Growing up in Arizona, my parents were business owners. They made enough money to buy a decent amount of property (cars, homes, storefronts), and for one reason or another, that property was regularly vandalized during my childhood. I know how infuriating it is. I know how unfair it feels. I know how downright terrifying it can be. I also know, having seen my parents own multiple businesses, and owning one myself later in life, that property is insured. When property is damaged or stolen, it can be fixed or replaced and we can get back to our relatively privileged lives. Even this pandemic hasn’t really slowed down the privileged. Privilege grants the luxury of being able to adapt to new dangerous circumstances without exposing yourself to too much risk.
These demonstrations on the streets are justified. The people many of you are dismissing as “vandals” and “criminals” are protesting. Any form of protest that is less dramatic, and therefore less bothersome to those in power, has not proved successful. Take kneeling at a football game for instance. Or raising a black fist on a podium. Or sitting at a lunch counter in a diner. Or respectfully appealing to the vice-president after the curtain call at a performance of Hamilton. The truth is that there is a LOT of racist and prejudiced thinking in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and New York (the only three states I’ve had experience living in). Racism is not the whole picture, but it’s certainly a featured character trait of this country and its (often good) people.
The privileged can try to change the topic and lament the property being destroyed - but the disadvantaged who are tired of the needless brutality will never get their murdered friends and family back. They will never not be “othered” by an American system that continues to exploit them at the bottom of the food chain. Yes, witnessing a protest or a riot or vandalism or a violent looting is traumatic. But life is traumatic. I wish we could avoid trauma entirely but we can't. Luckily, trauma can be healed. Through conversation. Through getting closer to the things that scare you, the people who act in ways you find inappropriate, and identifying the reasons your trauma took place.
In this specific instance, I can't agree with the premise that property and fiscal losses are more important than the systemic discrimination and killing of any racial group. I will continue to choose to pursue a world where more people can stay alive, to heal from their trauma, than a world where people die but cash flow is uninterrupted. And this is not to say that small business owners are in any way at fault or to blame for wanting to open their shops. I want to get back to making money too. But I want to respect the lives lost and feel that this moment calls upon us to examine the system that forces people to lash out. Over and over and over again. We can't keep pretending like it's not happening for a reason.
Ever since 2016 changed the way we recognize our implicit biases and echo chambers - I see more and more people “tuning-out” the news. Lessening their “internet intake”. Not trusting “mainstream media”. I totally acknowledge the political agendas of news organizations, but personally, I try to watch and read as much of the stuff as I can from FOX to MSNBC, from The National Review to The Root, just because I’m lucky enough to have the time to do so and it interests me. Right now, this story is being framed as a response to the death of George Floyd. But these protests/riots/rebellions or whatever-you-want-to-call-thems, aren’t happening because one man was killed. They are happening because police kill twice the number of unarmed black men in this country than they do unarmed white men, even though black people only make up 13% of the population. They are happening because black people have either been slaves or at a severe economic disadvantage since the founding of this country - and being at an economic disadvantage in the United States means having no access to medical care when you need it most, for early detection of a serious illness. These protests are happening for very legitimate reasons. In 2014, Eric Garner told police officers “I can’t breathe” and died hours later. Since then, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Antwon Rose, Botham Jean, Breonna Taylor, and many many more unarmed black and brown people have died at the hands of the police. George Floyd literally tried using the same language Eric Garner did before he died - “I can’t breathe” - 6 years later. Clearly, the slow, principled, politically and economically convenient methods of implementing change have not altered the impulse to kill these people. If they were criminals, why weren't they charged through the established and supposedly fair judicial system, instead of being killed? That's what makes these murders systemic and racist.
The most surprising thing I’ll say, to those of you who actually made it this far, is that I am an optimist. I really do believe and hope that if my friends and family were being killed at the rate black Americans are being killed that friends and strangers of all colors, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and genders would help me protest until people started listening. Because I believe we can fix this. So if you still disagree with me, if you think civilians should never ever dare loot a target, no matter how bad it gets for them, please do let me know - what do you think they should do?
TL;DR - Protest isn't protest if it's convenient for those in power. And it's certainly not the fault of the people demanding to be heard after having their friends and family killed. This stuff gets oversimplified by politicians who want us back at work as soon as possible. This pandemic meets depression meets rebellion is a deeply complex moral dilemma of our own collective making. Don't let them rush us back to the status quo as quickly as they want to. We all want to live in a more fair world and it often takes disruption to achieve that.