Yes.
Poor black people in the ghetto have been beaten down, marginalized, cheated, robbed from, kept uneducated, imprisioned, and murdered for generations by our society. Why should they give one good god damn about a social contract that's a complete lie when it comes to them? White people protest with guns, nothing happens. Black people protest with signs, they get cuffed and booked. What else have desperate people got but lashing out? The Civil Rights Movement was over half a century ago. Fat lot of good it's doing them now.
Everyone likes to talk all loftily about non-violence, and how ignorant people are who don't subscribe to it. But the Civil Rights era was littered with race riots. It's revisionist to presume that all the pressure for social change came solely from the non-violent protest marches, as if the onus was on black people to make a convincing argument that was safe enough for the approval of white people before anything could happen, and that the Montgomery marches finally hit upon the formula that magically opened the golden door. Well, the fact is the Bobby Seales and Malcolm Xs and the justified anger they represented were a vital part of the pressure to get the white power structure to even be inclined to deal with with the non-violent part of the movement.
I know you're trying to make the distracting argument that these looters are just selfish criminals trying to do a smash and grab. Well sure, how the hell do you think that happened? They were born with no future in a place with no hope who are constantly under threat from authority no matter how they behave, people who've never had shit and never will have shit and who are constantly told that they're bad. How are they supposed to see beyond what they can get their hands on next? Things you consider to be low petty crimes are their protest, their disobedience to the rules of the oppressors, it's all they've fucking GOT. We've fucked them and stolen their shit for so long, how can we have the nerve to be shocked and outraged when they finally say fuck it and act the same way?
The argument that riots provide a convenient way to dismiss the problem by whites and therefore it's the fault of the rioters that no progress has been made is as stupid as the argument that feminism blocks progress in equal rights because the name is too excluding. There's no need to cater to the fake concerns of a group that was going to fight you tooth and nail anyway. They would find another excuse. Outrage that people behave like cornered beaten animals is sheer deflection from that fact that this is what we've driven them to. The fact is, we aren't going to have a real conversation about how to fix things with real incentive to implement the solutions without that looming threat of increased violence. And we've been sitting on it pretending the problem had gone away since Reagan got elected.
So yes, this is an anger that has run far too deep, far too wide, and far too long for you to blithely expect to be subsumed in the name of civility, or condemn in the name of personal responsibility. There will be more riots, and until we change things, it's America's fault. We are personally responsible for building a better society where entire classes of people aren't systematically abused. The riots, the vandalism, the looting, that's our collective fucking failure, and the sooner we stop deflecting that responsibility onto our victims, the better.
So shut the fuck up about how bad the rioters are, and start pointing your outrage noise tubes at the Power. You know, THE THING THAT KEEPS MURDERING BLACK KIDS.
