Property and economy shouldn't even be the discussion right now. You can be upset about unnecessary violence and small business destruction yeah, but first and foremost you need to acknowledge the injustice that happened to George Floyd and how that one example of racism is rampant throughout so many parts of our government and infrastructure in so many ways. You need to acknowledge why these riots and protests happened. It is a privilege to even have that mindset when so many black people have to live in fear of so many other things. Peaceful protest and other campaigns fell on deaf ears for too long. I think this should be a wake up call on humanity, justice, and so many other moral things that we need to address before any sort of economical or lots of other issues can even begin to be addressed.
I also used to just go along with what my parents taught me, or to think that police and government should be the leading force. However I think there is such a corrupt underbelly about it that intervention outside of the "laws" is necessary. MLK opposed laws up and down, and if it wasn't for that ethical push we wouldn't have gotten the slight ground for black people that we would have today. I too wish that violence on innocent people and small businesses was minimized, but I absolutely understand why this has happened and i support that movement towards true equality and justice for black people way more. Just like you can support a cause for a war knowing innocent people will get lost due to negligence, "bad apples", and the nature of things.
A number of people are stating that they can no longer get groceries or medicine due to groceries and pharmacies being destroyed from the riots or it is far too dangerous to even go outside. It was already difficult enough to get said things due to the pandemic. Just sayin' that there is more than just "destroying buildings" to the story.
Also, innocent people are losing their jobs due to places they worked being destroyed.
I'm multi-quoting both of these messages as there are points I agree with in both of them. Like I said, I do not agree with the destruction of buildings or property, but I'm also aware that many African Americans are just simply tired of not being listened to-and that's a problem for this country, especially when you considered how it was in
1619 that blacks first arrived in this country as slaves brought over from Africa. Thomas Jefferson's promise of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness like he wrote in the Declaration of Independence when it was drafted in 1776 were not afforded to African Americans for
far too long, even though
Jefferson had children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, and then their children, by extension, were slaves too. It wasn't until Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 that slavery finally became illegal nationwide, and that was in the midst of a civil war which was almost completely about slavery, as I stated earlier when discussing this matter with Mica in this thread. Even then, when you consider that Jim Crow laws became commonplace around 1877 following the end of Reconstruction, blacks in the South would deal with so many prejudicial issues, most infamously lynching. (As an Alabamian, I should note that not far from Huntsville, where I live, is the city of Scottsboro, where infamously the
Scottsboro Boys got falsely accused of rape in 1931, which these events were later used as the basis of the plot of Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird) It really took the civil rights push in the 1950s and '60s for these tides to turn, largely following how a large number of African American men served in World War II. Even then, and despite the fact that we even had an
African American president, blacks in many ways face problems that no other race does. These actions aren't done out of malevolence-they are done out of desperation.
