Of course the title is clickbait. Sorry about that. Ms. Jones is not a politician, much less one that is ready to be president. She does, however, have the intelligence, clarity, and integrity that most (if not all) of our national politicians lack, especially when it comes to analyzing the problems of racial inequality in the US. For those who were living on Mars in June, I link to her viral rant which catapulted her to fame far outside of Georgia.
Her message was so powerful and true, and according to the comments on YouTube, many people have watched the video hundreds of times, and some watch it every day. Previously, Jones was a local activist in Atlanta, but due to the video, now she is organizing movements all over the country, and has become a lioness on social media (homepage, Instagram). You really should follow her on Instagram, if only to understand how a modern civil rights leader operates, and to follow her daily routine which would overwhelm the stamina of a lesser person. Jones is also an author of an excellent book for young adults, I'm Not Dying with You Tonight, which due to her recent fame became a New Youk Times bestseller. But the point of this diary is not to celebrate her as a person, but rather to celebrate her message.
[As suggested by user siab, I insert a link to another marvelous diary on the Stanford Marshmallow Study, which can serve as required reading, and provide background before attempting to tackle the points in Ms. Jones’s video.]
Note that she never once uses the word “racism” in her speech. She is not asking for white people to love her, or even respect her people. She is not calling for an end to racism, which she knows is a futile mission. Rather, she is demanding economic justice for her people after centuries of economic destruction. She recites an abbreviated history of how her African Americans have been grievously wronged, beginning with slavery but continuing to this day; how they have been systematically denied the possibility to move upward, and whenever they did acquire a bit of capital and political power, it was stolen from them, sometimes violently. Jones covers just a few of the millions of outrages waged against black people, but her summary is sufficiently compelling to have gained her an enormous following, and surprisingly among white people as well as African Americans. I will not recite her arguments here, since she does a much better job in her video than I could ever do.
In the Democratic Party, and reflected on this site, there seems to be a constant tension between those who primarily want social justice and those who demand economic equality, or at least less inequality. Ms. Jones makes clear that these goals are really one and the same, but while social equality is something to strive for, addressing economic inequality is needed right now. I am firmly on the “Sanders-Warren side” of the Democratic party, but I admit that we economic justice warriors too often overlook the specific plight of black people, and how a generic approach to “raise all boats” will always benefit whites more than blacks. The first steps in this battle must address this problem specifically in the black community. One element of this could be reparations, which is a controversial idea in America, and even in the “anti-racist” Democratic Party. But reparations would only be a small part in a program to let African Americans acquire wealth in the US, the first step of which is always home ownership.
The first time I heard about the monopoly analogy was in a lecture by Dr. Claud Anderson, the economic historian and educator, which you can find on YouTube:
Although this is a rather long video, I would urge people to watch it until the end. It is a more detailed version of Kimberly Jones’ short rant, and provides further examples to document the sad economic history of African Americans. He also notes a curious fact: Before the civil war, free black people made up 51% of the incarcerated population in the US, and today, we are just doing slightly better. In fact, we may be doing worse, if you count the huge steady-state number of black suspects in jail, awaiting arraignment, trial and sentencing. Dr. Anderson goes on to give an account of how black people have been systematically exploited throughout their history, and augments his points with personal anecdotes from his positions of power — in which, as he makes clear, he had no power at all.
A few days after the release of Ms. Jones’s, there was a wonderful article here on Daily Kos by user Jan D Weir, entitled Banking Apartheid, Debt Slavery, and Financial Lynching: Why People Protest. This got little attention, despite my attempts to promote it elsewhere. Mr. Weir explains how black people have been intentionally prevented from entering the homeowner class, which is key to attaining economic security in the USA. Simply put, it is more profitable to keep people paying rent than helping them buy homes. When the banks do pretend to help, black people are "sold" houses where they will surely default on the mortgage, yielding even larger profits for the owner classes. As with the majority of economic justice diaries, Jan’s article was ignored — that is, except by a few concerned people who objected to the word “violence” in the original title, and didn’t read further than that. Which brings me to my final point.
When this video went viral, some people refused to hear, or even understand her message, because in their opinion, the references to rioting and looting betrayed the goals of the BLM. If you listen to her words, she is not really advocating violence, but there can be no doubt that she is, to some degree, justifying it, or at least trying to make people understand it. Kind of like this guy did 53 years ago.
[Riots] 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.
- M.L. King, September 1, 1967. APA Annual Meeting
As King more famously said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Whether a riot is justified, or productive, is beside the point. A riot is not an organized action, and it is not even a protest. It is a pure, unadulterated expression of rage, pain and suffering, which has nothing to do with logic or intent. A riot is a scream that must be heard and acted on, or else there will more rage and more violence to come.
And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
M.L. King, The Other America
It is true that Jones goes a bit further than King could in a public forum, and does say that supports both the protests and the riots, because of the messages they send. As she expresses it:
So, when they say: “Why do you burn down the community, why do you burn down your own neighborhood?"
IT'S NOT OURS. WE DON’T OWN ANYTHING.
The conclusion is that people will respect their neighborhoods when they actually have an ownership stake in them. For now, those buildings (where the rent can be extortionary) and stores (where prices are higher than in white neighborhoods) are symbols of their oppression, and their very presence can be hated.
While the destruction suffered in riots is lamentable, they do get public attention, and can yield results. The initial peaceful protests were not sufficient to produce charges against the police officers that murdered George Floyd. It was the riots that pushed action taken against Derek Chauvin and the other officers. The police union could have postponed the charging process indefinitely, but the riots forced even them to stand down and let justice take its course.
Wherever Ms. Jones’s video has appeared, it is not surprising that it has gathered comments from racists and other trolls. But the most common Republican commenter will cite MLK as a “good” spokesman for black people because — and perhaps only because — he preached nonviolence. And whether they will admit it or not, many Democrats (and even some on this site, I venture) feel the same way. They love MLK because of his nonviolent approach doesn’t threaten them in the same way as would a full-out race war. But they forget that in his day he was hated and feared by white America, and when the FBI called King “the most dangerous man in America”, most white people agreed with that appraisal.
As the quotes above show, while King preached nonviolence, he was certainly aware of the power of violence, and by the end, he started to acknowledge that violence did have a power of its own, and was the consequence of white neglect. If institutions were immune to every other approach, violence would be the result.
And if MLK didn't advocate violence per se, he certainly knew how to exploit its power indirectly. During that period there was violence everywhere, and white people foresaw a race war coming. King presented his movement as an alternative to bloodletting in the streets, and forced white people to choose between ending segregation or suffering the wrath of the enraged. Even so, when white people saw those massive gatherings of African Americans, they were still terrified, because they knew that with a word from MLK the crowd could have turned in another direction. King was a brilliant strategist, one of the greatest of all time, and people delude themselves if they believe that he was all about nonviolence. He used a peaceful approach because that was the best instrument he had at that time.
Neither King no Kimberly Jones is advocating violence as a viable form of protest. The recent riots and those of King’s day were spontaneous expressions of pain and rage, an irrational transgression of the social construct by people who have no voice and no power. What else would you have them do, post their grievances on Facebook or Twitter?
In any event, Ms. Jones has continued doing what she always has done, which is going about the hard work of channeling black hopelessness into concrete action. Now that the “fashion” of BLM is starting to fade for white people, and they are moving onto other interests, I wanted to remind people of Kimberly Jones and her message, and how it has shaped our perception and understanding of black economics in the aftermath of the riots.