Forever getting caught up in the "innocence" or "guilt" of people who are killed by police, on whether or not they "deserved" to be gunned down, or otherwise murdered, by cops whose job is to enforce order – that order, itself, being inequality – is a mistake.
In the disaster zone of late capitalism, of organized abandonment, of neo-fucking-liberalism, people do many things, good, bad and indifferent.
Certain categories of people act with impunity (or with a low degree of consequence), while others, like Black people, are subject to all manner of violence, including incarceration and death, for literally any offense (or even no offense at all).
These people are not being killed on the basis of what you consider good or bad, right or wrong, or to preserve life in a more general sense. They are being killed for the sake of order. Capitalist order. White supremacist order.
They had already been deemed expendable in the name of that order, because that is the standing arrangement of things. They were already subject to death, at the discretion of police, if they ran afoul of order.
Of course bad things happen in that context, in that zone of disposability, violence and abandonment. Of course people do things that can be vilified. They have been set up to do so.
This is why they are exceptionalizing George Floyd to such an extent. They want you to get caught up on how innocent or harmless someone was, rather than the social arrangement that dictates that they can be wiped out at any time, in the course of business, without consequence.
They want you to divorce the actions of people killed by cops from the rigged context in which they lived. They want you to consider policing a legitimate context for violence. There is nothing morally legitimate about the violent enforcement of inequality, which is what they do.
Victims of policing are disposed of because they have been designated as disposable in the dominant social arrangement. The details of their deaths vary. But "innocence" is not the point. This violence is not guided by our values. More on that here: https://truthout.org/audio/you-cannot-divorce-murder-from-policing/
We need to get systemic in our analysis already. We need to stop putting each person they kill on trial in these internet streets, deciding whether they were innocent enough to live, instead of declaring that all of this is rotten and rigged and there are no hall passes for cops.
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