The funny thing to me about the "Antifa is behind the riots" narrative is that it states, outright, that the "black community" (whatever that is) takes more direction from a bunch of white incel Weimar Germany LARPers than it does any philosophers or logicians, black or white.
That a bunch of college drop-outs or lower can manage an interstate dead-drop logistics campaign to secret away weapons on dynamic parade routes, and are dead certain black people are so dumb they'll mozey along and pick them up -- and are right!
That a couple of white girls from the Outer Borroughs can hand out bricks like big blocks of horse from the back of a car and black dudes just roll up, all day long, getting their fix for the nightly revels.
And that all this, the puppetry of an entire race and social class, can occur using the cover of a legitimately bad occurrence that EVERYONE no matter their politics said, "Whoa, hold up here. That seems wrong."
It's far more comforting for lots of people to buy the Antifa Mastermind line. Black people and communities get to dodge the bullet for the stuff they're shown on very clear video with "The white devil made me do it!"
White liberals get to feel smug that their kids and inheritors pulled off an honest street rebellion out of them dumb blacks -- again -- and they'll get their rewards stored up in Heaven for aiding their lesser men.
Conservatives get yet another example of emergent media narrative drawn out of people desperate to never argue with one another about anything of substance and wholly unified around a single shining guidestone: Trump BAD! RAAUGH!
White supremacists (some overlap with white liberals) get to point at the riots, the self-revealing self-loathing, and laugh, saying, "Look at them damn monkeys eatin' each other! Didn't you just know they would?" (And they have, every night, murdering their own to a punchline.)
And the vast mass of people, that harbor no ill-will in their hearts for black or white (or brown or yellow, though the other POC reject the last) who would rather NOT believe that given so little provocation from so weak a source, would forget what is good and revert beastial.
Because if Antifa doesn't get shown to possess god-level mind control powers in the last week, eventually -- maybe not this one but soon -- we'll have to accept that the sickness that drives black urban culture to violence and larceny isn't imposed. They can choose otherwise.
It's not imposed. It's selected. They are willful, willing foot soldiers for a force worse than "police force discrimination." They're soldiers for an army marching to spit in their own mothers' faces, slap their fathers right across the mouth.
They march to scream, right in their parents' faces, "I'm not as good as you! I don't WANT to be as good as you. You worked hard, you sacrificed, and you watched me sign on to an army of the mad -- and you let me. You let me. You let me."
Only self-loathing drives people to burn the lives of their neighbors, to ruin the dreams of their kin, to spite someone who never cared about them in the first place.
It's not Incel Antifa. Those guys can't jerk off in a sack standing in a store. It's the young, black community that's standing out in the street, screaming how hard done by they are by life as rich, powerful, black entrepreneurs and celebs egg them on instead of speak standards.
It's YOU, black, urban culture, who've failed your kids, and you, black urban teens, particularly men, who've failed your parents. That there are bad cops out there? No shit. We all get cracked by them sometimes.
The difference is that when it happens to someone like me, you nod and mutter, "whitey boy deserved that." And when it happens to you, I mutter, "looks like another abuse of force suit that qualified idemnity'll screw over." I, at least, have a read a book.
The same one you could read. In the same library. Beside me on the same bus. On the way to watching a rocketship take off carrying men going beyond our world riding on designs either one of us could have laid down.
You're blind the the possibilities. You think white men keep you down. We don't. For the most part we don't care about you enough to want to keep you down. You're just a dude.
It's the crab pot that wants to keep you down. Blacks deeper in, and every time you try to get out, someone jerks you in. If they can't get out, you sure won't. And to keep from feeling bad, you pretend he did you a noble favour.
It's not a bunch of white libtards making you do anything. Nobody makes you do anything. All they can do is suggest.
It's not white supremacists making you do anything. They definitely can't make you do anything.
It's not society making you do anything. Society is just the mouths of other people. Those are just words, any ten-thousand words you want to pick.
It's you. It's always been you. It'll always be you. You have to grab yourself up off the stupid street and say, "How the fuck did I end up putting my life in front of the guns of a group I believe want nothing else but to MURDER ME RIGHT NOW!?" And then you walk away.
You walk home, and you be glad you're not dead, despite that there are going to be a lot of deads from this bunch of stupid. You're not one of them. This time.
Maybe you choose to stay home, stand in front of your dad's deli, his market, his hotel, his food van, his research lab -- stand there FOR your family and your neighbors and against your less wise family and neighbors. But stand defending what's YOURS.
Hold that. It's a far better tribute to Floyd, saving their lives, making a way straight, than he ever had a chance to pull. He probably would have.
Just -- go home. Build your communities back up. Look for the people who found a brick in the road and promptly threw it into his neighbor's shop -- he's not your friend and never was. Hold your parents.
Go rebuild something better -- but start first with yourself. It's the key element. Start with yourself. No number of "allies" or "supporters" change the truth: the evil is one at the core of the human experience, without regard to race, and you get played by it.
Do better. Be better. Then demand better -- but demand it only of those who've impeded you, knowing first and foremost that it started with you and judge accordingly.
Now go, and sin n o more.
@threadreaderapp unroll
