On objections to "the violence and destruction"

Trigger warnings: graphic descriptions of racist violence including lynchings

For those clutching their pearls, "but the violence and destruction! It's just not how democracy works!"

1) Democracy is clearly not working.

(a) It's not currently democracy, because there are people doing everything they can to prevent actual democracy and we never really got it set up right in the first place.

(b) Democracy is the method we chose to try to govern in a manner that preserves stated rights.  Pretty clearly, the most fundamental rights are more important than the tactic of democracy.  If the most fundamental rights are clearly and consistently trampled and the majority will not, for whatever reason, fix the problem democratically, then there has to be another mechanism, or we logically can't claim to *actually* value those rights.

Ok, so, the violence and destruction.  The two words are used together a lot, so we don’t think about them separately as much, but in the current context this is a white-supremacist/pro-“capitalist” concept-laziness.  (“Capitalist” because a lot of people feel very righteous about us living in a “capitalist” society, which we don’t.  We live in a wealth-protection racket with a veneer of righteous-sounding words.  The veneer is wearing away.)

SO: an important distinction: violence is against living things, destruction is against inanimate things.  In some times and places, violence was against *people* and destruction was against *not people* (including animals and whatever the local society considered to be subhumans ... in America, non-whites sometimes, Blacks in, if we are honest, most times).  In this essay I am aligning with the more modern usage, which exposes our inhumanity, and our knee-jerk "capitalism," better.

Violence is against living things, destruction is about inanimate things.

In the context of the protests, violence (from either side) is against *people.*

It is worrisome at a basic moral-value level that burning stores or police precincts stresses many viewers out more than the absolutely over-the-top violence perpetrated by the police on the protestors, sometimes because of real but almost completely not-actually-threatening violence from the protestors, but often, often, just because someone on the police force decided they needed to "assert their authority" or "control the situation."  In the situations when the protestors were flinging ONLY WORDS at the officers in question -- which was a bunch of situations of police violence against protestors -- I'm a little horrified that I have to point out that there was not a "situation" to "control."  There were citizens peacefully protesting.  That is not a "situation to control."  In the situations where the protestors were "complying" as best they could, even with highly questionable orders, by moving away, or being still and physically non-threatening if they had been handicapped by a police weapon or had a preexisting handicap -- again, I'm a little horrified that anyone needs to point out that that is not a "situation to control."  That is a situation that is *already under control,* and further violence *is not justified,* even if under the laws of that locale some arrests might be.  Kettling, when followed up with violence on the trapped people ... that was not a "situation to control."  That was straight-up entrapment by your government authorities for the purpose of torture.

The *actual violence* perpetrated by protestors against the police or anyone else has been nearly zero.  The destruction?  Sure some of that was protestors in some places, but 

(1) a lot of it was outside agents trying to make the protests look bad.  White supremacists, cops, random entitled teens and twenties who don't have a damn clue and think it will be a lark, have all been caught on videos or on chat strings planning or implementing this.

(2) are you demonstrating that you care more about a Target than about all the black people murdered and beaten up and framed and sent to prison by police in that city?  Are you really?

Statistical significance would discount the violence created by the current protestors compared to the violence levied against black people not only during slavery, when white oppressors had a general financial interest in keeping most slaves alive and physically capable of working, but in the Reconstruction years, when militias and sometimes just local communities on the fly -- you know, I got nothing to do after church this Sunday, you wanna? -- would get together and hunt black people.  When they assassinated elected black politicians one after the other in a targeted and deliberate way, and then started on black candidates brave enough to try to run for office to replace the dead.  When they burned and looted homes and communities.

Most of what I just described was flat-out shooting-blacks-with-guns, and mostly it wasn't battles, it was just massacre and murder.

And that's not even getting into what we think of as "lynchings," which were common enough that towns in the South sold commemorative, collectible photo-postcards. 

Because lynchings were such a public "good" at the time, they didn't, as we have been taught in our society if we are talking about them at all, just involve "hanging." They were a blood sport, for an audience (whether just a few guys or a town Sunday picnic on the green), where the hanging was not expected to kill a person quickly like an execution. Putting a rope around someone's neck and dragging them up into a tree guarantees a 'botched' hanging, a lingering and terrifying death (with an avid audience, it should be remembered) *even in the cases* when the white folks doing the lynching didn't ALSO ADD FUCKING FIRE. Late in the period when public lynchings were still an acceptable social event, the lynchers managed to keep a black male alive for four hours, burning him not all at once, but slowly and carefully.  Sometimes they killed whole families in lynchings.  Babies included.  Sometimes they experimented with fun things like poking out eyes or cutting out tongues or pulling out fingernails or cutting off fingers.  Some of those body parts were kept as souvenirs.

All of which ignores, by only considering the deaths, the severe beatings that always accompanied lynchings, to disable the victim (and for sadistic race-superiority enjoyment of course) ... and the severe beatings that were casually levied, everywhere and anywhere, in the last 150+ years on blacks who were not lynched, because white folks no longer had a financial stake in keeping "the blacks" capable of work anymore, and it's very psychologically satisfying to assert one's dominance.  In way too many places in America that is not only acceptable but encouraged, even still.  Dominance-assertion as a psychological jack-off is pretty common in every part of American society.  Certainly it is still visible from waaaaay too many police officers.

Dominance-beatings very effectively instill trauma and ongoing fear (which is the point), and sometimes permanent physical damages.  The deaths, however incredible the numbers are, are only a small part of the story of historical racist violence against the black community.  The same holds true now.  For every story I've seen over the last bunch of years about a black person murdered by police, there have been several other black people talking about the time(s) the police beat them.  And if I rouse myself enough to go looking around the internet on purpose for those stories, which I have sometimes done, it is quickly apparent that the sample making it through the social media algorithms is very small.

So yeah. There has been violence against some people and destruction in the last few weeks, and I'll even (unlike some) admit that some (although certainly and provably not all) of that was actually done by actual protestors. And that's not ideal. It's even, in a simple sense, bad.

But, those numbers, amounts, and types pale in comparison -- even the destruction (of inanimate things) numbers, amounts, and types, but especially, *especially* the violence (against people) numbers, amounts, and types -- to the overt violence and destruction that has been consistently enabled, encouraged, and accomplished against black people (and often their allies) by white supremacists (which in some places is still most white people) and the white-advantaging, black-disadvantaging power structures in our nation and in our cities.

AND the violence (remember: against people) perpetrated by protestors is in every instance VASTLY LESS than the violence perpetrated by the police, who are sometimes just *starting shit* without waiting for "provocation" or any actual physical threat. Why is the violence from protestors getting all your condemnation, but the often (cough cough) "proactive" (aggressive), and always larger and meaner, violence by the police is not?

It is notable that these demonstrators are very few threatening anyone or anything with guns. (Hence FOX photoshopped the same white dude with a gun onto several scenes in the Seattle situation, to make it look scarier. So much for gun rights I guess.  Even white people aren't allowed to be visibly armed, if the rights they are protesting for are for *black* people.)

I'm not a proponent of violence or destruction. But if you weren't complaining BEFORE NOW, the whole rest of your life, about, and trying to stop, and fix, and prevent, the much vaster violence and destruction -- the much greater suffering -- that was forced onto the black community in **all the other years** (AND STILL IS, witness a cop murdering a non-aggressive black man in the goddamn middle of this social crisis ... pretty sure I haven't heard of any black people murdering a cop during the protests, not even an armed and dangerous cop who was threatening them, which is thousands of opportunities a day in this country right now, not *even* lynching the one that slowly and with apparent personal satisfaction and zero remorse choked the death out of a black man, when white people lynched black men for nothing and everything) ... 

... if you weren't *more* outraged by all the earlier violence and destruction against fellow Americans, it's not reasonable to suddenly "find Jesus" and be some kind of moral pacifist 'in alignment with your political beliefs' now.   Your 'political beliefs' clearly value property and the current power structure over people's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (but mostly over "life," let's just start with the most basic one) and JUSTICE.

Yeah, I'm against destruction, and I think it's generally morally wrong unless for real it is a move toward something better.  I wish people wouldn't burn Target.  I don't see how that moves the needle in the right direction.  I wish people wouldn't loot, but I can kind of see the justice of impoverished people looting, in the big picture, even while I mourn the livelihoods of the business people involved.  Burning that precinct -- after there was noone inside -- or trying to burn the Justice Center in Portland, when the few people inside that night could be expected to escape -- those made some sense as political statements and effective actions, against public structures and investments that *actively hurt black people in those locales.*  I'm still not down with destruction, but ... when there is evil, and it's entrenched, sometimes destruction is necessary.

DESTRUCTION OF THINGS IS NOT MORALLY EQUIVALENT TO DIRECT MURDER AND TORTURE-ABUSE OF PERSONS.

If you want to condemn some Americans for their violence, black people are not where to start to root out the problem.  Almost all black people have been conscientiously and deliberately choosing NOT TO TRY TO KILL the rest of us for 150+ years, despite having an arguable moral right, in the Old Testament sense (tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye), to *totally* do so.  Black people generally have consistently shown amazing humanity and restraint in the face of bald racism and hundreds of years of dehumanizing violence tolerated by their nation.  The fact that they've always trusted that actually, someday, the rest of us would finally step the fuck up is remarkable, and pretty much based on nothing in history.  It's an act of faith they chose and choose, and a gift of grace they offered, and offer, to the rest of us.

"But ... but ... the violence and destruction and looting!!"

Yeah, no.  Step up to fix the root causes, every day, at all levels.  If and when you have helped build a better system, so that the violence from the system pushed on black people is smaller than the violence done by black people protesting for justice and rights and basic safety, *then* you can totally complain about those evil looters and be taken seriously.  

Except, oops, there won't be any ... which is the implied goal of your freak-out, right?  

No protestors wreaking violence and destruction?

Win-win.