Protesters crashed the wedding of a cop who shot Stephon Clark in the back. They yelled “murderer!” They asked, “if you started planning your wedding before you killed Stephon Clark or after?”
Well, this is what happens when you reject and punish peaceful protest. You invite non-peaceful protest. That’s on you. You chose this, America.
I’m sure some people reading are in disbelief right now. I can already hear the questions forming: How can you say that? How can you justify ruining a man’s wedding?
I’m not justifying it, but I’m not condemning it either. He shot an unarmed man in the back. And (this is the truly important piece) protesters have no faith in the system anymore. Why should they? Demands for “due process” for accused police officers fall flat if you realize how consistently they are acquitted. When, too frequently, they continue to not even be charged with a crime.
But more importantly, demands for “due process” fall flat when you realize that the purpose of the protests is a lack of due process. An unarmed man shot in the back has no due process. He has no chance to challenge, or to appeal, his summary execution at the hands of government agents. If you find that his rights were violated, he is still dead.
A demand for “due process” at this point is a demand for peace and order, not a demand for justice. And justice is what people need.
A false focus on peace
Today’s Nazis fetishize the non-violent aspects of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. This is deliberate. They hold up their passive, compliant vision of King as a role model for modern civil rights protesters to adhere to. They lecture nonwhites about the importance of “judging people not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character.” (Oddly enough, I never hear them lecture other whites about this.)
Of course, the notion of oppressors defining how others should protest is just another form of oppression. But this sanitized version of the civil rights movement, and of King himself, is too prevalent now. People don’t know what they’re missing, they don’t know there’s more they need to learn.
Part of what every American should learn is that, in his last few years before his untimely death in 1968, King went through a rapid evolution in perspective on violence and its role in the civil rights movement. This is not to say that he shifted to advocating violence, but his resolve to find purely non-violent solutions diminished as time passed and as America failed to deliver on a new promise of equality.
You can see the beginnings of this in King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail“, written in April 1963. King, in jail for protesting without a permit (not exactly the model of a law-abiding citizen), wrote about the difference between obeying just laws and disobeying unjust laws. And it was here that he began to openly question those who advocate for peace, and for law and order, recognizing that it was demands for “law and order” that placed him in jail over a peaceful protest:
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
King wrote his letter in part to challenge critics, who said that King was “inviting” violence upon him by marching without a permit (which he could not get). But King rejected an obligation to protest only legally, especially where the oppressors controlled what was legal and what was not:
In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.
The language of the unheard
By 1966 King broadcast his evolving view to the world during a CBS TV interview with Mike Wallace:
MIKE WALLACE: There’s an increasingly vocal minority who disagree totally with your tactics, Dr. King.
KING: There’s no doubt about that. I will agree that there is a group in the Negro community advocating violence now. I happen to feel that this group represents a numerical minority. Surveys have revealed this. The vast majority of Negroes still feel that the best way to deal with the dilemma that we face in this country is through non-violent resistance, and I don’t think this vocal group will be able to make a real dent in the Negro community in terms of swaying 22 million Negroes to this particular point of view. And I contend that the cry of “black power” is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.
This first point, King’s declaration that “riots are the language of the unheard,” has gotten renewed attention over the last couple years. King was not advocating violence, but he was recognizing that the violence existed as a reaction to injustice. Riots were not happening in a vacuum. Riots generally do not happen in a vacuum. People living in a state of peace and justice do not randomly assemble and start destroying and vandalizing property.
(Or maybe they sometimes do, but when white people do it, the press calls it a “celebration”.)
But Mike Wallace immediately asked a follow-up question, and King went on to make a second, greater point, one which shatters the white-power narrative of King as an advocate of peace rather than an advocate of justice:
WALLACE: How many summers like this do you imagine that we can expect?
KING: Well, I would say this: we don’t have long. The mood of the Negro community now is one of urgency, one of saying that we aren’t going to wait. That we’ve got to have our freedom. We’ve waited too long. So that I would say that every summer we’re going to have this kind of vigorous protest. My hope is that it will be non-violent. I would hope that we can avoid riots because riots are self-defeating and socially destructive. I would hope that we can avoid riots, but that we would be as militant and as determined next summer and through the winter as we have been this summer. And I think the answer about how long it will take will depend on the federal government, on the city halls of our various cities, and on White America to a large extent. This is where we are at this point, and I think White America will determine how long it will be and which way we go in the future.
When Mike Wallace asked King how long things could go on, implicitly he was asking King how long the prospect of riots could continue. And King says, “my hope is that it will be non-violent.” He expresses two more times his “hope” that “we can avoid riots.” But he takes no ownership of it, he avoids saying he is responsible for preventing or avoiding further riots, or that he will try to do so.
King points to the federal government, to state and local governments, to White America itself as responsible for what happens next. By 1966, King wasn’t calling for riots, but he was refusing to condemn them, and he was refusing to accept responsibility for ending them.
The end goal is not peace, it is justice. People lacking justice will keep choosing new ways to demand justice, until they find one that works. If you want peace, then you must help choose a peaceful path to justice. Otherwise those choices will still be made, they will just be made without you.
The choice of the empowered
How does this relate back to today? Well, perhaps instead of investing more and more in armored tanks and riot gear, cities and towns across America should try to eliminate massive and systemic racial bias in their justice systems. Maybe they should provide independent oversight of police departments. Perhaps they should be so bold as to actually call it murder when a police officer needlessly shoots an unarmed man in the back.If you are white, and you are concerned about riots or violence or about having your peaceful and joyous occasions ruined, you really have two options.
The first option is to join the pursuit of justice until the need for such protests is gone. At a minimum, if you prefer to have non-violent and non-invasive protests, try telling your peers to stop opposing more peaceful forms of protest. If peaceful protests still offend you, and you don’t want to deal with protests at all, then ask why people are protesting and do something to help them. If your goal is peace and justice, then promote justice, and you will gain peace.
The second option is to accept that protests will continue to escalate in the absence of injustice. No one is going away or quieting down, not voluntarily, not until things improve. To attain peace for yourself without justice for others, you would need to detain or eliminate all classes of oppressed persons who desire the rights you already enjoy.
But that, of course, would literally make you a Nazi. Don’t be a Nazi. Be a good person. Be a person who wants peace and justice in America, and then help make it happen.