“Protest. But Not Like That. Or Like That.”: U.S.-America’s Self-Imposed Riots
To suggest that protest in the United States is in its blood would be an understatement. Even a flippant view of the creation of this nation would require a recognition that the very founding of the United States was predicated on a string of protests. The casual references to the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and other events in the decades leading up to the American Revolution would have to recognize the train of events as inevitable stepping stones to violence. The founding American story is an easily discernible hill that one must climb, fall down, and climb again: peaceful protest, destruction of property, looting and rioting, rebellion, and revolution. Yet, in the grand scheme of U.S.-American culture, we have often segregated our favorite variations of the pattern from the less comfortable ones. U.S.-Americans can joke about the Boston Tea Party or raise their fists over the Revolutionary War, but the same fervor and pride is noticeably absent when it comes to the same patterns concerning racial injustice, as in the case of the Slave Insurrection of 1741 or Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831. U.S.-Americans during the era of slavery responded to possibility of slave revolts not by recognizing the immorality of the slavery system but by stifling dissent, increasing their control on slaves, and preserving white society. Later, U.S.-Americans would split their views on the institution of slavery while preserving a segregated society — by law in the South and by design in the north. Later still, U.S.-Americans were split again on the Civil Rights movement, with far too many supporting the use of police violence to stop dissent (with the help of the FBI). And today, that familiar response is here again.
The Lie of Resisting Arrest
In the last four days, Minneapolis has been on fire, literally and metaphorically. On Monday (5/25), George Floyd was strangled to death by a police officer who placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for a total of seven straight minutes. The officer was white. George Floyd was black. In the wake of the murder, the officer (and three others who were with him) was fired and Police Chief Medaria Arradondo has called for an FBI investigation; to date, no charges have been filed. Protests followed. Those protests soon became two straight evenings of riots; protesters turned from peaceful demonstration to destructive rage, lighting buildings on fire, looting stores, and creating mayhem. Minneapolis is just one fire burning in the United States, a country that has struggled and sometimes fought tooth-and-nail to preserve its racist history. A history that lives today in the apparent racist SWATing-style attempt against an NYC Central Park bird watcher, the apparent lynching of a black man who was simply jogging, the systemic inequality contributing to a disproportionate number of deaths in black communities from COVID-19, and the rise of anti-Asian racism partly fueled by Trump. Minneapolis has its own unique racist history, from the destruction of the predominately black Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul during the construction of I-94 to the history of racism within the Twin Cities police forces — the same area in which Philando Castile was murdered. And just like the the country it resides in, Minneapolis is burning.