Moreover, I think focusing too much on the property destruction is missing the point. As MLK says, "Riot is the language of the unheard." White people have had a couple hundred years to "use the system of governance" to fix this. We haven't.
I get why you'd want to call for patience, for peaceful pursuit through the law and courts. But you should read "A Call for Unity", an open letter 8 pastors wrote to MLK in 1963:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181229055408/https://moodle.ti...
his response to this is the famous Letter From Birmingham Jail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail
Like you, the white pastors wanted patience, wanted people to trust the system to eventually provide justice. MLK eloquently explained why that was wrong. And little in the nearly 60 years since makes the case any more persuasive.
But violent revolution is also not, in the aggregate, a net benefit in the immediate term. Not even for black people. Believing otherwise represents a failure to anticipate 2nd/3rd order consequences and beyond. In the best case, you might experience a lot of suffering today to benefit people in the far future. I don't think we'll see that best case play out with the current rioting. We've been here before, many times (e.g. Rodney King). It doesn't work.
Take a look at Hong Kong. They got rid of Carrie Lam and just a few days ago lost their special trading status with the United States. Stay tuned for more consequences.
The flaw in MLK's logic and the reason that black people still encounter systemic mistreatment 60 years later is that it fails to account for economic conditions (where do stereotypes come from? vivid, sticky ideas that trigger fear, like violent crime; where does violent crime come from? economic disenfranchisment) and the glacial pace of cultural change (relatedly, the 'hearts and minds problem'; sometimes you just need to wait for enough bigots to be better educated, achieve empathy by actually knowing black people personally, or die out).
It caused an overhaul of the LAPD. Do you really think the Bush administration would have charged the cops otherwise?
The flaw in MLK's logic and the reason that black people still encounter systemic mistreatment 60 years later is that it fails to account for economic conditions
The Poor People’s Campaign.
The reason why things have gotten violent is as I mentioned in a prior post is self-defense. People don't trust the police at all, and why should they? We've seen them attack journalists multiple times, we've seen them assault people who were protesting peacefully and increasingly it looks like they're employing agent provocateurs to give themselves a reason to get violent. Who is going to hold them accountable when the system refuses to hold them accountable?
You should naturally expect some amount of badness in almost any sample of humans, including the police. It might also help to empathize with a cop on the ground in this situation when police stations have literally been blown up.
You should naturally expect some amount of badness in almost any sample of humans, including the police.
And the “badness” seems to only affect people who look like me...
But as Chris Rock said...
Well, it’s not most cops. It’s just a few bad apples. It’s just a few bad apples.” Bad apple? That’s a lovely name for murderer. That almost sounds nice. I’ve had a bad apple. It was tart, but it didn’t choke me out. Here’s the thing....But some jobs can’t have bad apples. Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. Ya know, American Airlines can’t be like, “Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.”
First, I didn't realize blue was a race now. Or are we not allowed to criticize the police state? Does your 'sweeping generalization' rule also apply when we criticize things like the Chinese government because 'I'm sure some of the politicians are good people'?
Second, you don't say. The problem is that the police have zero accountability. They get away with murder and assault like in [1] or [2] or [3] and for what? Can you tell me what laws they violated? Are you personally going to go out there and hold those cops accountable for what they did? It sounds like you should go outside and get the real view of what's happening on the ground.
[1] https://twitter.com/imactuallynina/status/126691262719377408...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/nypd-officer-shoves-woman-ge...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/minneapolis-protests-p...
> the reason that black people still encounter systemic mistreatment 60 years later
The reason that black people encounter systemic mistreatment is white racism. Full stop. It's not due to a "flaw in MLK's logic".
Also, MLK was not advocating "violent revolution", so I think the flawed logic here is yours. Especially your notion that we just have to keep waiting for bigots to improve. It's two full generations since MLK walked the earth. Waiting doesn't work.
I know there's a whole bunch of galaxy-brain takes on this about how counterproductive the rioting is, but it's not like cops have needed any pretext to resort to "more horrible tactics" already.
Incidentally, the overuse of "virtue signalling" to describe other people taking positions that they presumably sincerely believe in and wish to share with each other is incredibly snide, and if you don't want to come off like an asshole, you should stop. It's become one of those phrases that seems more like a pointless tribal "tic" (like "political correctness").
But yes rioting does change things. It forces people to pay attention.
Increased surveillance of political organizers and low-income neighborhoods, more military weaponry at their disposal, laxer guidelines around 'use of force'.
Because those types of things never happened in during the peaceful marches in the 60s...
We need to use the system of governance we have at our disposal to try and fix this. It's the harder but also only truly effective means of recourse society has at its disposal.
We don’t have that system at our disposal when the majority prioritizes the life of a fetus (or for that matter a dog) over the life of minorities.
We don't need more rappers, we need more politicians, doctors, engineers. People in positions of power so that the status quo can change.
Until then nothing's going to change, and IMHO that would take more than a couple generations
https://www.ebony.com/news/chase-bank-calls-cops-on-black-ma...
The Black doctor who got shot by a policeman while helping his patient?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey
A title doesn’t give you power in America if you are a minority. You will still be seen as a threat. I live in the most affluent county in my state, and our household is above the median household income, my son and his (Black) friend still gets stares walking around unless they are hanging out with their larger group of White friends.
It is not working. People are being murdered by our government, and the murderers are not punished. There could not be a stronger argument against your position.
The rioting is a mistake. It will not change hearts and minds. It will not undo the problems endemic to police forces. In fact, it may very well exacerbate them.
The problematic archetype is the bigoted cop who's drunk with power and behaves more like an animal operating on instinct than a thinking human. These people, in the collective, are irrational, aggressive, and reactionary. They also hide behind authority and a convenient veneer in the "rule of law". We also are now seeing that there may be many of more of them (and many more enablers of them still) than we thought.
And it is exactly these people who will feel vindicated and emboldened in the face of the rioting currently underway. If we're not careful, it may also give them a pretext to resort to even more horrible tactics in the future. Increased surveillance of political organizers and low-income neighborhoods, more military weaponry at their disposal, laxer guidelines around 'use of force'.
The current trajectory is not the way. We need to use the system of governance we have at our disposal to try and fix this. It's the harder but also only truly effective means of recourse society has at its disposal.