As jarring and disheartening as it is to see this much rage breaking out nationwide, and touching down in our own backyard, this is the type of shit that I’ve been talking about for years. Injustice is a liability for everyone.

And people are (somewhat understandably) going to struggle drawing the connection or parallel between an unjustified police execution in one city and violent outbreaks in another. But it’s all rooted in the same systemic inequality, abuse and exasperation with that system.

The reality is, healthy and well-adjusted people who feel satisfied and safe in their lives are typically not going to engage in looting and rioting. America has a LOT of people who don’t feel that way. Who never have. And it goes largely ignored, dismissed or justified.

I don’t know how long this particular outcry is going to last or how widespread or extreme it’ll get, but this is what untreated social and economic cancer looks like. You can’t abuse and neglect segments of the population legally for decades and expect to contain the damage.

And the scope of the problem is sprawling with all these tentacles of entangled systems. Education, healthcare, criminal justice, socioeconomic. All compounding impacts and widening disparities.

Arguments about whether or not these outbreaks do or don’t bring about change are inevitable, but there are a couple things to remember about that discussion. 1) historically, yes. Mass outbreaks of riots do actually affect change. 2). This is just 3 days old. 3) what else has?

Because it’s important to understand again that riots and looting are not carefully thought out and planned strategic countermeasures to injustice and rampant inequality. They’re unpredictable collateral damage to fostering unhealthy communities for decades on end.

People who are breaking into stores and burning shit down are not trying to appeal to anyone’s moral sensibilities, or their rational thought. Neither of those are relevant, and the reality is that appealing to people’s morality and rationale has been tried to exhaustion.

Every other form of “appropriate” and nonviolent and acceptable and organized effort to bring about change has garnered incremental and temporary change at best. Whether intra-racial or interracial.

Tulsa Oklahoma was bombed. The Panther Party started a free lunch program for impoverished children and law enforcement literally pissed in the babies breakfast. At some point, appealing to the mythical kind hearts and rational of apathetic White America simply is not enough.

Especially when, at the heart of most of this is that the vast majority of white Americans are consistently socialized and educated with a watered down, whitewashed/sanitized version of American history and culture and can only view outcries in our community as moral deficiency

Yesterday I posted an OPED that cited a 1962 Gallup poll where 85% of white people felt Black children had just as good a chance at a good education as white children. In 1962. Do you understand how delusional that is?

In ‘13, 67% of white ppl polled felt “very or somewhat satisfied” with how Black ppl are treated. It speaks to a persistence of not listening. Seemingly at no point in American History have White Americans been able to recognize or admit to existing racial disparity in real time.