How many of us can imagine ourselves responding the way the owner of a family restaurant in Minneapolis did when his restaurant burned to the ground during the riots triggered by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police? “Let my building burn,” he said. “Justice needs to be served. Put those officers in jail.” His daughter, telling the story in the Washington Post, adds, “If this is what it takes to get justice, then it will have been worth it.”
That is a solidarity that puts those of us who are sheltering at home, tweeting our support of Black Lives Matter from the safety and comfort of our living rooms to shame. Creating a more just society has a cost. No matter how non-violent protesters strive to be, social change involves unrest. Even the mythologized protests of the civil rights movement were not safe places to be. They were sites of brutal state violence and were demonized at the time as threats to law and order. If the status quo is so unwilling to change that mass social movements are required to force it to do so, there will be chaos, clashes, and destruction.
But just as with everything else, the costs of social change are not evenly distributed. The wealthy, especially wealthy whites, are structurally protected from directly feeling the effects of the anger that is boiling over. The stock market hums along, largely unaffected by protests. Segregation patterns mean that the people who benefit most from the current organization of society are less likely to be physically near the current damage. Even investors in Target, which closed stores and curtailed hours due to looting, don’t appear to have had the value of their portfolio damaged so far. Instead, the brunt of the costs is pushed downward, toward those who are more marginalized in terms of class, race, immigration status, and so on. We see that now when the people most at risk of injury and death are the very people taking to the streets. We see that now when the people most harmed by looting and vandalism are struggling small business owners and the workers who already don’t have the privilege of staying home during a pandemic.
This isn’t an accident. This isn’t due to moral or tactical failings of the protesters. This is as much a defense mechanism of the status quo as the lines of armed police officers are. Throughout American history, pitting people who are marginalized by different intersections of race and class against each other has been an extremely effective way to suppress rebellions and keep wealthy white people in power. Colonial elites defeated interracial worker uprisings by giving exploited people of European descent enough extra privileges to break up class solidarity. Similarly, successive waves of immigrants have been pitted against black and low-income people to keep the position of wealthy whites secure. That dynamic is repeating now. In situations where there is any property damage, the narrative shifts almost immediately from the story of a conflict between protesters and the state to the story of a conflict between protestors demanding black people be allowed to live versus hardworking but financially struggling immigrants/whites/blacks being harmed by property destruction or violence. Such a framing allows the role of wealthy whites—how we benefit, how we could be the ones to bear the costs—to once again slide out of view. Instead of acknowledging and working on the fact that many white people are unwilling to accept the changes that would be necessary for the state to stop killing black people, this narrative shift provides a socially acceptable excuse for opposing protesters.
We need to stop falling for this diversion of attention. The most important thing going on right now is that the police who exist to protect us are killing black people and traumatizing communities. However, the second most important thing going on right now is that when we wealthy white liberals say, “I support racial justice,” what we often mean is, “I support other people bearing the costs of racial justice so that I don’t have to.” It then becomes easy to criticize “those people” for failing in a crucible that we ourselves never face. That is not justice. Justice is stepping up to bear the costs ourselves.
In moments of protest, stepping up to bear the costs looks dramatic, as when white allies show up at demonstrations and put their bodies on the line to protect black and brown people. However, many of the costs that we wealthy whites need to shoulder are far more subtle and routine. We need to stop asking the police to harm people on our behalf. When we call the cops because we have been robbed, they humiliate and endanger our fellow human beings in a quest to recover or avenge our lost property. When we pass anti-homeless ordinances because homeless people make us uncomfortable, we commission the police to harass people. Whenever we decide that some behavior justifies the use of force, we start the chain of events leading to the threat and use of police violence. It’s easy to say in the abstract that the police shouldn’t hurt people, but the problem is that many of the things we ask the police to do in the course of their normal duties inevitably hurt human beings. Ending police violence requires us to stop turning to them as the only way to keep us safe.
This is where we face our own test of solidarity and fail repeatedly. It is one thing to call for a few bad cops to be prosecuted. It is another thing to move away from police protection more generally. After all, what are we supposed to do if someone robs our house? Just let them do it? Like all human beings, we are afraid of being vulnerable. But unlike our siblings who face vulnerability every day and have had to learn how to cope, we have the unrealistic expectation that we will be entirely free of it. The prospect of experiencing the smallest increase in vulnerability triggers a massive overreaction. Wealthy white people have shown time and again that we are willing to sacrifice the bodies and lives of others in huge numbers in order to fend off the slightest sense of vulnerability for ourselves.
This needs to stop. Those of us with privilege need to find a better way to cope with feeling vulnerable. This is not easy because fear short-circuits our compassion and our ability to think calmly. But it is only through finding other ways to respond to perceived threats that we can prevent our fear from overriding our values. Maintaining safety without resorting to violence might seem like a fantasy, but we are shown the way by communities who have never had the privilege of relying on the police for protection. Through long, hard work, they have come up with alternatives to being a helpless victim or doing harm. We must learn from them how to become better members of our greater community. How to do so is beyond the scope of a single essay, but the books We Keep Is Safe, by Zach Norris Executive Director of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, California and Until We Reckon, by Danielle Sered, Executive Director of Common Justice in New York City are good starting points. After that, we need to commit to uncovering the ways we benefit from police violence and to preparing to give them up.
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