Judge the System not the Protesters

So I've been feeling numb and paralyzed, been spending a lot of time in my head b/c I'm not sure what will happen if I let the real feelings be felt. I've got a lot of shock and awe and disbelief, fear and hope, gratitude and guilt swirling around, competing for space.

But since white silence is consent, I'm going to put some ideas here despite my worries that I'm going to get something wrong, that my analysis isn't perfect, fears that I'll offend my black and POC siblings. 

Here is what I want to say to my white peers -- If you are going to criticize or judge the violence I say this: violence breeds violence. So if you're going to judge the small minority of protesters that have employed violent tactics in their rebellion, I fully expect to hear you also judge the intertwined system of racial capitalism which is inherently a violent system. It depends on the use of violence to exploit workers' labor and quell their attempts to organize and resist. I expect to hear you judge our system of policing which murders black and brown people in broad daylight with impunity and which unleashes violence on peaceful protesters. I expect to hear you judge the media and the current leaders of our government, who parrot out tropes that devalue black life, celebrate violence, give violent white nationalists a pass and worst of all, advance policies that amass wealth for the very few while continuing to deprive the rest of us of a life of dignity. After you invest your energy judging the systems and institutions in our society and working to restructure them, then maybe will I entertain hearing you judge the tactics being used by a small fraction of the protesters. By focusing on and judging only their tactics, you are undermining and detracting from their message: BLACK LIVES MATTER. Try to care more about black life than you do about private property. And lets remember, there are millions of people of all races protesting peacefully. The media is less interested in sharing those stories because "if it bleeds, it leads."

Now, I can outright say that violence inflicted by the white supremacists burning down Minneapolis is wrong. And some may  be wondering why I'm willing to condone violence that erupts out of rebellions demanding that black lives matter and why I will not condone the violence of the white supremacists. And the distinction here is the power differential between these two groups. White supremacists have a man in the White House who parrots out their tropes. The BLM movement does not. Black people are oppressed in this country and across the global economic system, white people are not.

You know, every time there is major coverage of a police shooting of a black person of color, in order to break myself away from the numbness I feel by the never ending newsreel of black people being murdered by state-sanctioned violence, I try to imagine what it would be like if it was a Jewish person. And I feel terrified. That it can keep happening and there is no change is devastating and infuriating and renders such a deep feeling of powerlessness. And so I understand, how this moment in time, on top of the daily challenges of being black in our country, on top of a pandemic that is killing black people at higher rates than white people and rendering millions of people who were already living on the margins jobless and homeless, I can understand how there would be a rage so deep that the only outlet is to burn it all to the ground.

Maybe we have found our breaking point. A global pandemic that has slowed the capitalist system laying bare the vast inequalities in our society, putting people through extremely trying times as they lose their ability to provide for their family and connect with their community. The murder of George Floyd, a black man, in broad daylight by a white on-duty police officer. Perhaps our country will finally wake up. Perhaps our country will finally rise up. In the meantime, organize, demand systemic change at every level of government, elect candidates who will fight to defund the police, tax the wealthy, and invest those resources in communities, especially communities of color, and say it every day: BLACK LIVES MATTER.