Q: How does looting and destruction bring about justice for George Floyd? (Rhetorical)
A: It doesn’t.
Bringing about justice is the job of the prosecutor’s office who tries these cases, the judges who preside over them and the juries who decide the guilt or innocence of law enforcement officers like Derek Chauvin.
What the protesting, the looting and the destruction of property does do is get the wheels of justice turning.
If there was no pubic unrest, no protests, no looting, no destruction of property, Derek Chauvin would still be sitting at home right now along with the other three former Minneapolis police officers who still have yet to be charged.
The protestors know you.
They know you care far more for your things than you do for our lives.
Always have.
During the antebellum south, masters eventually caught on that unfortunate “kitchen fires” that would “coincidently” burn the big house down not long after after selling someone’s child away, or after a loved one was permanently disfigured by a merciless overseer’s lash weren’t so coincidental.
And we’d listen as he calculated the cost of rebuilding what he’d lost, but we never heard him calculating the physical, psychological and emotional cost we paid losing a father, a husband, a brother, a son, a daughter, a mother, a sister a wife to his callous, entitled, violence against us.
Eventually Master moved the kitchens far enough away from the Big Houses that if they ever caught fire, he wouldn’t have to worry about the fire threatening his home.
He never did stop selling away our children, raping or mutilating us. Master believed he had MORE right to our own black bodies than we do.
And even back then, he had an expectation that we were to suffer what we must beyond the reach of his eyes and ears.
Again, the protestors know you.
They know that they can’t bring about justice by burning down a Target or a police station.
But they also know the only time you pay attention is when you start losing things.
My question to you is, when will you realize that you’re protecting your things when we’re protected from the Derek Chauvins of the world?
