Here's the thing I've been struggling to articulate (struggling particularly because identifying who's doing what with specificity is extremely difficult):
I liked Saladin Ahmed's take, "I know nuance is hard right now but we really need to distinguish between white pseudo-anarchist kids' myopic armageddonism and Black people's frankly undeniable moral right to smash whatever they hell they want to."
That first night, plenty of the looting was local, and it showed. Target got looted. (I don't think this was that much because of anger at Target, I think it was more just pragmatically that it's where the stuff was. Out-of-towners were claiming that Target had "refused to sell milk to protesters." That was bullshit. Target just closed the store early to let their employees go home before the protest really got going.) There was looting of some specific stuff that always gets looted if there's looting -- pharmacies, liquor store, people tried to break into an ATM, and the local businesses were mostly, though not entirely, left alone.
There was also some seriously opportunistic looting already -- Uptown. That was clearly not people drifting over from the protests. That was opportunistic burglary while the police department wasn't responding to calls.
The following night, the precinct burned. That may have been aided and abetted by "outsiders" of one kind or another, but let's be very clear about this: that absolutely had the enthusiastic support of the crowd and probably most Minneapolis residents who weren't there. My very law-abiding husband's comment was, "one down, four to go."
But then there was the explosion of fires that were NOT avoiding local businesses and community centers and that in fact targeted Black-owned businesses, Black neighborhoods, and the centers of Black community. And this is why I profoundly disagree with "property damage isn't violence." When groups of white people -- whether they are white supremacists or some sort of "burn it to the ground and start over"/"let's get this revolution started" leftists -- are deliberately targeting Black communities for arson, that is ABSOLUTELY VIOLENT. Uncle Hugo's is not a Black-owned business but it stood in the heart of a mostly Black neighborhood, surrounded by Black-owned businesses that were painstakingly built up from a wasteland of boarded-over buildings over decades of work. Destroying decades of work by Black and immigrant people to revitalize a neighborhood without gentrifying it? HELL FUCKING YES THAT IS VIOLENT. And I absolutely do not believe this was the neighborhood "destroying itself," because when it was the rage of Minneapolis protesters, it looked entirely different. (Also, plenty of eyewitnesses reported that the group(s) that set fire to the Uncle Hugo's block were well-equipped carloads of white people, same as the other fires that night.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-01 05:09 pm (UTC)I liked Saladin Ahmed's take, "I know nuance is hard right now but we really need to distinguish between white pseudo-anarchist kids' myopic armageddonism and Black people's frankly undeniable moral right to smash whatever they hell they want to."
That first night, plenty of the looting was local, and it showed. Target got looted. (I don't think this was that much because of anger at Target, I think it was more just pragmatically that it's where the stuff was. Out-of-towners were claiming that Target had "refused to sell milk to protesters." That was bullshit. Target just closed the store early to let their employees go home before the protest really got going.) There was looting of some specific stuff that always gets looted if there's looting -- pharmacies, liquor store, people tried to break into an ATM, and the local businesses were mostly, though not entirely, left alone.
There was also some seriously opportunistic looting already -- Uptown. That was clearly not people drifting over from the protests. That was opportunistic burglary while the police department wasn't responding to calls.
The following night, the precinct burned. That may have been aided and abetted by "outsiders" of one kind or another, but let's be very clear about this: that absolutely had the enthusiastic support of the crowd and probably most Minneapolis residents who weren't there. My very law-abiding husband's comment was, "one down, four to go."
But then there was the explosion of fires that were NOT avoiding local businesses and community centers and that in fact targeted Black-owned businesses, Black neighborhoods, and the centers of Black community. And this is why I profoundly disagree with "property damage isn't violence." When groups of white people -- whether they are white supremacists or some sort of "burn it to the ground and start over"/"let's get this revolution started" leftists -- are deliberately targeting Black communities for arson, that is ABSOLUTELY VIOLENT. Uncle Hugo's is not a Black-owned business but it stood in the heart of a mostly Black neighborhood, surrounded by Black-owned businesses that were painstakingly built up from a wasteland of boarded-over buildings over decades of work. Destroying decades of work by Black and immigrant people to revitalize a neighborhood without gentrifying it? HELL FUCKING YES THAT IS VIOLENT. And I absolutely do not believe this was the neighborhood "destroying itself," because when it was the rage of Minneapolis protesters, it looked entirely different. (Also, plenty of eyewitnesses reported that the group(s) that set fire to the Uncle Hugo's block were well-equipped carloads of white people, same as the other fires that night.)