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

[cyllan]

There may not be a specific goal. But, the protests -- and I include the violent clashes with police in that category -- have had an impact.

I work for a Very Large Tech Company headed by a CEO who is remarkably left-leaning for an exec. And today, because of what happened over the four days, the C-suite called an all-hands call to discuss racial justice, equity and inclusion. They've centered the conversation around black voices, pledged money to BLM, and have laid out concrete steps to (continue to) try and lift up black employees and reduce bias in hiring, promotions, etc. And yeah, we were taking steps in that direction, but explicitly laying it out like this? Would not have happened last Monday.

Now, I'm not in Minneapolis; y'all have got some other weird stuff going on that I can't speak to. But Black Americans showing that they have finally hit their limits of nice? That has an impact.