Seriously people!
The troublemakers at the protests in no particular order except the first are:
Cops
White Supremacist
Antifa
Organized Gangs
Criminals
Bored Teenagers
These bad apples come in all colors, shapes, sizes, ideology and motive.
When these protests started, a quiet conversation started popping up on Black Twitter. As we watched these feeds, one of the things we started noticing is that the troublemakers in the group weren’t exactly brown. In fact in a lot of cases, there were no brown people to be seen. DAY’s before the mainstream media picked up on this, there were already viral threads with examples of this going around Twitter. Please see this link:
Let’s be very clear on the timeline of events: When the protests first started, tensions were high but the protests were peaceful with pockets of police overreacting and setting off problems. Then it slowly evolved into people intentionally provoking the cops. The people that were starting the problems IN THE BEGINNING were a mixture of hot heads and Antifa.
I happen to live in Berkeley so you can all spare me the Antifa has a bad name because of the media. In the Bay Area, Antifa has a bad name because there is always a small minority of (usually/not always) aggressive white males trying to cosplay the revolution. They are a huge annoyance to everyone else who is trying to protest peacefully and they are destructive.
The next couple of nights brought out more people protesting but it also brought people intentionally looking to stir crap up. This included both Antifa and Proud Boys and other white supremacy groups. Once the looting started happening, it moved from angry people on all sides to opportunists.
In the Bay Area, a roaming group of multi cultural looters, organized with cars, equipment and people have been circulating around the Bay looking to capitalize and rob stores. And yes now, white supremacist groups are openly organizing and roaming the streets.
As a black person, I’m use to the looting narrative. Every single black person is use to narrative. We know that no matter how peaceful we try to keep the protest, the media will focus on the handful of people looting and rioting. We also know that the pictures being shown in newspaper/media/online will be of black youth and men.
Which brings me to my current annoyance of this pushback that it can’t possible be white people on our side. Well yes, it can be. It takes a certain white privilege to look at another white person committing crime and then just assign them to the other side. Nevermind that I also not interested in outside groups hijacking protest to push whatever cause they need to pickback onto the movement.
Maybe the best people to listen to right now are the activist on the ground and the activist on the ground keep telling you who is doing the rioting/looting. If you need examples of black people pushing back, let me know. Happy to post them.