The widespread attempt I'm seeing this morning to pin the uprisings in American cities on outside agitators is a convenient way to deny Black power/agency and seeing people buy the weaponization of privilege politics to bolster up this extremely racist narrative is disheartening.

Of course there are fascists and adventurists in the mix because of the large scale of the uprisings, but 'outside agitators' is trotted out every single time there is large-scale unrest to deligitimize what is going on and repress emergent solidarities.

It is an extremely racist narrative that implies that Black people would not participate in and lead these uprisings if it were not for 'outside agitators' typically cast as white, when we have seen Black people on the front lines of these struggles again and again.

It also de-centres the role of the cops, who sparked these uprisings by murdering an unarmed Black man on camera and reacted with extremely violent and heavy-handed policing to the crowds that gathered to demand justice in the aftermath of his murder.

The exact same 'outside agitator' trope that is being circulated this morning was also used in Ferguson to discredit the uprising there and was thoroughly debunked in the years afterwards. If you historicize the term you will see it used to demoralize popular unrest all the time.

I'm not denying that whatever your preferred flavour of outside agitator is — white anarchists, MAGA people — has a presence in these uprisings, I'm saying that the myopic focus on them is meant to discredit these uprisings as somehow inauthentic or disconnected from their cause.

'Outside agitators' cannot sustain uprisings in American cities over multiple days and the focus on their presence is meant to demoralize liberal/apolitical people who previously supported the tactics as a way to manufacture consent for a state/police crackdown. That's the truth.