Your morality is bankrupt
We’re at the police precinct on Wednesday for the second day. At some point a liquor store gets ransacked and there’s just like beer and liquor floating through the street. I don’t care much about the looting, but I’ve been raised on a strict Catholic upbringing of no substances at demonstrations. Not a party after all. Serious business. We are serious folks working for serious change.
We get teargassed for the Nth time and for whatever reason I don’t really get out of the way and stumble through the streets with snot running out of my nose choking on my own puke.
A young Black man catches my eye as I sit down on the curb and raises his eyebrows at some beer at his feet. I shake my head in agreement and he tosses one across the street to me. I sit outside of Moon Palace and drink the whole thing in one gulp. I really really wanted a beer. It feels vaguely taboo, even though I’ve had 1000 beers in 1000 places. Stolen beer at a /protest/. Well, yes, beer after tear gas, doesn’t that just hit the spot.
A white man about my age approaches me and taps me on the shoulder. “Did your beer come from that store?” he says, pointing at the wreckage of Minnehaha Liquors and I truly assume he is making a joke. “I don’t see any other places to get free beer around here at the moment.”
He looks at me for a long silent moment while the police continue to shoot concussion grenades at people’s heads behind us. “I am so ashamed of you.” he spits at me. I am honestly taken aback. “I’m ashamed of the cops.” I manage to stammer as I walk across the street. “You are supposed to be out here for racial justice, but you’re just another hooligan.” he yells after me.
I yell over to the hooligan that threw me the beer.
“I’ve been a street medic for forever but I never knew beer helps with tear gas more than milk!”
“You damn right it does” he says.
Who is actually out here fighting with who I wonder?
—
After the demonstration and even before the riot everyone wants to know what happened out there. Who did what and why did they do it? Did the white kids from the suburbs start the fires? Or did those dumb people burn down their own neighborhood again? Why would they do that?
—
Once upon a time, I say, there were no police in the United States. Plantation owners used to pool their money together and pay out for the capture of fugitive slaves. Out of this, organized slave patrols for money were born that later solidified into police departments. It’s more complicated that that they say, who wants disorder? In 1850, I say, the US agreed on a compromise about a fight they had gotten in when they killed a bunch of brown people and took a bunch of Mexico and then passed the Fugitive Slave Law.
It decreed that any slave arrested anywhere must be returned to their master, regardless of crime or current state of residence. It was the compromise to keep all that new fancy Mexican territory.
We’re in the North they say, we don’t wave that Confederate flag around. In the North the people that used to catch the slaves were called the Night Watchmen and were formed out of neighborhood patrols I say. Every police officer in the North is a descendant of a political compromise that allowed their creation to be able to keep a bunch of land stolen from dead Mexicans.
—
I spent a week watching a multi-racial coalition of people fight the cops and win and burn down the goddamned police station and spent the last month watching a bunch of white people arguing about whether their Instagram feeds should have a black square or not and who was a better ally and are you racist if you have concerns about your park being turned into an underfunded homeless shelter?
Who the fuck cares what you post on your Instagram feed. No one cares. Just you. Just you and whomever you’ve managed to drag along to your idea that your actions can give you absolution. There’s no absolution here, only restoration, rebellion, resistance, relationship. Chill the fuck out and have a beer if you get teargassed one too many times, but get in the messy struggle where you are gonna make all kinds of mistakes.
If you’re white, stop lecturing other white people about how racist they are, and go meet them the fuck where they are and be in relationship with them so they don’t end up feeling like the only people that actually want to listen to them are actual neo-Nazis.
Act for your own damn liberation. Not on behalf of anyone else. Cause this system has you all caught up in it too and it’s not gonna change if you are pure enough to pay for your beer or recycle more.
I’ll take 100 people that want to get drunk, listen to music, and shoot some fireworks at the cops because fuck the cops man, the cops are some fucking bullshit and we’re here now aren’t we? Knowing we’re tired of the bullshit, hanging out with other people tired of the bullshit, and being like this shit has got to change. One way or another. This shit has got to change.
I need a little less lecturing people on reading White Fragility and a little bit more figuring out what it means moment to moment to do the work that leads to collective liberation. Not their liberation. Our liberation.
And get your Christianity out of my uprising unless it is of the liberation theology current, Bible was used to defend slavery for damn near its entire existence.
—
I’m not telling you I’m better than you. My daily life has become so fucking white since I moved to Minneapolis it’s still some days shocking to me. Spending a decade working on racial justice with a Black boss and still ending up living in a poor majority-Black neighborhood in St Louis for years without any way NOT to screw up, but still eventually making it to Sunday BBQ.
Whiteness conquered right there when you get fed some actual greens. And good fried chicken. You think that makes me racist? The fried chicken comment? Then you obviously haven’t been the only white person eating fried chicken after church at a big old messy afternoon supper. But like how far the world is between greens on Sunday and your Instagram feed, I don’t even know if I can explain, but they are so not the same place that they don’t even have a relationship with each other.
—
And it’s fucking dangerous to talk about race in the US. We leave it to the comedians for the most part, to say the shocking things. And, part of this is because white supremacy is fucking shocking to talk about. How it pervades everything. How you ever build a multi-racial democracy after slavery without having a truth and reconciliation committee, how people get stuck on whose language is the most inclusive when Black babies are still out here dying twice as often as white babies. But also, because race is tied up with class and both of those are tied up with space. Gotta live together to know each other. Gotta eat together, gotta dance together, gotta stink together, gotta get in fights in the street together.
Dirty secret is that class and segregation still pervade racial justice work. Give me a poor racist white guy that actually works in a kitchen where he’s the only white dude and occasionally gets put against the wall for some bullshit he says but still has drinks and jokes and love at the end of the day over anyone that has decided that “white people need to understand that they cause harm just by existing” but hasn’t actually confronted in a real way how white supremacy is an impediment to relationships they are trying to form every day, but also, and this is very important, extremely important, how those relationships can transcend that system in the simple act of flicking a beer across the street.
“You need one of these brother?”
“I do. Thank you brother.”