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Dear fellow white folks on my feed: please stop trying to tell black people how to protest, how to feel, how to be "peaceful." Stop clutching your pearls. Stop trotting out the cherry-picked and sanitized MLK quotes. Be supportive: https://minnesotafreedomfund.org/ /1
You like weekends, standard workdays, child labor laws, public schools, and what few civil rights we have left? The folks who fought for those sometimes got violent. The biggest perpetrators of violence are the police, the state, military & private enterprise. /2
Keep in mind how freedom struggles are framed by the press - how they applaud "freedom fighters" who "bravely fight with police" in other countries but then call black protestors "angry mobs" who "clash." BTW - it's not a clash when one side has all the weapons. /3
Sociologists, organizers, activists, criminal justice researchers, poly sci folks - have studied riots since the 1960s. Guess what? The best predictor of rioting is an overarmed overbearing police presence, basically proving protestors' points. /4
Keep in mind that major crimes peaked a couple of years before widespread adoption of broken windows (and the '94 Anti-Crime bill). Cities that didn't adopt BW police tactics saw roughly the same drop in crime as those that did. So what did BW policing accomplish? /5
The "war on drugs" and BW policing, coupled with increases in budgets, deployment of surveillance and military technology, has resulted in the militarization of the police. They are occupiers of territory, not maintainers of peace. / 6
These occupiers disproportionately target black & brown people, people with disabilities and mental illness, ignore and harass women, beat up trans folk, spy on Muslim communities. Because it's constant, it's 'normal.' When some folks strike back, suddenly it's violent. /7
There's also a whole separate discussion about whether the more aggressive protestors are actually undercover police (google COINTELPRO or more recently some of the BLM and Occupy infiltrations). It's common for police to go undercover in movements. /8
The FBI (not the most liberal of organizations) noted about 10 years ago that white supremacist groups were getting more organized, and infiltrating police departments. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-in-law-enforcement /9
Last point is that the oppression is not just done by police. Banks & realtors have been shown to practice discriminatory housing lending (very recently), segregation is still the norm, Karens & Chads call the police constantly or don't hire POC. Income & wealth inequality. /10
