New York City the night before last saw a fountain of righteous fury unleashing itself on the NYPD for meeting peaceful protesters marching against police brutality with more brutality. The accounts I’ve read said things were fine until around Union Square where the police got up to the tricks I witnessed during OWS: telling people to go this way or that way with a smile and then threatening and violently attacking them or dangerously (and illegally) kettling them into tight spaces. During a respiratory pandemic, these militarized assholes let loose with pepper spray and tear gas, which settled in people’s PPP forcing them to take of their now poisoned masks, coughing and gasping and breathing in each other’s possibly deadly mucus droplets. Many will die in the coming month at the hands of these cops, but no one will ever know who or how many and no charges will ever be filed.
 | I don’t know if it was this extra added bit of public endangerment or if people simply had had enough of not fighting back when being assaulted by those we pay to protect us, but the dam broke and mayhem ensued. Police responded by driving over protesters. These weaponized vehicles were then smashed, tagged, and set ablaze by the rightfully vengeful mob. Their burned out shells were on full display yesterday while the NYPD pulled themselves together enough to remove them. The mayor victim blamed those run over by his police force while clean up crews set about the task of boarding up broken windows and sweeping up glass. Yesterday Nicole and I walked our 10,000 steps surveying the damage and hearing people on the street talk about hitting this place or that one tonight. I was pleased to see that, at least where we wandered, it was mostly banks and CVS’s that had been hit. There were also gentrification machines like Urban Outfitters and some of the fancy stores no normal person who actually lives here could ever afford to shop in with a busted window or a spray painted door. We wondered what the night would bring. |
Not too surprisingly the night brought looting. I listened to the police scanner on my phone and read reports off the Citizen app. We saw a few groups go past the apartment, but they didn’t break things like the night before and seemed to actually be protesting. What was happening in SoHo and the East Side didn’t seem to be that. From what I could tell it was all young people, both white and black, looting every store they could. The cops were literally breathless on their radios trying to keep up, and at least one man was shot and wounded.
We haven’t been outside today (workday after-all) but from what I’ve seen a lot of stores and restaurants got hit hard. Unfortunately, this includes a lot of the mom & pop places which are already struggling which is, of course, very sad. It’s an unfortunate part of this type of uprising, the collateral damage. It also sparks a lot of angry confusion in people who perhaps don’t understand that this is all a perfectly normal, if painful, part of change. There’s been a sanitization of a lot of history and no one seems to remember that most peaceful movements that succeed also have a violent counterpart.
We haven’t been outside today (workday after-all) but from what I’ve seen a lot of stores and restaurants got hit hard. Unfortunately, this includes a lot of the mom & pop places which are already struggling which is, of course, very sad. It’s an unfortunate part of this type of uprising, the collateral damage. It also sparks a lot of angry confusion in people who perhaps don’t understand that this is all a perfectly normal, if painful, part of change. There’s been a sanitization of a lot of history and no one seems to remember that most peaceful movements that succeed also have a violent counterpart.
 | “That white people think the Civl Rights movement was exclusively Rosa Parks sitting politely and MLK being ~peaceful~ is proof that our educational system is rooted in white supremacy. Black history is turned into a Disneyland version for white consumption and comfort.” - Hanna Brooks Olsen @mshannabrooks on Twitter May 30 |
| And it’s not just black history: Today is the first day of Pride Month, a celebration of the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots/Rebellion/Uprising. Stonewall was literally 5 days of brick throwing, fire starting, cop fighting, violent uprising lead by trans POC who had had enough. While still oppressed in many ways, the LGBTQ community can now legally marry, adopt and have IVF kids in most places. Before Stonewall they could not legally *exist*. I’m sitting here typing this a few blocks from where the catalyst for this massive change took place, and every status I see about how violence never changed or solved anything looks really ignorant from here. |  |
History is chock full of slave uprisings, labor riots, and a million other instances of oppressed people saying enough is enough. They are always preceded by peaceful attempts at staking a claim for equality, and often go hand in hand with non-violent forms of protest, but there is no possible way to refute that these instances of people being pushed too far have made serious impacts on the freedoms we have today. I’m not a violent person, I have literally never been in an actual fight in my life… but even I can see how these things play an important role in history and literally change the world.
Last night was, as far as I can tell, mostly about looting, and today there are statuses everywhere denouncing this as counterproductive, as harmful to the movement and calling those who participated all sorts of names. I get it. Change is hard. It hurts. Not every part of it is necessarily good, even if it bends the world towards that which is. Seeing small businesses get screwed when they are already in serious trouble due to 2020 just being an epic shit-show of a year is awful. In many ways these sentiments I’m seeing all over the place are absolutely correct. The Right loves to latch on to examples of violence and looting to denounce entire movements. There are those in many cities who have been infiltrating protests in order to literally spark another civil war (google the Boogaloo Movement if you want to go down a weird/scary rabbit hole), and there have been calls on 4Chan and other platforms for white supremacists to go cause mayhem that can then be attributed to protesters to turn America against them.
So there’s a lot of ways all the looting and random vandalism are, in fact, playing into the hands of these assholes, and are hurting the local people and businesses. But looting -gross and distasteful as you might feel it is - is absolutely a valid form of protest, especially in this era and country. It is protesters literally screaming in the face of the out-of-control capitalism (Aaron James dubbed it “asshole capitalism” in his book Assholes: a theory which I highly recommend) in its own language! Looting speaks the language of asshole capitalism, hitting it where it hurts and reclaiming some of the power it has over us all.
History is chock full of slave uprisings, labor riots, and a million other instances of oppressed people saying enough is enough. They are always preceded by peaceful attempts at staking a claim for equality, and often go hand in hand with non-violent forms of protest, but there is no possible way to refute that these instances of people being pushed too far have made serious impacts on the freedoms we have today. I’m not a violent person, I have literally never been in an actual fight in my life… but even I can see how these things play an important role in history and literally change the world.
Last night was, as far as I can tell, mostly about looting, and today there are statuses everywhere denouncing this as counterproductive, as harmful to the movement and calling those who participated all sorts of names. I get it. Change is hard. It hurts. Not every part of it is necessarily good, even if it bends the world towards that which is. Seeing small businesses get screwed when they are already in serious trouble due to 2020 just being an epic shit-show of a year is awful. In many ways these sentiments I’m seeing all over the place are absolutely correct. The Right loves to latch on to examples of violence and looting to denounce entire movements. There are those in many cities who have been infiltrating protests in order to literally spark another civil war (google the Boogaloo Movement if you want to go down a weird/scary rabbit hole), and there have been calls on 4Chan and other platforms for white supremacists to go cause mayhem that can then be attributed to protesters to turn America against them.
So there’s a lot of ways all the looting and random vandalism are, in fact, playing into the hands of these assholes, and are hurting the local people and businesses. But looting -gross and distasteful as you might feel it is - is absolutely a valid form of protest, especially in this era and country. It is protesters literally screaming in the face of the out-of-control capitalism (Aaron James dubbed it “asshole capitalism” in his book Assholes: a theory which I highly recommend) in its own language! Looting speaks the language of asshole capitalism, hitting it where it hurts and reclaiming some of the power it has over us all.
 | “You can't commodify every single aspect of living and then not understand looting as a legitimate form of protest. Looting is the ultimate strike against a system that deems mass-produced objects to be far more precious than life itself. It is humanity demanding to be recognized.” Hampton Institute @HamptonThink on Twitter May 27 |
In a time of staggering income inequalities… when the wealth gap is too far to even see across; when multiple generations simply cannot afford to own a place of their own no matter how small; when almost no one can get out from under the student debt they had to incur in order to escape their minimum (starvation) wage jobs; when teachers live out of their cars and EMTs don’t have access to health insurance; when we’ve been stuck inside for 2 months and our government has only seen fit to help us out with one $1,200 refund on our tax money (which not everyone even received) forcing many to choose between rent or food or medicine while billionaires and corporations received the lion’s share; when these stores have been sitting locked for months, but were always financially locked for any of the normal residents of this city… the systematic looting of SoHo should shock absolutely no one.
It sucks. It’s sad, and inconvenient and messy. It disrupts lives and livelihoods, makes people afraid and angry, and leaves many feeling wronged. And that’s absolutely the point. Humans do nothing unless they are uncomfortable. Like any uprising, the people taking to the streets are trying to get a point across: things are not ok. They are tired of asking that they stop being beaten and abused, starved and deprived, exploited yet ignored in every other way. They are tired of seeing promise after promise ring hollow and watching as their community members are murdered by people whose salaries they pay. It’s not supposed to feel good. It’s not supposed to leave you feeling happy, content and safe. Destroying and looting property – property they have no chance of ever enjoying otherwise and which is valued more than their very lives because of the systemic oppression and isms baked into our system – is the method of communication that remains after all others have failed.
I’m not saying you should enjoy what is going on in our city, and cities across the country. No one should be. I’m saying that to move forward we need to understand it. We need to parse out what is simply bad actors and false flaggers from the legitimate protesters. We need to see the destruction by the latter for what it is. As King put it “a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? ... It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
Don’t be part of that segment.
I’m not saying you should enjoy what is going on in our city, and cities across the country. No one should be. I’m saying that to move forward we need to understand it. We need to parse out what is simply bad actors and false flaggers from the legitimate protesters. We need to see the destruction by the latter for what it is. As King put it “a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? ... It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
Don’t be part of that segment.
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