I have held off on writing something for several days. I have not felt like I am the person to speak out on this issue. I am white and I do not want to draw focus from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) voices. However, I am an immigrant to this country and this morning I woke up to find several messages on my phone from people in other countries checking that I am safe, some from people I have not spoken to in years. One phrase in these messages stood out to me: “I heard that riots have popped up in Atlanta.” The phrasing was potentially minimizing, and the use of the word “riots” left room for too many inaccurate interpretations of the events. I’m not clear on how this is being reported across the globe, but I do know that we have started to see protests happen in other countries as well. So I write this first in the hope that I can provide a source of information for those abroad who may be getting a distorted view of events, second so that I can link to people who can speak with more authority on this issue, and finally because I need to: my responses to those friends got longer as I went, and I realized my own need to process what I have been seeing in this country.
The below points are largely written in response to questions that people back home and abroad have asked me or things that I have had to shed light on for them. I welcome any and all comments and corrections. Some of what I say is based on ever-changing news stories and may become inaccurate as time progresses.
This is intended as a primer for people who know little to nothing about what is going on. I’ve compiled a further reading list at the end that includes articles and books by people who can speak with more authority on these issues and provide a more comprehensive understanding of the history behind these issues. Click here to skip right to that.
Impetus for the Protests
These protests did not “pop up,” springing from nowhere. The impetus for this run of protests was the death of George Floyd. But they are not about one man. They are about Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and so many more that I wish I could list. This is not a single event. It is in response to the succession of public murders—often caught on video, often with backgrounds of unaddressed police brutality—and the lack of consequences for the police force and the white community that inevitably follows. This is about a systemic issue that has been going on since before the founding of the nation. You can track the history directly from slavery, to Jim Crow and Emmett Till, to now. If those names do not mean anything to you, click the links and read.
If at any point these protests seem to be an extreme response to one man’s murder, remember that people are protesting a system that has supported incidents such as this and is set up to let police officers and white people get away with killing black and brown people. It is only in the past couple of years, and after an intense public response in the form of protests, that we have seen officers receive charges for their excessive use of force injuring, traumatizing, and killing black people. The system is set up in such a way that Derek Chauvin (the officer who killed George Floyd) could have eighteen complaints filed against his conduct prior to this and still be an acting officer. A charge against Chauvin has not stopped the protests because we have seen time and again that these charges do not lead anywhere. And the protests will not stop with the charging of the other three officers who watched and did nothing (these officers were charged with aiding and abetting murder while I was editing this, which shows the protests are working). These protests will continue until something changes. These people’s lives and the lives of their children depend on it.
Looting and Property Damage
There are two sides to this issue.
First, has looting and property damage taken place? Undoubtedly. Is that a bad thing? Well … it is perhaps not ideal, but it may well be justified. The people have been ignored for too long. When Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem in 2016 to protest exactly this he was shut down and people said he was protesting “wrong.” Whenever people protest they are told they are doing it in an inappropriate time or place. That is because for the people in power any protest is inconvenient. The lack of changes in the system in response to incident after incident demonstrates that the loss of black lives is acceptable and that protests will be ignored. So some people are hitting the thing people in power do seem to care about: property, money, and material goods. And that has made the people in power sit up and take notice. If decision-makers had responded appropriately to the previous peaceful protests, we would not have reached this point. People who would rather not see these protests have cherry-picked words from Martin Luther King Jr. to use out of context to try and explain that they are doing it wrong and undermining their own cause. In response, there have been various fragments of MLK’s speeches that acknowledge the functions of more violent action floating around. I post a couple of sizeable chunks here because he (unsurprisingly) says it better than I could:
Let me say as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. … But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.
Martin Luther King Jr. – The Other America, Stanford University, April 1967
And then a few months later:
Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he is shocking it by abusing property rights. There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.
A profound judgment of today’s riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, ‘If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.’
The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.
Martin Luther King Jr. – Washington D.C., September 1967
King makes a notable point regarding the ease with which different people might “take hold of consumer goods.” One of many issues with American capitalism has been its construction in a way that keeps capital out of the black community, whether through redlining, the destruction of black banks, a failure to provide reparations for years of slavery, or other means. With this in mind, it might be easier to understand why, when pushed, people may have a higher tendency toward property damage and theft within civil rights actions than you might have expected.
The damage to property is obviously going to have knock-on effects for people, which is why it has drawn so much attention to these issues. That being said, large companies are insured against such things. Small businesses may stand to lose more, but many small business owners have spoken out in support of the protests and accepted the damage to their businesses as an unfortunate but necessary cost of justice.
To see Americans up in arms over property destruction and damage to commerce being used as a means of protest seems a little strange to a Brit with an understanding of history. A part of the current Republican Party named themselves after just such a protest that happened in 1773 in which the Sons of Liberty destroyed 342 chests of tea after peaceful protests had failed and they felt that they lacked representation. The violent escalation by the British then led to the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States.
The other part of this question is alluded to at the end of the first paragraph of the second MLK quote: Who is looting and damaging property? While the acts of property damaging and looting are certainly not limited to any one race, many of the videos and photographs seem to suggest that a higher proportion of white people are taking advantage of this situation. Questions have been raised over who these people are: Are they genuine protesters? People just taking advantage?
Evidence has started to pile up that some of these people have ties to the police or white supremacist groups and are there to instigate violence and provide a reason for police to use force. This is a developing situation and I am providing relevant links to some of the stories that have come out so far. One protester in Richmond, VA, noted that protesters were being targeted by police while the looters in the area were being left largely unharmed.
Violence
We do not have numbers yet, and may never get any, regarding how many police or civilians have been injured in relation to these protests. What we do have are videos, photos, and accounts of the police’s use of force against peaceful protesters. I will link to several such sources, and I assure you that you can spend a couple of hours on Twitter scrolling through more of them. These images may be hard to look at, but that is precisely why they are important for us to see. It is becoming plain that it does not matter if you are standing with your hands up; an officer may still pull down your mask and pepper spray you. You can be sitting in your car and be tased and dragged out of your seat to the pavement. You can be a reporter with a news crew and be shot at directly with rubber bullets on live TV, rubber bullets which can cost you an eye (they are not intended to be fired directly at people). Tear gas, a weapon that is outlawed in war, has been used extensively across the country for “crowd control,” including canisters being fired at people at point-blank range and toddlers being gassed. In New York we have seen police ram their cars through crowds of protesters. Some parts of California have seen curfews imposed of 1pm (I would argue that 1pm is not a curfew, but rather just an order not to leave your house). These curfews have often been instituted with little to no notice, trapping protesters in areas where officers have created an excuse to arrest them. Finally, police have been armed with military gear and reportedly seem to be, in some cases, even excited about the opportunity to hurt people. With people being shot for standing on their own front porch, banners ripped from people peacefully protesting and then being attacked by the police, continual attacks on news crews, and protesters having to take refuge in the houses of strangers, it is clear that the first interest of the police is not the safety of their communities.
Things have been extremely bad over the past few days, but it seems that they are only going to get worse. Trump has designated AntiFa as a terrorist organization. This is particularly ridiculous as there is no such organization. AntiFa is an idea and merely stands for “anti-fascist.” This is particularly dangerous because this means that anyone who does not support Trump could be labeled as being AntiFa and arrested for no other reason. I thought that America agreed several decades ago that being a fascist was a bad thing and that all of the country was anti-fascist? I guess I was mistaken.
And then on Monday night Trump held a photo-op in front of St. John’s Church, across the street from the White House. This move required the area to be cleared. The church’s patio had been in use as an area for the clergy to provide protesters with food, water, and medical attention, in an admirable display of their faith’s tenets. So that Trump could have his photo taken there, bible held high, the security teams gassed the protesters and the clergy without warning to clear them out. The people of the church have spoken out against the act here and here.
Trump’s photo-op followed his Rose Garden announcement that he was “an ally of all peaceful protesters” and warned that the country was at the mercy of “professional anarchists, violent mobs […] arsonists, looters, criminals, rider rioters, Antifa and others.” CNN noted: “The gaslighting and emptiness of Trump’s words was evident in television pictures that showed the crowd outside, which appeared young and a mixture of races and ethnicities, peacefully demonstrating moments before.” Trump stated that if cities and states did not stop the protests, then he would “deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” This would turn the country into the militarized police state that has been the bogeyman held up by second amendment advocates for years. However, those people seem to now be silent.
These protests are about the excessive use of force against the black community. These protests have happened before and have been ignored. They have escalated and drawn bigger names to support them, and have still been ignored. This was the natural progression of ignoring these calls for action. The protests have been met with further excessive force, as seen in the videos above. The community has had enough and is not backing down. Trump’s plan to apply further excessive force will result in deaths, but I doubt it will end the protests. People have had enough. Now we need change.
What Can You Do?
- If you are in a position to do so, go to a protest. Here’s some useful information if you do:
- Know Your Rights as a Protester (ACLU) (Also, check out their “mobile justice” app if you’re out and about)
- How to Protest Safely During a Pandemic (Vice)
- Donate to protest support, bail funds, and more. Here are some suggestions:
- Sign Petitions:
- Reach out to local organizations to see what other support they need—some organizations are looking for people to do simple things like wait near jails at night as protesters are sometimes being released in the middle of the night without phones, money, or adequate clothing and are in need of support.
- Support black-owned businesses and, where possible, move money to black-owned banks: this moves capital into their communities and helps them to grow.
- Contact your state and local governments and representatives and ask for change.
- Educate yourself on these issues and the history behind them (see the further reading list below).
Further Reading
I do not profess to have consumed all of the media below. This reading list is as much for myself as it is for anybody else. We must all work to educate ourselves every day.
Articles:
- Read about The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum in Alabama
- The Shooting of Black Americans Started Long Before the Looting
- Am I Going to Write About Murdered Black People Forever?
- Why Minneapolis and Ferguson are More Similar Than You Think
- Thousands of Complaints Do Little to Change Police Ways
Books
- How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi
- The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
- Just Mercy by Brian Stevenson
- White Rage by Carol Anderson
- Eyes Off The Prize by Carol Anderson
- Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson
- When they call you a terrorist by Patrisse Kahn-Cullors
- The Color of Money by Mehrsa Baradaran
- The Man-Not by Tommy J. Curry
- So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
- Policing the Black Man Edited by Angela J. Davis
- Are Prisons Obsolete? By Angela J. Davis
- Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon
- Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad
- A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Movies/TV
- Just Mercy (Has been made available for free until the end of July. Based on the book by Brian Stevenson)
- 13th (On Netflix)
- When They See Us (On Netflix)
- The Hate You Give (Based on a young adult book by Angie Thomas)
- Dear White People (On Netflix)
- Eyes On The Prize (On Amazon)
- If Beale Street Could Talk (On Hulu, based on the book by James Baldwin)
- The Black Power Mixtape (On Amazon)
Well said Mark. Thank you.
Interesting article.