Mass uprisings are complicated ecosystems. This one especially, perhaps, because of how unbelievably complicated our world has become.
At the core you have a severely oppressed racial group who has OVER AND OVER AGAIN been denied peaceful means of redressing its CONSISTENT brutalization by white society, lashing out in an explosion of righteous anger…
…and then, around that, you have a lot.
You have some of these black folks breaking shit, because they’re mad as hell and for damn good reason.
You have some of these black folks not breaking shit, and angry at those who are, because black people are, y’know, people, with their own thoughts, not a monolithic entity.
You have young activists who aren’t black who instigate property damage in the name of solidarity and are then able to disappear and leave black people to foot the bill, which is far higher for them.
You have people who aren’t black and care deeply about racial justice and are there to help in all kinds of capacities.
You have people who are aren’t black and care but who politically fetishize black people in a troubling way.You have opportunists from all kinds of racial and economic groups, including the well-off, just out there for their own purposes.
You have poor people from other races, including generationally impoverished white people, who are pissed for their own reasons and using the moment, theirs or not.
You have thrill-seekers who can’t resist the feel of urban warfare.
You have agent provocateurs from the right-wing and from police forces, escalating destruction in order to increase the force of the backlash and influence public perception.
You have white leftists who care but care more about a sort of revolutionary cosplay because the right-wing, or their dads, painted them as wimps.
You have white leftists who are using coordinated aggression because they have a consistent and thoughtful philosophy around it, the nuances of which they accept.
You have a growing far-right terrorist movement, accelerationists who are trying to exploit the situation to bring on a new civil war.
You have leftists accelerationists who, whether they admit it or not, also want the war.
On the other end you have targeted destruction towards, say, a police station, more or less following the traditional rules of engagement; corporate destruction that is well-insured and mostly victimless; and, also, destruction of mom-and-pop shops, health clinics, dive bars, minority-owned businesses, et cetera, that severely damages communities …
… and, as illustrated above, there are a lot of potential actors.
Then, just to complicate things, you have a global pandemic that doesn’t care if people are shoulder-to-shoulder at a desert music festival or protesting systemic racial inequality: it will take the opportunity to spread and infect our society’s most vulnerable members. And, in a terrible, bitter irony, will now pass through these mass gatherings in communities that were already hurting the worst due to … you guessed it, systemic racial inequality.
And that barely scratches the surface of what is going on.
At the end of the day, you can cheer or bemoan the uprisings, but the only responsible analysis is that they are the inevitable result of the system that provoked them, the symptoms of American’s most heinous disease – and fighting the symptoms means nothing. You have to go to the source.
We all know what the source is: the monstrous racism that haunts America’s noblest dreams. The rot at the root. The black body hanging from a tree then printed on a postcard as a trinket for tourists. Murder most foul.
I am uncomfortable saying, as some of my fellow leftists do, that a situation this complicated is GOOD, and I refuse to say, with centrists, that it is bad or wrong. The only thing I know is that it is INEVITABLE. And it’s not new. American cities burn every couple of generations because America has not learned to respect its black citizens.
As James Baldwin said when asked about the black riots of the 1960s, and what it would take for black people to “cool it”:
“I suggest that the mayor of every city and the President of this nation go on the air and address the white people for a change. Tell them to cool it.”
This will continue until we finally come to terms with our original sin. Or we will all burn. And we’ll have brought it upon ourselves.