atlanta, small businesses were wrecked and broken. There are rumors that the white nationalists have specifically targeted Black businesses much as mobs of their antecedents attacked Black neighborhoods in times past. The likelihood of state or federal relief, as in any other state of emergency, is slim to none given the punitive reactions of federal and state officials. Lifetimes of hard work and dreams have gone up in smoke.
So stay home. Hang a sign in your window or a bumper sticker to your car. Don’t give 45 an excuse to further militarize our communities because there is no predicting how he will try to use that to retain his power. Don’t aid and abet anarchists, white supremacists, thieves and whoever else to destroy the neighborhoods where you live and work.
You can not march to secure convictions of those four Minneapolis policemen to obtain justice for George Floyd’s murder. The prosecutor can be pressured into calling a grand jury, but they rule the process and the justice system moves slowly. We have already seen the system close ranks, with the issuance of an inaccurate medical examiner autopsy report. They will resist all attempts to upset their fortress. They will not concede ground quietly. And there are plenty of Minnesotan jury members like the gym man. But an effective response demands a detailed tactical legal course that does not evolve from leaderless marches around the country.
Go out and help rebuild what others have destroyed in your area. Go out and have some tough conversations about race and the criminal justice system with people you don’t know. All law enforcement is local. The vast majority of prosecutions are local. It’s called a justice system, but it is actually diffused across 17,895 different departments. Learn what your local law enforcement agency statistics and policies are and then organize to change them. Deray McKesson gives an extensive discussion of the problems and solutions to policing on Pod Save America. These websites have information to supplement your education. Go to the mayor, the police chief or sheriff, the district attorney and if they don’t respond, replace them.
Understand that police unions which act more like lobbyists than traditional labor unions concerned with wages and benefits act as bulwarks against systemic change. Their contracts make it near impossible to fire officers even after multiple complaints and create punishments that go into employment files but cost offenders nothing in terms of job security or rank. As part of their contracts, disciplinary reports are purged at specified intervals, bringing the blue curtain down on transparency. Police unions underpin the blue wall of silence and promote false testimony to support colleagues. These actions extend into police misconduct on all fronts, including corruption. They don’t have any interest in weeding out bad apples; appeals often result in rehiring or paid damages. And the opacity of employment records allows police to find a home in new departments where they can bring bad habits with them.
Organize in your workplaces to change employment and disciplinary policies. Learn the history that brought us to this place and bring it into your schools and classrooms, even if they’re still on Zoom. Whites should speak out when people like them, let’s say the Central Park dog walker, act inappropriately.
Go make friends with African Americans with similar interests. Interact in social settings, come to understand how much you have in common. Come to understand the differences in your experiences that frame your worldviews. There is no such thing as color blindness, nor should there be. To deny my skin color is a denial of the experience you have foisted on me. These interactions will be good for all of us.
Create an actionable force that will work toward concrete solutions in organizations, businesses and all levels of government. Organize to get people to vote out bad prosecutors and judges and legislators who stand for the system that you say doesn’t represent what you believe. Work with legislative representatives to change criminal codes and penalties; work to end cash bond. Investigate the jails in your town and work to change those conditions with those in charge. If they don’t respond, work to replace them.
Nothing systemically will change as long as the White Supremacist in Chief and his lawless gang of bloodsuckers foments the demeaning of all minorities and reconfigures the federal government to further oppress them. While we are always in the forefront, other minorities will follow. His ouster along with those who have endorsed and defended him at the federal and state level is imperative.
November is the first opportunity to make change. It is crucial to become knowledgeable about candidates, such as they are because there will be time for the next elections in two years to make further change. Don’t opt out because a candidate isn’t everything you want them to be. Someone is going to occupy those offices and not voting is essentially voting for the status quo.
But this is only the beginning of the fight. The culture has been bombarded for longer than our lifetimes with deeply ingrained racial stereotypes; they can’t be marched away or wished away in a day or a week. Their destruction will take more effort than you’ve ever expended on anything else in your lives.
One other reason to stay home: COVID-19. While many demonstrators are wearing masks, some are not and some masks are not covering noses, a crucial part of the protection for you and those around you. With tear gas, masks must come off. But the effect of masks on risk of infection was not studied under the conditions of rebellion, when people spend hours packed together and when people are attacked by the police. Arrests bring the additional risk of exposure in jail cells.
The projection of viral particles is increased with yelling, singing and screaming while being attacked, both in number and distance which inherently increases the risk of viral spread. Ironically, the police with gas masks and face shields are better protected from the virus. Police tactics that wedge demonstrators into confined areas only augments viral spread, particularly when accompanied by tear gas, like the Philadelphia crowd trapped against a roadside embankment. Further, the potential for tracing contacts is undermined, since many contacts will be unnamed strangers in a large crowd and the unnamed officers who may have been attackers. These precautions are not for the young, who will likely have mild disease but for the mothers, grandmothers and fathers to whom they may spread the disease. And for the unknowing essential worker. Let’s not add more deaths to the toll of inequality.
In June, 2011 US Census reported the 25.7% of African Americans and 25.4% of Latinx Americans were living below the poverty line compared with <10% of white Americans.
oleblacklady 