Image by the Telegraph via Telegraph.co.uk
Why is it that more outrage is directed at protesters who destroy property than at officers who take lives?
It’s because in this white supremacist capitalist society, any violence which upholds that status quo is seen as justified. While violence that responds to it, that seeks to upend it, is demonized.
You can see it now in the call for peace by the mainstream media and those in power, but where is their call for peace and restraint when police officers kill Black men and women in America?
The problems in America intersect with the global economic system of capitalism.
It is a system which always puts profit over people’s lives, especially when those people are Black.
As described by Black professor and scholar Cedric J. Robinson, we live in a system of “racial capitalism.”
We see manifestations of it in the way essential workers' health and lives are not treated as essential. We see it in the way billionaires profit from a pandemic that has hit Black Americans the hardest. We see it in the over policing of black and brown communities. And now we see it on national television as the democratic governor of Minnesota fully mobilizes the national guard against protesters.
One of the chants that can be heard across the nation is “No justice, no peace!” They refuse to listen to those who, as the great Martin Luther King Jr. said, “are more devoted to order than to justice; who prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
If the mainstream media and those in power, Democrat and Republican alike, wish to see "order," then they must ensure justice is done. Otherwise, we will continue to demand it and won’t get off the streets until we see it.
A system which does not serve and protect, which does not guarantee and allow people, all people, to live and be free, does not deserve to exist.
Comments