I recently posted this to Facebook as a way of reaching the normies and older people who aren’t on Twitter and are likely seeing a lot more bootlicking dreck from billionaire-funded right-wing sources than footage of peaceful protesters walking face-first into federally sanctioned police riots. Feel free to share this or make a post of your own.
I want to provide some helpful context to the current uprising for well-intentioned white folks on Facebook who may be misled by the deluge of right-wing misinformation that dominates this platform.
I want family members of mine who have known me their entire life and know I sometimes "do that protesting thing" and that I'm 100% harmless to know that despite this being an uprising, it is entirely peaceful. The few people who come out at night and spray paint buildings and break windows are still nowhere near as violent as the police, who have just in the past week arrested nearly 10,000 peaceful protesters and are indiscriminately gassing and beating protesters and credentialed media alike. For context, the Chinese government has arrested around 9,000 Hong Kong protesters in the past year. You should also know that the same tear gas that police have deployed against US citizens peacefully expressing their Constitutional rights is a chemical weapon banned in warfare by the Geneva Convention.
The institution of American policing began as runaway slave patrols, in which wealthy landowners gave a badge and a gun to poor whites with specific instructions to hunt down black people they viewed as their personal property. This isn't my own personal opinion, this is documented fact backed up by research at the Eastern Kentucky University Police Studies department, which is the first accredited law enforcement academy in the country.
Police slowly became more evolved and more efficient in their original mission of being the state's arm to control and oppress black people. In the 1921 "Black Wall Street" massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma (which happened roughly 99 years ago today) police not only stood by while whites ransacked the most prosperous black community in the country and lynched black people, but even deputized vigilantes to "go get a gun and get a n***er," according to the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Police inaction during the "Red Summer" white supremacist terror attacks in the early 1900s, Bull Connor's deploying of dogs and fire hoses on civil rights protesters in the 1960s, the violence of the police against MLK's peaceful march in Selma on Bloody Sunday, the savage beating of Rodney King, are all evidence that police departments have never strayed from their original intent of using state violence to oppress black people.
The present-day police killings of unarmed black people like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Terence Crutcher, Sandra Bland, and many others have largely occurred with impunity. Police almost never face accountability for lynching black people in public, in broad daylight, on video. The reason you're seeing so many people protesting today is precisely because of the lack of justice in these aforementioned cases, and the cases of so many others.
If you want this uprising to stop, it's on normal, everyday, regular people like YOU to stand up for black folks and against racism in public spaces, and vote out incumbent mayors, DAs, state legislators, Congressmen, and anyone else in power who has failed to stick their neck out and do something when the people peacefully demanded it.