When I came home from work on thursday I made a sandwich, grabbed a shandy out of the fridge, and plopped onto my bed to scroll through memes on instagram. What I immediately found was this:
I want to discuss the ongoing events in Minneapolis, the public reaction to them, and how they fit into a broader historical and political context. But before I do that, I want to establish the facts surrounding the case that ignited the whole situation.
George Floyd was murdered. Pretty much everyone agrees on that and virtually no one apart from actual white supremacists is defending the officer who murdered him (nor the three other officers who watched). Regardless, I'll substantiate that.
Specifically, George Floyd, a 46 year old black man from Houston who lived in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, allegedly tried to buy a sandwich with a counterfeit $20 bill at Cup Foods on May 25th and instead of simply turning him away, someone who worked there opted to call the police.
Floyd was found by police sitting in a car, allegedly under the influence. They spend several minutes removing him from the vehicle and handcuffing him (it's not clear whether he actually resisted arrest or not, as police claimed), then place him against a wall. He does appear to meekly resist being placed in the police car, and the next footage available we see officr Derek Chauvin sitting on Floyd's neck, with two other officers (Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Keung) holding Floyd down and one other (Tou Thao) watching . Floyd moans in pain, says he can't breath, states that his stomach and neck are in pain and repeatedly begs for his life. Bystanders also plead with the officer to stop sitting on Floyd's neck, and one points out that he is bleeding from his nose. Another suggests that Chauvin is enjoying it.
Even after Floyd stops speaking and moving, Chauvin keeps pressure on his neck and does not stop until EMS arrive. All in all, he kept sustained pressure on Floyd's windpipe for almost nine minutes, nearly three of which after Floyd had stopped moving.
Floyd registered no pulse in the ambulance and was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Chauvin, for his part, was far from a stellar cop before this incident. He had no less than 18 complaints on his official record, and was involved in three officer-involved shootings, one of which was fatal. 18. Keep that in mind if you find yourself filing a complaint against an officer.
All four officers have been fired (not arrested, mind you, FIRED), and the US Department of Justice and FBI are investigating the incident. On Tuesday May 26th, protesters gathered and marched to Minneapolis' 3rd Police Precinct. At first protests were peaceful but they gradually became violent, with objects being thrown through police precinct windows and gradually a back and forth between protestors and police, who deployed sandbag rounds and tear gas into the crowd, who responded mostly with water bottles. On Wednesday afternoon videos appeared of police using pepper spray on crowds, and looting began. An Autozone and Wendy's were set ablaze and by Thursday morning over 30 businesses had been looted or otherwise damaged. Late Thursday night rioters set the police precinct on fire and riots have continued through Friday. Finally, following days of protest, Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged with 3rd degree murder.
And that pretty much gets us up to the point where I'm watching people smash self-checkout counters with hammers in Target and I find myself feeling strangely... excited?
Looting and rioting are the types of events that really show you where people are on the political spectrum.
The participants often aren't political at all- the average looter in Minneapolis, I imagine, isn't particularly interested in the sociopolitical ramifications of snagging a couch or a pair of headphones, they're just poor people taking advantage of the opportunity to grab some cool shit they wouldn't normally be able to afford. Perhaps it's also a means of lashing out against the system of laws and power which somehow always seems to align against people of color in virtually every area of their lives.
There are the conservatives who dutifully call the rioters thugs and applaud acts of violence against them. Their aspersions teeter ever so closely to saying what they really mean- black people are animals who are poor because of their inferior genetics and should be beaten or killed whenever they step out of line because that's just what's best for everyone in the end- but usually they avoid actually taking their thought process to its logical conclusion. Whatever, nothing new here, I think we all know what we're dealing with.
Centrists and liberals are more reserved, and one sees in their reactions the cognitive dissonance of wanting to be on the side of oppressed people but not being able to handle the reality that oppressed people often are not meek, often are not peaceful, and often don't even give thought to the system they are, like it or not, materially revolting against. In principle they agree, private property is sacred and anyone who tries to take private property should be punished, but they don't want to say that because doesn't it just sound awful when you put it like that? Instead they either ignore the issue altogether or seek to separate the rioters from the "good ones", the polite Booker T. Washingtons of the world who seek a passive, feel-good form of resistance that doesn't hurt anybody, and in the vacuum allow the right to do their dirty work.
Joe Biden, for his part, managed to mumble his usual grandstanding but utterly substanceless and generic lamentation of American racism and police brutality (a violent about-face for the politician who in 2008 referred to the 1994 crime bill as the Biden Crime Law). But to be fair, this is something Biden has been fighting against for decades since his participation in the Civil Rights struggle he has repeatedly recounted in luxurious detail and which also never fucking happened. At least he stuck to the script this time I suppose, we need him to at least do that much until November.
But one thing he didn't do was say a single word about rioting. That would be altogether too complicated for a lowest common denominator politician like Biden, where people are either victims or perpetrators (which is which sort of depends on which way the political winds are blowing, but never mind that). To be fair to him, nuance does not win elections.
(As an aside, he also neglected to mention the fact that Amy Klobuchar, currently one of our most likely VP picks, had previously declined to bring charges against Chauvin following the first time he killed someone while on duty in 2006. So perhaps if anything George Floyd's death will spare us having to hear Klobuchar's "Snow Woman" routine another forty times. Small comforts.)
[Update: the stories about Klobuchar's involvement in the Chauvin case has since been discredited. Maybe we aren't even that lucky.]
Leftists, of course, don't win elections and thus can stand to be a little more sophisticated. Thus they are generally neutral to favorable towards rioters. Some couch it as a direct action against corporate power. That's a pretty gross oversimplification, looters have damaged numerous small local businesses as well (I'm sure the Daily Caller and the Blaze were ecstatic to be able to report on this black firefighter who's bar was destroyed). There is no doubt these riots are bad for the local community and for an economy already reeling from a pandemic.
Still, though: damn do I wish I could have been there smashing self-checkouts with a hammer. Don't you?
Have you ever gone shopping at Target, gotten to the self checkout and somehow feel like you're like a cow walking over to feed in its trough? Like nice Daddy Target is going to give you the warm fuzzy feeling of consumption you want while sad-looking employees listlessly stand around and helplessly watch you do their job for them? Doesn't the whole thing fill you with a hint of shame? You think to yourself "man I wish there were some small business owned by people in my neighborhood I could have bought these jeans from, but we're in the middle of a pandemic and this fucking place is the only one that's open and all my pants are falling apart?" Or am I the only leftist filled with communist guilt when I spend money at a corporation because I have to look at least somewhat not homeless when I go to work?
All this to say it feels fucking great to see people look at these tools by which money is siphoned out of their communities in return for cheap plastic shit and say "you know, I think I'm gonna go break that." I have no sympathy for Target- they have spent tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks over the past 12 years, including half a billion in the past fiscal quarter alone. Stock buybacks, if you're not up to speed, are basically a way to siphon company revenue directly to shareholders by artificially raising a company's share price by buying one's own stock. It's understood as a way wealthy capitalists are able to profit from company revenue without paying workers better, reinvesting into the company, or actually producing anything more than they were before. This is bad for workers, bad for consumers, and it stalls economic growth as a whole. All of which is why it used to be illegal, but unlike your local dude who wants a free flat screen, people in the financial sector find federal law to be a remarkably malleable thing and if they want to take your rent money to buy Chet his first G Wagon, well who is the federal government to stop them?
Oh and by the way, they also laid off 1700 people in Minneapolis in 2015. The intent was to save a few million to help allow for growth in the next year.
Target spent $2.2 BILLION in share buybacks in 2015. Cry me a fucking river.
In truth I think that catharsis is what rioting is really all about. The great contradiction of poverty in a consumer economy is being simultaneously told to spend as much as possible, that acquisition of consumer goods is the key to happiness, but also that you should be ashamed for wasting your money on consumer goods and you should be saving it rigorously so one day you might be able to invest in the stock market, or real estate, or some other form of capital that could be used to generate income so you too can become one of the property-owning class harvesting the labor of workers to generate profit. So, which is it? Do we spend, or do we save? And when the material conditions offered to us- the schools we are allowed to attend, the houses we grow up in, the income our parents are able to bring in and the food they can afford to feed us with- are so meager and inadequate that obtaining capital becomes almost impossible and virtually all our money goes to buying only the most essential consumer goods, do we even have that choice? Is it even tenable for the capitalist system for most people to have that choice?
We have created a society in which people are thoroughly convinced that your happiness and your success are measured by how much you own. This is agreed upon by all races, across all socioeconomic classes because it is drilled into all of our heads on a minute-by-minute basis almost from birth. We have simultaneously built our economy on the backs of poor people who we have given no real opportunity to achieve any meaningful measure of that ownership. Then a circumstance is created where they are able to simply walk into a store and take what they want and smash the stupid fucking checkout machine that would normally stand between them and material acquisition, and we are enraged when they do so?
Riots are not new. In 532 CE the Nika Revolt in Constantinople left half of the city burned to the ground and tens of thousands dead, thirty thousand of them rioters executed by the Emperor Justinian. Then as now, the riots were in response to discontent with the ruling class- Justinian for the high taxes he and his prefect John the Cappadocian had levied, which they seem to have mainly used as a private slush fund, third-world dictator style. Other examples abound, from the French Revolution to the bread riots in the American Confederacy in 1863. When the people are pushed around enough, eventually shit gets violent. From a broad historical perspective, today's riots in the US, which as of this writing haven't cost a single life (except one taken by a pawnshop owner in Minneapolis shooting an alleged looter), have been remarkable peaceful and restrained. But they are nonetheless an inevitable consequence of subjecting people to certain socioeconomic conditions from which they find themselves unable to escape. To meaningfully address the problem, you must address the causes.
What are the causes? Ultimately they are principally economic. George Floyd may have been killed in part for being a large black man, but we don't really know that. We can never quantify how racist Derek Chauvin is. What we can quantify and analyze are the systems that over generations put George Floyd in the position of trying to buy a sandwich with a counterfeit $20 bill.
Was George Floyd offered the same quality of education as the average white man of his age (education being, after all, the greatest predictor of income)? Did he grow up in adequate housing relative to his white counterparts? Did he have as healthy a diet? Did his family inherit substantial assets from older generations, as most white families do? How often was he able to go to the doctor? Were his wages adequate compensation for the actual value of his work? Did his skin color factor into the hiring decisions made over the course of his life by the workplaces he applied for? Did cops patrol and make more arrests in his neighborhood than in white neighborhoods nearby? Really, what was the likelihood of George Floyd ever reaching the middle class, with all its material security, from the moment of his birth? Investigation of all these questions will invariably reveal large gaps in opportunity that can be directly tied to racial disparity, enforced by dominant systems created by and for white men in a time when racist attitudes were far less subtle. And riots will be a natural consequence of that fact for as long as they are allowed to remain standing. That is not to take away responsibility of people for their own actions. It is merely to point out that if your average middle class white family were dropped into the circumstances of the average black family, riots would be just as inevitable a reality. If you doubt me, I'd point you to the many photos of white looters coming out of Minneapolis.
And it would be remiss of me to take for granted the assumption that rioters are motivated purely by selfishness or rage. There have been numerous examples documented- protesters forming a human shield around a riot cop who had found himself surrounded, rioters challenging the very oddly cop-like man calmly smashing windows in the Minneapolis Autozone, looters taking jugs of milk to distribute to people who have been pepper sprayed, protesters cleaning their communities after rioting the night before- that have shown an enormous humanity among those participating. It reveals what I think should be an obvious statistical reality: some people are good and some people are bad. Much like the police, whenever a large group of people comes together around a fairly vague collection of ideas (like, "police violence is bad", or "America is racist"), some of those people will be good and some will be bad. But the existence of the latter group does not in any way delegitimize the concerns and needs of the whole.
And it would be irresponsible of me not to point out the endless stream of police violence we're seeing, which speaks for itself.
Protests offer an opportunity to have a real discussion about issues of politics and power with people who don't normally think or care about these issues. We must take advantage of it. Now more than ever is the time to help your apolitical friends register to vote, now is the time to let your friends know there are progressives running in their state who will advocate to help poor and working people and redistribute political power into their hands. Now is the time to remind people that the racial injustice they are seeing has a long history and is part of a broad system that, in somewhat subtler ways, is oppressing them too. No matter what happens over the coming years, we need a broad coalition of working people to come together and demand justice in the streets and in the ballot box. Power is never given, only taken. There is no other way.
In all of this, I think one of my favorite clips has to be this one posted by All Gas No Brakes.
"Everybody feel like that."
If you can go out and protest, do it. If you can donate, do it. You can find links to your state bail fund here to help protesters get out of jail.
If you'd like to help the small businesses of Minneapolis rebuild, you can donate to the Lake Street Council here.
See y'all out there.
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