Like the White rioters, the Democrats and their media supports are also exploiting the most disadvantaged among their fellow Americans with hopes of winning the November polls
There was no rest for the wicked on the seventh day. The shooting of police officers on Monday night in St Louis, Missouri and Los Angeles opens a new phase in the disorder that began in Minneapolis on May 26. On Monday, Terrence Floyd, the brother of George Floyd, the Minneapolis man murdered on camera by a police officer, called for calm. So did US President Donald Trump, incongruously waving a Bible in front of Washington DC’s St John’s church, where every President since 1815 has prayed and which rioters set on fire on Sunday night. But on Monday night, America’s tragedy moved closer to catastrophe.
It’s not just that race is the American agony and that African American men are disproportionately likely to be targetted by the police. A particular chain of events turned the initial protests in Minneapolis into nationwide protests, which turned into violent riots. Some filmed evidence appears to suggest that the crucial second phase of these events, the phase in which protests in poor and majority-Black neighbourhoods turned into confrontation with the police and assaults on civic symbols, was inflamed and exploited by the far Left.
This is why the violence must stop. Not just because lives and property are being lost. Not because it takes decades for an inner-city neighborhood to recover from an assault by its own residents. Not because it shreds the tendrils of racial amity that have grown since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. But because the course of events has at crucial moments been directed by affluent Whites. And they know that the butcher’s bill will not be delivered to their suburban communities.
The Americans have a name for this: White privilege. A few weeks ago, White men protested the COVID-19 shutdown by storming the Michigan statehouse in military fatigues and carrying assault weapons. The police allowed them to rampage around the Statehouse while White protesters shoved the police lines on the statehouse steps and no one was injured. Pass a fake $20 bill as George Floyd did, however, and you risk a rapid escalation, which may end in injury or death.
The same inequality of risk attaches to the White grad student who dons the black hoodie of Antifa and throws fireworks and bottles at the police and the Black women and children, who standing on the porch of their home in Minneapolis, were shot at by the national guard as one of the guardsmen shouted “Light ‘em up!”
It is inaccurate to say that all of Black America is on the streets. Fifty years of deindustrialisation and drugs have created a Black underclass but 50 years of civil rights and affirmative action have accelerated the growth of the Black middle class. In Atlanta, Georgia, the capital of the Black middle class, initial protests did not lead to open-ended rioting.
The Mayor, who is White, ventured onto the streets and talked to protestors as equals. In a further instance of the civic responsibility that has been lacking in most Democratic-run States and cities, the local rapper, Killer Mike, the son of a police officer, issued an emotional plea “not to burn your house down.”
This kind of plea works best if you have a house to burn down. It doesn’t work on people who have no property and no prospects as in the heavily Black neighborhoods of western Philadelphia, where helicopter footage showed the police abandoning their cars to entirely Black mobs.
Nor does this appeal work on people who have the luxury of burning down other people’s homes and businesses — and those people, the White rioters, are the ones who commandeered the initial protests and forced them towards violent confrontation.
Nearly half of the population of Washington, DC is Black. Yet some footage appears to show hardly any non-White faces among the mob who attacked police outside the White House and set fire to St John’s church. Here in Boston, we saw an orderly march from a heavily Black neighbourhood to the city centre, led by church leaders. It was black-clad Whites who fought the police after the curfew. I observed teenagers from my suburban neighbourhood, students at Ivy League colleges and exclusive private schools, setting off in the black costume of Antifa.
“It happens most often that a people, which has supported without complaint, as if they were not felt, the most oppressive laws, violently throws them off as soon as their weight is lightened,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the French Revolution.
The radicalism of the American Left is rarefied and spoilt: More troubled by student loans and an absence of exciting jobs than failed schools and police violence. Antifa’s revolution, like that of 1968 and most other Western revolutions, is a “revolution of rising expectations.” The concerns of the young White men and women, who are attacking the police, are not those of the young Black men who will be killed in the nights to come.
Most of the media endorse the radical Left’s political costume drama. So do prominent figures on the Democratic Party’s Left, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and Keith Ellison, the ex-Nation of Islam agitator who was second-in-charge of the Democratic National Committee and is now Minnesota’s Attorney-General.
Like the White rioters, the Democrats and their media supports are also exploiting the most disadvantaged among their fellow Americans. They are exploiting the suffering of Black people in the hope of winning November’s elections by painting Donald Trump as the second coming of George Wallace.
This strategy is unlikely to succeed. No candidate ever harmed his chances by running on a law and order ticket. Its greater failure is, however, moral.
(The writer is Life & Arts editor of The Spectator (US).
(Courtesy: The Dawn)
