I thought this was good:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/defu ... lex-vitaleQuote:
MD: It’s so strange and unexpected to see a resurgence of protests against police brutality in this moment, of all moments, with the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing and much of the nation still theoretically in coronavirus-related lockdown. I didn’t even expect to see people protesting the inadequate coronavirus response en masse, much less protesting racist police violence. How can we make sense of this?
AV: It is kind of shocking. I also assumed that the social distancing imperatives would dramatically curtail street protest. But I think we’re in a moment of profound crisis that goes far beyond policing, and that the coronavirus crisis and the coming economic depression are part of what’s driving this. It’s the convergence of a bunch of different factors. Completely unreformed brutal policing is just the catalyst that has unleashed a kind of generational activism that’s responding to a deeper crisis, which policing is part of and emblematic of.
MD: I see many different kinds of people at the protests. There are poor and working-class black people, but there are also young white people, many presumably from middle-class backgrounds. That seems to support what you’re saying, that the protests are driven by anger both at police violence against black people in particular, and at a wider variety of social phenomena.
AV: I think what we’re seeing is the residuum of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Sanders campaign, movements united by a sense that our basic economic system is not working. Even people who don’t personally experience police violence see a future of economic and environmental collapse and are terrified and angry. If we had a booming economy, it would mute this. If we had credible leadership in Washington, it would mute this. But not only is Trump in the White House, I don’t think that anyone believes Biden is going to fix it.
When we think about the urban uprisings of the 1960s, we don’t think of them as being solely about policing. We understand that policing incidents were a trigger, but that they were a response to a deep problem of racial and economic inequality in America. That’s how we have to understand what’s happening today. Police are the public face of the failure of the state to provide for people’s basic needs, and to paper over that failure with solutions that just harm people further.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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What a attractive lady eh?
