THE BREAKING POINT

One of my grandsons showed me a meme yesterday referencing the current riots in the USA over yet another killing by a white police officer of a black man.

It depicts a black male with gritted teeth and tears tracking down his cheeks saying, “I can’t believe that happened because the police stereotypes [sic] us as violent thugs.  I’m going to destroy private property and loot expensive TV sets that’ll show them.”

Our following conversation canvassed decades of research and centuries of experience showing that riots of this kind are responses to untenable social conditions. But memes such as the one he had shown me, characterise them as inexplicable and seek to delegitimize the grievances that underlie them. Both these lines of reasoning are shallow and wrong; in fact, they help explain the factors that cause riots in the first place.

Recent police killings of black men in the Twin Cities region — Jamar Clark in 2015 and Philando Castile in 2016 — provoked demonstrations but no sustained accountability; the officers who killed Clark were neither charged with crimes nor fired, and the officer who killed Castile lost his job but was acquitted of criminal charges.

Protests against these outcomes were met with aggression from the state and its sympathizers. A protest camp outside Minneapolis’ 4th police precinct in response to Clark’s death was razed by law enforcement after two weeks of demonstrations and an attempt by white vigilantes to kill its occupants. (Five black men were shot; none died.)

The past several months, meanwhile, have seen American life contract due to the novel coronavirus pandemic; millions of people have lost work, over 100,000 have died, and more people are suddenly struggling to pay bills and rent and feed their families.

Black people are disproportionately represented among the crisis’ victims, both epidemiologically and economically. Its heavy toll on their communities makes starker the longstanding reality of black life in cities like Minneapolis, which is defined by residential segregation and the targeted neglect and over-policing that accompany it.

Yet even as their and other disadvantaged communities suffer outsizedly, the fortunes of the country’s billionaires have ballooned to the tune of a $434 billion wealth increase since March — a gain of 15 percent, according to CNBC.

Enforcing compliance with these inequities, remains the responsibility of armed law enforcement, who’ve enjoyed massive new investments and expanded powers in the bargain.

It’s hard to imagine, without experiencing it, what your personal breaking point is — the point at which the compounding oppressions and indignities expand your understanding of acceptable recourse. 

Most of us will never be driven to this point, but those who are look upon a vista of possibilities that at least bear some hope of changing conditions. Some of these are illegal. Some are destructive. Rarely do they risk matching the depravity to which they are responding.

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand some of us may feel smugly superior to our USA counterparts,  We ought not.  As I said to my grandson, while the social conditions here may seem more tenable, they are not.  When faced with compounding oppressions, indignities and inequities, everyone has their breaking point.