Absurd though it may be, somehow I feel folks like me are expected to catalog and translate all this fear and death with testimony and teaching. Is this the greatest public service we can offer? All rights reserved. Are we supposed to make it more elegant? Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. More personal? Sign up for our weekly newsletter- the latest horror, humor, and hope around economic inequality in your inbox every Monday. “How much,” left activist Doug Selwyn writes me, “have the rich looted, that is, stolen through tax giveaways and bailouts... trillions... with no real protest?” (None, at least since the Obama administration and Democratic-run city governments moved to repress the Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall of 2011.). With the killing of Floyd, however, the response has gone beyond the usual ‘Black Lives Matter’ speeches, marches, and confrontations. Just a few of the voices of Baltimore collected from around the web: “They are treating us like animals.” –Baltimore resident/protester, “To us, the Baltimore police department is a group of terrorists, funded by our tax dollars, who beat on people in our community daily, almost never having to explain or pay for their actions.” –Baltimore resident, “When we were out here protesting all last week for six days straight peacefully, there were no news cameras, there were no helicopters, there was no riot gear, and nobody heard us. The massive scale of the protests sparked by the police killing of a black man in Minneapolis bares the roots of American discrimination – economic woe and ‘legal’ ruling-class looting, multiplied amid the Covid-19 pandemic. No more weighty nostalgia for broken places and promises. There is nothing new, sadly, about mass black protests in the wake of a white police officer killing an unarmed black man in the 21st Century United States. Posted May 30, 2020 A makeshift memorial to George Floyd in Minneapolis, Thursday, May 28, near where Floyd was taken into police custody. The recent bipartisan $2.2 trillion coronavirus pandemic corporate bailout (passed with only a pittance of relief for the nation’s working-class majority) is just the latest example. Covid-19, and the economic depression that the coronavirus has sparked in the US, has hit already deeply impoverished and highly segregated black communities with special and tragic virulence. Dr. Marjorie Wood is the managing editor of Inequality.org and a senior staff member of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. America is not a functioning democracy. Enough is enough. Like Garner, Floyd was a middle-aged man charged with a nonviolent offense who pleaded “I can’t breathe” while being asphyxiated by a vicious white officer in a senseless assault caught on video. Living in a racist country is, Jeneé Osterheldt: It's bigger than buildings. Gunfire has broken out in numerous cities, including Louisville, where crowds rose up against the fatal police shooting of 26-year-old black woman Breonna Taylor. Americans who reflexively condemn the “looting” and property violence on display in Minneapolis, Columbus, and elsewhere would do well to reflect on Dr. King’s judgement more than half a century later. A wave of protests erupted across South Minneapolis overnight and into Thursday, with the police firing tear gas and rubber bullets as people set buildings on fire and looted stores days after Floyd, a Black man, died in police custody. Watching the predictable, status quo coverage of the riots, it sadly doesn’t seem there’s any soul searching going on. Mass marches and confrontations with police and (in some cases) the National Guard followed the ‘police-involved killings’ of Eric Garner (New York City in July 2014), Mike Brown (in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014), Walter Lamar Scott (North Charleston, South Carolina in April 2015), Freddie Gray (Baltimore in April 2015), Philando Castille (Falcon Heights, Minnesota in July 2016), and Keith Lamont Scott (Charlotte, North Carolina in September 2016). But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. A quote trending on Twitter the past few days is Martin Luther King Jr’s insightful definition in 1968 of what a riot is. Why the special and prolonged intensity of civil unrest after George Floyd’s death? This website uses cookies. Prisons do not keep us safe. Our health care system is immoral. Kerandi’s ultimate goal is a complete reorganization of her campus’s public safety system. This is out of control.” –resident/protester, “I am black. “Get tough” is code for beat, maim, and kill. She found the courage for her public statement and actions thanks to the vision and persistence of her students, led by student body president Jael Kerandi. By Paul Street, the author of numerous books, including They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2014) and The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Routledge, 2011). And there is more. The unrest has included popular break-ins to appropriate life necessities and other goods from corporate retail outlets (“looting”), and arson, including the remarkable burning down of the Minneapolis police precinct that was home base for the four cops complicit in Floyd’s death. “We cannot see any law enforcement or self-defense rationale for what occurred,” they wrote. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. Just the old facts, and then new directions. Dr. King fought on, non-violently, for two more years. The coronavirus has been redirected to attack people who are poor, brown, and Black. Only then world’s racial wounds can be healed, Woman gets KNOCKED OUT by cop after punching officer twice (VIDEO), WATCH: Looters ransack Louis Vuitton, police HQ and smash BANKS as Portland erupts in protest, Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement, concentrated in low-wage occupations without health insurance, Minnesota riots coverage: This is why Trump called mainstream media ‘enemy of the people’, US 'terminating relationship' with World Health Organization - Trump, Death & taxes: Big Tech lobbies not to pay much tax after making a killing on Covid-19 pandemic, SpaceX Starship SN4 prototype explodes after engine test in Texas (VIDEO), Minneapolis riots are PUTIN’S PLAN, ‘Russiagate’ thought-peddlers warn, Georgia calls in NATIONAL GUARD after protests in Atlanta descend into chaos with LOOTING & ARSON, CNN crew terminates live coverage as EXPLOSIVE thrown into network’s HQ in Atlanta, ‘I’m getting shot’: Police fire pepper balls at TV REPORTER & crew during Louisville protests (VIDEO), Would US shoot itself in the foot in imposing sanctions over Hong Kong?