When Emmit Till was tortured and murdered the outrage that his body sparked wasn’t focused on just punishing those responsible for that tragedy but for the many tragedies that preceded it. People aren’t rioting for Floyd, they’re rioting for the criminal misconduct that existed..

long before the video of his treatment ever surfaced. People have felt powerless and fearful of the police for decades and what we’re witnessing is the reaction to decades of abuse. We are witnessing people taking out their rage against a system that’s failed us.

It’s myopic to ask, “How is destroying your own community gonna bring justice for Floyd?” Firstly, we don’t own these communities, we don’t own Starbucks or Target. We don’t own the police departments that are paid to protect white capital...

...from us. We don’t own the businesses that fear and profile us when we walk in the doors to spend our money. That’s not our community. That’s yours.
When we riot, we riot bc we’ve had enough. We’ve lived with knees on our necks for decades and when Floyd fell, we all felt it.

Y’all don’t get it. You wanna see us as animals and the elders in our communities are afraid bc we’re in these streets and they know how it always ends. Y’all want us to sit back and watch us the system let’s us down again and again and again. Y’all want us to accept 2nd class...

...citizenship and to not fault police everywhere for the actions of a few officers. A few “bad apples”. At what point do those few poison the bunch? At what point will you understand that the struggle isn’t against a few police but a few in every precinct in the country?

Our only power lies in collective action. Our only power lies in making you uncomfortable with the status quo by disrupting the thing that you’ve shown us matters more than our lives: capitalism. Nothing ever changes otherwise. If we didn’t have the social media to expose...

...your treatment of unarmed black people being murdered in cold blood you’d amplify the voices of those that say we had it coming. You still say it but only the racist amongst you are listening. These riots are frightening, dangerous and at the same time just.