What are ‘proper directions’ for protest when peaceful protest is for naught?

benfell

Update, May 29, 2020: Investigators have now arrested the fired police officer, Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on George Floyd’s neck. The prosecutor who charged Chauvin “with third-degree murder and manslaughter” said more charges are possible.[1] This leaves the remaining, also fired, officers who did nothing to stop the murder.[2] The text below has been updated.

Update, June 1, 2020: In this post, I highlight the question of a friend helping a friend guard his Metro PCS store which is, in essence, how should Blacks protest when peaceful protest fails? I don’t think he’s going to like Kellie Carter Jackson’s answer. But I’ll bet you he acknowledges its truth. In short, the answer is that no form of Black protest is acceptable in Amerikkka.[3] As James Downie noted,

When mostly white protesters openly carrying assault rifles tried to shut down the Michigan state legislature, police didn’t fire rubber bullets or drive cars into demonstrators. But when mostly nonwhite protesters marched, that restraint was nowhere to be seen.[4]

Update, June 3, 2020: The charges against Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on George Floyd’s neck, have been upgraded to second degree murder and charges for aiding and abetting that murder have been laid against the other officers at the scene.[5] I remain skeptical that any charges would have been brought whatsoever had the protests not been so widespread and intense.

As protests raged in Minneapolis, following the police murder of George Floyd, in the all-too-common pattern of a white cop killing an unarmed Black man, and some, many in authority, called for “peace” and “calm,”[6] the Popehat Twitter account (“most tweets by Ken White”) posted this:


Peace is a lovely thing, we say. But there are two kinds of peace, a negative peace in which there may be an absence of violence but underlying disputes are not resolved, where justice has not been done; and a positive peace, where these disputes are resolved and justice has been done.[7] These calls for peace in Minneapolis[8] are, yet again, for that negative peace, the very same negative peace that has been in place since the last time a white cop killed an unarmed Black person, and since the time before that, and the time before that, in an ever-lengthening list, and with absolutely no assurance that a positive peace is within reach. Elie Mystal argues from the Floyd case and another case also very recently in the news where a Black birdwatcher asked a white woman to keep her dog on a leash in accordance with the rules governing the area and she called the cops on him, indeed, that white Amerikkka thinks its killer cops are just fine, that we whites rely upon the very substantial risk that cops will use deadly force against Blacks to keep the latter in line, that progress is impossible until we whites decide that police violence against Blacks must stop.[9]

It hardly bears mentioning that we whites have not made such a decision, certainly not when I drive around Pittsburgh and see so many “Blue Lives Matter”[10] flags, certainly not when I see signs that declare, “We Support Our Police.” That last is instructive—when we say “our” police, who are “we,” whose police are they, anyway? We can say that they are the white capitalist police, enforcing “law” and “order” as decreed principally by wealthy white men, historically even slaveholders, as is the design in a constitutional oligarchy.[11] But with cops killing so many Blacks, we cannot say they are the Blacks’ police.

We are a very, very long ways from justice in this country;[12] indeed, it took days for the murderer of Floyd even to be arrested and charged,[13] even under a profoundly flawed system of injustice;[14] we still have no charges against the other, now fired, cops who were accessories to the murder, doing nothing as Derek Chauvin choked Floyd to death;[15] and we are, therefore, a very, very long ways from positive peace.

In Minneapolis, the Washington Post quotes a man helping a friend guard his Metro PCS store:[16]

“This ain’t anger, this is pain,” the friend said. “This is the type of stuff we need to address in the black community. They need to stop the brutality against black people. This stuff has been happening for a long time. Our congressmen aren’t listening. We’ve got poverty, drug addiction, but they don’t want to help us in our community. Unfortunately, we don t know how to point our pain in the proper directions, so we do this.”[17]

The shortcomings of nonviolent protest and an incremental approach to social justice[18] are never more apparent than when human beings are being killed. The man deserves an answer: What are those “proper directions” when peaceful protest is for naught?

  1. [1]Associated Press, “Officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck arrested on murder charge,” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-29/minnesota-george-floyd-officer-arrested↩
  2. [2]Elie Mystal, “There’s Only One Possible Conclusion: White America Likes Its Killer Cops,” Nation, May 27, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/white-america-cops/↩
  3. [3]Kellie Carter Jackson, “The Double Standard of the American Riot,” Atlantic, June 1, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/06/riots-are-american-way-george-floyd-protests/612466/↩
  4. [4]James Downie, “Time to toss the ‘bad apples’ excuse,” Washington Post, May 31, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/31/time-toss-bad-apples-excuse/↩
  5. [5]Josh Campbell, Sara Sidner, and Eric Levenson, “All four former officers involved in George Floyd’s killing now face charges,” CNN, June 3, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/us/george-floyd-officers-charges/index.html↩
  6. [6]Holly Bailey, “Chaotic Minneapolis protests spread amid emotional calls for justice, peace, Washington Post, May 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/29/chaotic-minneapolis-protests-spread-amid-emotional-calls-justice-peace/↩
  7. [7]David P. Barash and Charles P. Webel, Peace and Conflict Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002).↩
  8. [8]Holly Bailey, “Chaotic Minneapolis protests spread amid emotional calls for justice, peace, Washington Post, May 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/29/chaotic-minneapolis-protests-spread-amid-emotional-calls-justice-peace/; Elie Mystal, “There’s Only One Possible Conclusion: White America Likes Its Killer Cops,” Nation, May 27, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/white-america-cops/↩
  9. [9]Elie Mystal, “There’s Only One Possible Conclusion: White America Likes Its Killer Cops,” Nation, May 27, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/white-america-cops/↩
  10. [10]David Benfell, “The binary between ‘Black’ and ‘Blue’ Lives,” Not Housebroken, January 3, 2020, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/01/03/the-binary-between-black-and-blue-lives/↩
  11. [11]David Benfell, “A constitutional oligarchy: Deconstructing Federalist No. 10,” Not Housebroken, April 24, 2020, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/04/22/a-constitutional-oligarchy-deconstructing-federalist-no-10/↩
  12. [12]Wanda D. McCaslin and Denise C. Breton, “Justice as Healing: Going Outside the Colonizers’ Cage,” in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 511-529.↩
  13. [13]Associated Press, “Officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck arrested on murder charge,” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-29/minnesota-george-floyd-officer-arrested; Holly Bailey et al., “Chaotic Minneapolis protests spread amid emotional calls for justice, peace, Washington Post, May 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/29/chaotic-minneapolis-protests-spread-amid-emotional-calls-justice-peace/↩
  14. [14]Ernest Drucker, A Plague of Prisons (New York: New Press, 2011); Herbert Gans, The War Against the Poor (New York: Basic, 1995); Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2004); Dan Simon, In Doubt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2012).↩
  15. [15]Elie Mystal, “There’s Only One Possible Conclusion: White America Likes Its Killer Cops,” Nation, May 27, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/white-america-cops/↩
  16. [16]Holly Bailey et al., “Chaotic Minneapolis protests spread amid emotional calls for justice, peace, Washington Post, May 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/29/chaotic-minneapolis-protests-spread-amid-emotional-calls-justice-peace/↩
  17. [17]Holly Bailey et al., “Chaotic Minneapolis protests spread amid emotional calls for justice, peace, Washington Post, May 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/29/chaotic-minneapolis-protests-spread-amid-emotional-calls-justice-peace/↩
  18. [18]Bill Moyer, with JoAnn McAllister, Mary Lou Finley, and Steven Soifer, Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements (Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada: New Society, 2001).↩

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