I have been trying to process this week’s unrest through the historical lens of the (GOP-driven) politicization of protests against police brutality & the corresponding political importance of (white) racial rage & some things have become very clear to me on what happens next. 1/
2/ Seems like lots of people are falling into Trump’s familiar trap of making the criminal murder of a black man by the police into a radicalized issue of riots and “law-and-order” that will only end up helping him consolidate votes among racist whites and ethnocentrists.
3/ That’s 1 of the reasons why I think we’ve seen community activists stress that long-term progress will come from nonviolent protests. When ppl start arguing about rioters they agree to Trump’s strategic politicization & surrender the high ground (police shouldn’t kill people).
4/There are tons of confounding issues for why SOME of these protests have turned violent, of course. Rouge actors/infiltrators are one. Another is that they appear to be more diverse now, &
whites may feel more emboldened to use force than AfAms bc of their various privileges.
whites may feel more emboldened to use force than AfAms bc of their various privileges.
5/ We probably can’t talk about white racial rage and the partisan politicization of police brutality without talking about the increasing role of anger in negative partisanship. There has been a massive increase in partisan hostility & animosity over the past 50 years.
6/ One thing that’s different now than in 1968, 1992 or even 2014 is that all this racial anger is getting sandwiched between other dimensions of partisan hyper-polarization that increases the strength of our corresponding identities & ideologies and only drives us further apart.
7/ This probably increases the chance that this unrest will cause absolutely no improvement in the relationship between the police and the people they swear to “protect”. When racial polarization became political, religious and generational too we lost most of our common ground.
8/ So the issue isn’t just about racism and police brutality anymore, but about everything in our political system. The riots are about partisan loyalty and economic oppression, about distrust of the state and generational stagnation, about marginalization other stressors.
9/ Correspondingly, peoples’ opinions about the protests are also influenced by a host of factors, such as their partisan & ideological positions but also their age and gender, their religion and orientation toward Christian rights etc. etc. The conflict is now just political.
10/ Another difference from the 1960s and 90s is that all this anger, all this division but also the legitimate concerns about racial justice now combine with a political system that is wholly incapable of solving them.
11/ The only branch of the the US government that is in any way devoted to racial reconciliation is the democratic-controlled House, and they are not able to fix the root issue of all this unrest (again, cops killing black people) all by themselves.
12/ Like so many other issues, true justice for black Americans is doomed by a complacent US Senate and a president who is a cheerleader for violence and has completely abdicated his responsibility to calm the passions of the nation.
13/ The future, then, is probably more of the status quo: A cycle where the cops kill an innocent black person, people get angry, violence and riots sweep the nation, the GOP politicizes the conflict with calls for “law and order” and America only grows more divided.
14/14 In terms of all of (1) state oppression, (2) white racial rage, (3) electoral deligitmization, (4) institutional breakdown, (5) partisan hyper-polarization and (6) disappearing forbearance & mutual tolerance (mainly on the right) America looks more like the 1850s than ever.
