Rioting is the lazy form of grief and the dysfunctional form of protest. However, it comes from a place of isolation, frustration, and despair and that is essential to note.
Imagine for a moment that everywhere you turn hands are raised against you. Not just in the media, not just in communities outside your own, but the institutional forms of governance for which you sacrifice and pay taxes. The police target you for Stop and Frisk. White men with guns not only kill your children but they and their lawyers gloat about it while they make millions. States with white majorities pass laws making it easier to kill unarmed people.
Further, when those white shooters assassinate children they avoid all sense of punishment or justice. Imagine a world where being unarmed seems to invite murder from police, from strangers, from the society in which you live. Your voice is muffled by oppression, and every day the institutions of the country seem to conspire to compromise your voice, your success, your very life.
Yes, it is silly to riot and to damage property when mourning and protesting the assassination of another young black man. However, in the throes of grief and in the depths of despair, people often do foolish things.
The Black Tax, that separate reality that all black people must face in America, is a loss of individuality. A small group of malcontents can derail and stigmatize every black person in a community. Imagine if the small percentage of white protestors of the G8 or G20 who turned out to be Anarchists meant that all disagreement with those bodies was suspect and that all white people who were upset by economic inequality were “thugs.” Imagine if the small group people in the Occupy movement who were there for the wrong reason tarnished every white Millennial who protested for that cause.
The looters are wrong. The “rioters” are wrong. Their actions undermine the goals of peaceful demonstration. Still, we are decades away from Martin’s message of, “We shall overcome,” and Malcom’s, “By any means necessary,” sounds much more appealing to some. It takes time to talk to people down from the ledge. It takes shows of good faith and progress to explain to people who have no hope, that justice is possible.
Imagine if you never felt safe when the police showed up. Imagine if every time a police car appeared in the rear view of your car, or a beat cop walked by the corner where you were waiting for the light to change, you felt dread. Imagine if you had to ask yourself whether you were going to get shot today for no reason.
Consider rioting the self-mutilation of a community, the final primal scream of pain, rage, sorrow, and agony, as once again the very police we hire and pay to protect us gun down our kids. Once again, our political system betrays us. Once again, our pain and our fear and our needs are subsumed by lies, violence, and massive institutional racism.
In all of these cases of unarmed black kids getting killed, and the ubiquitous 24 hours of media outrage before we all go back to watching Real Housewives, I’ve never heard a reporter ask a simple question. Why do the cops never shoot an unarmed white kid? Why are the people who are shot always black or brown? The answer is simple and complicated. White people wouldn’t stand for the murder of their children by the police. Why should we?
Peace,
J. Christian Watts
Follow me on Twitter @JCWPolitics