The protests have been greatly enhanced and made far stronger by the ridiculous amount of police violence. Without that, and without the continued racist action of the Minneapolis police, DA, and even medical examiner.
Ferguson wasn't that long ago, and everything is worse since then. I'm not surprised that it's this big.
Speaking as a brown person, I am seeing a lot of white people in masks burning down and looting the livelihoods of black and brown business owners. I think I remember having read about something like this having happened before in history.
This is all happening fast so I can't say this is the best source, but: https://www.courthousenews.com/minnesota-officials-link-arre...
I think this is mostly wishful thinking, by people who are too horrified to admit that their tribe can be doing bad and so blame “outsiders”.
That's called projection, on your part.
I don't think anybody supporting the protesters is horrified that some of the "legitimate" protesters are looting. They're more horrified by the systematic abuse and lack of accountability that has sparked these protests.
Your insistence on focusing on the violence is a cheap distraction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-protests-...
Anecodtal evidence
> said Howard Graves, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center
Appeal to authority
Your "source" does not cite sources or factual data, just an observation from someone. Your post and that piece of the NYT article holds no water because of the logical fallacies.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/law-enfo...
How true is all this? We'll likely never know, but it seems odd that the media and FBI seem to have very little interest in this very plausible scenario.
I don't doubt that in some cases, provocateurs and false flag actors exist, but there's definitely a not insubstantial amount of anarchist-leaning folks who are acting genuinely.
The important thing to consider, in my mind, is whether your attention should be focused on a relatively small amount of property damage and looting, or the many, many examples of physical violence against people committed by police. Property damage is almost always a distraction, and is often intentionally used as one.
That's the very point people are speculating about.
Why do protestors have to ensure some bad actors that try to hide amongst them don't take advantage of the situation? Causing destruction for a laugh is what the police is doing already.
Because the people we're told are responsible for such things (the police, and the media who are supposed to keep them honest) are not doing that job.
I wouldn’t so much call them white supremacists but anarchists.
https://streamable.com/kc5hwj - amazon truck stopped and looted
https://streamable.com/jmr7ez - liquor store looted
https://streamable.com/x8rb8h - another liquor store looted
https://streamable.com/2ka2cm - store manniquens looted
https://streamable.com/53l2qd - office looted and trashed
https://streamable.com/x3al2j - target looted 1
https://streamable.com/e706oz - target looted 2
https://streamable.com/d9t0au - target looted - 3
https://youtu.be/hF6mMCwc8GY?t=6961 [Embed] - target looted 4
https://streamable.com/m3n5ju - ohio statehouse broken into
https://streamable.com/z2ffvm - arsonist sets fire to himself (disturbing)
https://streamable.com/2wjxc0 - daytime looting
https://youtu.be/HUptzxyfpgQ?t=285 [Embed] - people pulling cars up to stores to load loot hauls
https://youtu.be/hF6mMCwc8GY?t=1944 [Embed] - drug store looted by mob https://youtu.be/hF6mMCwc8GY?t=4349 [Embed] - back of store looted out onto street
https://youtu.be/hF6mMCwc8GY?t=5077 [Embed] - store mobbed cop car smashed
https://imgur.com/BPPgQu9 - nations most revered science
fiction bookstore and priceless collection torched
https://streamable.com/6710vr - LA's favela like conditions post-riots
https://streamable.com/vqi0vm - minneapolis aftermath warzone
https://streamable.com/94c32c - minneapolis first night pandemonium
https://streamable.com/revv8g - sympathetic protesters get their windows smashed for no reason
How does anyone watch these scenes and perform the mental gymnastics required to believe all the rioting and looting was secretly done by white supremacists?
It is absolutely incredible to see CNN right now, they make Fox seem like a news source. It is getting to to the Pravda level at this point.
I provide these videos in hopes people will knock it off with the conspiracy theories about white people being the ones rioting and looting. Police brutality disproportionately affect black and brown people. So why is it wrong to think that it would be mainly black and brown people who would be angered and go on a rioting/looting spree to lash out against the oppressors?
It doesn't make sense to protest any more, in person, if you are helping looters destroy your local economy in an already bad recession by occupying an already taxed and outnumbered police force.
why? it's big brands and no-face corporate capitalists who profit from a rigged game who are losing from the looting. haven't you watched The Joker?
The looters are motivated by selfish greed and clearly have an affinity for the most expensive commodities ie. Nike, Apple, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Rolex. But they still aren't surgically striking - the picture you falsely paint.
Many are even dumb enough to indiscriminantly destroy their own local neighborhoods, targeting both small and large businesses.[1,2]
Now, why would any outside investor, or even a poor entrepreneur who lives in the area, invest in the area, knowing that this infantile us vs them, poor vs businesses is going to be dominant narrative and zeitgeist of that area's people?
Investors wont take the same chances again if they are unappreciatively and scornfully seen as "rich man building a starbucks where it doesn't belong."
The people from these areas claim they want prosperity but deface and burn down anything with a mediocrum of betterment. By process of elimination, they want a poor uninvested area. Their message rang loud and clear in the last week: do not build nice things because then you are a "no-face corporate capitalist."
[1] https://youtu.be/hkW4yasOBtY
[2] https://www.foxnews.com/us/looters-run-wild-in-bronx-as-vide...
Look at some of the efforts by this organization, who existed before Trump even was on the radar, to understand: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision
https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...
So maybe look up videos of cops shooting journalists, smashing windows, bashing people in the face when they weren't doing anything, and running people over with their cars. There are literally hundreds of such videos from the past few days.
Then you'd be able to say you've seen videos of things other than white kids throwing bricks.
https://twitter.com/whitney_hu/status/1266540710188195843
Does casually hitting a man w/ a car door just to be a jerk count? https://twitter.com/DriveWendys/status/1266555286678048770
Can you tell me what the state senator did do warrant pepper spray? https://twitter.com/zellnor4ny/status/1266802303807500288
Woman sitting on ground is pepper sprayed THEN KICKED in the head.
https://twitter.com/ItsKadynC/status/1266967646345613317
what about a man that just was talking to police, got pepper sprayed and blasted in face w/ a flare? That was definitely not excessive either...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut/comments/gub8fx/po...
not "bashing in the face" but I'm sure you can tell me why this old man was rightfully knocked over while standing around.
Many of my black friends don't like the idea that the protests are about COVID tensions (even if income inequality and unemployment obviously contribute). It's felt like an erasure of their struggle. I'm Hispanic and have been profiled a few times in my life. While I cannot pretend to know the full spectrum of the black experience in the US, I'm inclined to agree that I feel similar, too.
Edit: no clue why this keeps getting downvoted. The protests are (1) not only about COVID and (2) implying that they're only about COVID feels like erasure to Black (and Brown) people. Unless I'm missing something, here. Perhaps I need to be more detailed?
The entire point of this protest is to be heard. There is a population, long silenced, that has a message to convey. Today that message is BLM - and it is incredibly taxing to convey that message. To then look that movement in the eye and completely miss the message, returns us to square one: the problem of being unheard. That is what I mean by "a feeling of erasure."
For some people the primary social contact that is broken is long running systemic racism.
For some it's militarization of the police.
For some it's the US seemingly slowly sliding in facism
For some it's the economic Injustice of being told "the economy", i.e. the stock market is doing great while unemployment is at an all time high.
Etc
This strikes me as too simplistic solution. I tried to find papers on how demonstrations become riots, but my google.scholar-fu has failed. Anyone got good review papers on this? (If none exist, there is a goldmine there for social scientists.)
In 1773, King George was upping taxes while not providing adequate representation. Colonists thought this was an abuse of power, so they robbed and looted a huge boat filled with tea, which set off events that led to the American Revolution. Look it up, I'm sure there's a wikipedia article or something, it's pretty famous event in history.
Edit, are you also insinuating that's the only 'rioting' they did and then magically the USA just formed out of nothing?
This is HN. You don't need to project motivations on people when pedantry is sufficient.
(Your Armani analogy doesn't work however - a better analogy would be destroying property owned by, say, Halliburton.)
Were you saying the same things during the lockdown protests?
My current mental model is that rioring both needs a reactant, but also a catalyst. Imo there was plenty of reactant sitting the lockdown protests, but no catalyst.
My thinking on the matter will likely change as I learn more.
And to answer your question literally: no, I wasn't really thinking about riots then
The other entry in the social contract is that our leadership should work to keep the country safe, and it failed at the very top.
Does that help clear things up for you?
Those sorts of things make me cranky. I suspect other people might feel the same way. Especially seeing as it's only the latest in a string of deaths like this.
I highly recommend watching it even if you don't like or usually don't agree with him. He frames this as a row of dominoes and the societal contract that black people constantly see violated.
(Not to deny the sentiment or validity of the protests -- maybe in an ideal world, the protestors would have gone otherwise, but IRL, would have been tired, bogged down in work or school, or otherwise distracted with life. Which currently doesn't exist).
Seriously? Given the choice between "many decades of racial animosity and unfair police conduct" and "it's the lockdown", you really made that choice?
If these riots had stayed isolated to Minneapolis you'd have a point.
It was in its infancy but the internet did exist. Technically the "INTERNET" was around in the 1960's.
I think the George Floyd killing is tied to C19 in it's extremity. To keep going like they did with vocal witnesses is very unusual.
The lockdown has affected both the police and public in a psychological way. We allowed ourselves to be locked up. At many levels our brains aren't happy.
Wearing masks has created change in protests and the way police act. It's anonymousing attackers and the attacked are also less human.