Property and...

[pegkerr]

I keep thinking about Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in which he said:

”...Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

I’m grieving about the property damage, yes—-the terrible loss of Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery bookstore particularly hurts—but people are more important than property, and the protests over the death of George Floyd are righteous. Justice for George Floyd trumps everything. Echoing Lincoln: could it be that all the burnt buildings, all the destroyed buildings are divine justice, a mere drop in the bucket of expiation for the robbing of black Americans of their economic justice? The stolen wages of slavery and sharecropping, the redlining and higher mortgage rates for would be black homeowners? The denial of GI penefits, jobs and pensions?

A comment on Twitter last night: don’t expect people who are shut out of the benefits of the social contract to adhere to it.

(I’m still glad that the neighborhood watch saved the Nokomis Library last night from the knuckleheads who tried to burn it down.)

Edited to add: And I wholeheartedly append to this post naomikritzer's comments below.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

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.)

[pegkerr]

Agree 1000%.

[julian]

Yah. There are a lot of things *like that* happening similarly in other places, as well, and I absolutely do not want one group's rage to be suborned by another's opportunism. But I don't know what to do about it. (Other than for people to protect each other as best they can.)

[pegkerr]

And here is part of what is making me so angry, by the way, on top of the wanton destruction: the jerks who are doing this, whether they have come in from out of town to burn things up (or not) want to blur the lines as much as possible to confuse us. They want us pissed-off and stressed and sleep-deprived and angry and fighting amongst ourselves as we try to figure out what to do as our world is being destroyed.

I am angry because my fierce loyalty for my city is playing right into their hands; my love has become a weapon to be used against me. I'm furious because it's working, that they're using what's good in me to serve their atrocious aims.