Notes

To all the asinine folks on my Snapchat making shitty posts about the protests:
1) Do not appropriate Martin Luther King. MLK famously said that "riots are the voices of the unheard," and while it is true that when this quote is placed in context, MLK is pointing out the flaws of rioting, we can still derive a meaningful truth from this particular line. Rioting is an expression of frustration, stagnation, and lost dreams, of social death, of alienation and "leftbehindedness." Remember too that MLK was literally the most hated person in America while he was alive, and your distaste for the protestors, your awkward fixation on these spontaneous outbreaks of violence, demonstrates that you have not learned a thing from the civil rights movement. Rather than laughing at the rioters, making totalizing condemnations of the protests, and refusing to place the looting in context, analyze them as the expression of an angry, frustrated people whose collective and historical wounds are too great to bear. (You're also ignoring the duality of the civil rights movement: how MLK's nonviolence coexisted with the militant organizing of Malcolm X and others, as well as how the militant self-defense of the Black Panthers, dissatisfied with the civil rights movement, later comprised the main organizing front behind black power and rights).
2) People criticizing looters need to incorporate a more nuanced class perspective into their understanding of what's currently happening. Looters do not steal out of greed; looting is an action born out of necessity. Decades, nay centuries, of continued oppression: of segregation, structural violence, systemic racism, divested communities, the murder of black leaders, the war on drugs, white flight, gentrification, disenfranchisement, police brutality, food deserts, and a million other nuanced, systemic forms of oppression. On top of this, we have a mismanaged pandemic which has disproportionately ravaged black communities, unemployment skyrocketing, a crisis of our medical infrastructure. Deindustrialization and chronic unemployment in black communities. While the looting of a small business is a horrific event, you must retain a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of capitalism, must contextualize these incidences as the inevitable result of a vicious and destructive white supremacist capitalist system.
3) Again, I do not condone the looting of small businesses, but these incidents must be contextualized. Why is it that I don't see outrage at the system
3) Take this moment to calm down, take a few steps back, and engage yourself in history: analyze the concrete historical developments that led to these outbreaks of violence. All social minorities, whether black, latinX, LGBT+, or working-class, are united in their struggle against one system, a systemic totality whose various "disparate" appendages (anti-black racism, racism in general, class inequalities, imperialism abroad, etc.) constitute a singular unity (this in no way is meant to diminish or erase the ways that anti-black racism is unique). All of our struggles are interrelated and interconnected. I can assure you that the destruction of another black radical movement will trigger another wave of austerity and free-market economic policies (and racist policies against other minorities too), just like how the systematic destruction of black communities via the war on drugs and mass incarceration is fundamentally connected to the birth of Neoliberalism (see Ronald Reagan; although I single out Reagan, this effort was bipartisan). This would have disastrous effects for all working-class and minority communities. The ideology of "law and order" is critical for the continued reproduction of America's capitalist system, for it maintains the social stability that is needed for the continued looting and plundering of the working masses by the capitalist class.
4) There are two ways to end the violence: reform or revolution. And those who make reform impossible, make revolution inevitable. And while I believe that revolution is the only possible route, those committed to nonviolence, or who are horrified by the outbreaks of violence that are happening now, must work towards creating the leadership and organizational infrastructure needed to create an effective non-violent movement. If you are firmly of the conviction that non-violence is the only way, then COMMIT TO IT; don't use these incidences to justify your reactionary impulses.