You know, the official line here is that we're to support the peaceful protesters and not the other ones, but let's be serious here for a minute: part of the reason the press loves the daytime protesters is because those are mostly more middle class people who don't have to be at work during the day. Of course they're peaceful. They have less to be angry about. But then night falls and work shifts end. Then the working class comes out and that's when the cops crack down and you see the scenes of clashes and rioting (mostly it's police riots, but demonstrators have been known to respond to being physically attacked too).
I mean I'm not supposed to sympathize with a bunch of mostly poorer people looting stores along the wealthy Fifth Avenue that sell only to rich people, but come on. Can I seriously be expected to view institutions like that as victims?
Survey data out this week (example 1, example 2) finds that yeah, most people do, in fact, understand the anger behind these protests and sympathize, even if they don't actually approve of every action everyone at these events has taken. I mean when you see that 57% of Americans now believe that police departments have a racial bias against black people and and an even larger 64% say they support the protests demanding justice for George Floyd and other victims of police brutality while only 27% oppose them (i.e. 73% are either supportive of or neutral on these protests), it's clear which direction public opinion has broken toward. I really want to point that out because for some time I kept hearing from concerned people online that surely, surely the occasional scene of a burning cop car would be enough to provoke a backlash against Black Lives Matter and the whole cause of racial justice. It makes you wonder about their mentality. What I saw happen on that video of George Floyd being suffocated to death for nearly nine minutes while three other officers do nothing to intervene was the single most despicably callous form of brazen murder I've seen police officers deploy out of all these videos thereof we've seen in recent years. How does one watch that video and seriously reach the conclusion that public opinion will break against any resultant protests? You have to have no conscience at all to believe that!
Just like read that now-infamous Trump tweet from last week about how looters should be shot by the army. That sums up the attitude right there: detractors to these protests believe that white property matters more than black lives. What else needs to be said?
And I mean this isn't even just strictly a racial issue! I mean if you're black, you're statistically like 19 times more likely to die at the hands of the police...but I mean, as we've also seen, it could also just be some random homeless white person even, or just any easy target like that that they think no one -- or at least no one who matters in their eyes, no one who they think society writ large will care about -- will miss. That's a major part of why there are so many white people at these events today, in contrast to years ago. That is why the anarchist groups -- which are basically all-white and proletarian -- are involved. This is a class issue too, not only a race issue.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 06 June 2020
