The post originally asked about the 9th of August 2014 is the date when Michael Brown was fatally shot by 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, Missouri. That was the event that led to the "Black Lives Matter" movement. BLM was actually started on 13 July 2013.
Still, Barack Obama was president. And he had been president for 7 years when the Michael Brown incident happened: not George W. Bush or Donald Trump.
It seems there was the usual rioting following that incident. Let's toss in that it seems that like school shootings, the usual drill is: black youth is harmed by police, riots occur, then fuck all happens, only to repeat.
There were also riots in Baltimore after the 2015 shooting of Freddie Gray. Again: black youth is harmed by police, riots occur, then fuck all happens, only to repeat.
My point is that rioting has been used as a tool even during what should have been a racially positive period. But have the results been ever really been positive? Why would I need to be asking all this if there had been positive results.
If anything, the rioting and violence have led to a continuation of the problem. If not making the situation much worse.
I need to add in for good measure that black leaders endorsed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden during the 2016 and 2020 primaries. Both Clinton and Biden have a horrid record on race relations.
A riot may be the language of the unheard, but temper tantrums also don't get a positive response.
These consequences were actually foretold by some in the Civil Rights Movement, including the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is common on social media to see people quoting King’s statement that a riot is a “language of the unheard.” But in the same remarks from which this popular quote is drawn, King also stated that “riots are socially destructive and self-defeating.”
In February 1968, nine months before Richard Nixon’s election, King warned that increased rioting would lead to a “right-wing takeover.” He pointed to segregationist George Wallace’s presidential bid, saying, “Every time a riot develops, it helps George Wallace.”
“They’ll throw us into concentration camps,” he told supporters of the Poor People’s Campaign. “The Wallaces and [followers of the John Birch Society] will take over. The sick people and the fascists will be strengthened. They’ll cordon off the ghetto, and issue passes for us to get in and out. We cannot stand two more summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a rightwing takeover and a fascist state that will destroy the soul of the nation.”
it's time for a new tactic since the old one hasn't worked in 50 odd years. And King was correct about how things would turn out if rioting is the tactic of choice.
