The Protests: How We Got Here (The manner of protest)

When Martin Luther King was putting together the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, he first went to white churches and implored to them that this was not a matter of race, that it was in fact a matter of economics and that poor whites were suffering alongside blacks and the two communities would do well to join forces. To which the white churches responded....no, it's about race.

The 'system' isn't racist. The 'system' is ruthlessly economic and wants everyone to be productive and make money. In fact, the 'system' cannot abide those that don't produce, so having a chunk of population off to the separate-but-equal side that doesn't participate in the larger economy is anathema to the 'system'. Which is why (I contend) that expanded industrial production of WWII demanded that blacks (among others) must participate in the economy in order to reach economic efficiency (which is the inborn desire of any economic system). Blacks must no longer be seen as separate and must in fact actually become equal because anything less makes no sense to the 'system'. MLK saw that black workers needed the buses to get to work and that polite society must honor that simple necessity. And he put it to the test. 

Transportation issues, too, were at the heart of Plessy v Ferguson (1896): separate but equal would imply, in that case, that railroad companies would now need to have a Blacks-only 1st class railroad car for every trip even though hardly any blacks at the time would've been able to afford a ticket. A railroad company carrying around an extra empty car could be ruinously expensive and is at best utterly useless. But the Culture of the South at the time demanded that blacks and whites remain separate. This is bad business but if the customer base makes demands, the corporations are obliged to supply. 

Plessy v Ferguson (1896) reminds us that the working class has the power to bend the Supreme Court and the corporate structures to their demands and at this point the working class demand was still decidedly white. Was it the 'system' that imposed separate but equal? No, this is a warping of the 'system'. It was the People, the illogical People who chose wastefulness and animosity over integrated forms of travel because social change is a hard thing to endure. Seeing someone else prosper gives the feeling of losing ground, even if that isn't the case. And in 1955, MLK was right: the economic circumstances were just as disadvantageous for the whites as it was for the blacks. But that was true in 1896 and the white people bungled justice then, too. In both cases the State, the corporations and the wealthy allowed this injustice to take place because another Civil War would've been worse (for them) than just letting poor people fight each other. 

MLK, echoing Gandhi (who became enlightened when he, like Homer Plessy, was thrown out of a 1st class train compartment in 1895), ushers in a wave of peaceful protests building on the legal victories of Thurgood Marshall before the war and the beloved stardom of Jackie Robinson after the war. He was adamant that the movement be peaceful and (even more to the point) legal. The point was to show that black people were citizens deserving of Constitutional protection and cultural assimilation just like everyone else and that it was their birthright. The notion of separate but equal was never real because it never applied to anyone else--there was no one to be equal to! Brown v Board of Education (1954) stamps this out judicially and even puts forth pronouncements for how it is to spread (namely "at all deliberate speed"). Again, the 'system' is ready to move on from segregation and embrace full economic efficiency, it is the Culture that drags its feet because social change must be forced.

The example of the Civil Rights movement forms the template of ongoing complaints of all stripes for the rest of the 20th century (re: the peaceful righteous fight is co-opted and re-purposed for everyone else's uses). From here the culture of protest takes over in America and, to my mind, has an entirely counter-intuitive effect: it makes people think they're rising up in the streets when increasingly they're just blowing off some steam. They congratulate themselves on speaking truth to power when really they've been given a place to stand and rigid rules of conduct and are mostly just harmlessly absorbed. Protests rarely lead to violence, indeed they are rarely even worth mentioning as they have become so ingrained in the civic culture. Protests have replaced parades: people are getting together to complain rather than celebrate, but the effect isn't wildly different. MLK was fighting for something, most people since have just been trying to look like they're fighting for something.

The turmoil of the 1960s begins an era where the white middle class was tearing itself apart and had no need whatsoever for the poor whites. They would rather magnanimously grant freedom to African-Americans than deal with the white underclass, which is now even more beholden to keeping black people down as a means of deluding themselves into feeling like they are living the American dream, that they are doing things right, that they are in God's good graces, etc. 

For the wealthy 'race' is an illusion. They don't need to pretend to be superior to blacks--they have more money in the bank, which is the only superiority they ever needed. The enlightened whites have discarded 'race', thus they want to treat blacks and other whites the same. This works for the wealthy because since they are in better economic standing (the only thing that matters), everyone else is naturally kinda all the same anyway. 

But to the poor whites, they see their world steadily eroding because they can't keep up with the pace of advancing technology and social change. Poor blacks have increasingly imbibed their suffering as race-related and while that may well be true, it is ultimately secondary to what they need to be doing: namely, accumulating capital to escape the misery of economic impoverishment. As the wealthy grow ever-wealthier, they grow further away from the others of their society, while the poor are continually getting pushed together and the racial differences that used to separate them are no longer honored in polite society.

Blacks are not victimized by the 'system', they are victimized by those keeping them from being a part of the 'system'. Blaming the 'system' is missing the true danger, it is the barriers to joining the 'system' that bedevils them. Separate but equal was not the 'system', it was the absence of 'system'. Homer Plessy bought his ticket for the 'system' and was denied; Rosa Parks bought a ticket for the 'system' and was taken to jail.  

The 'system' is color blind--it is completely blind. But we don't experience the 'system' in our day to day lives, we experience each other in what we call 'culture'. But we live in a multiplicity of paradigms with a range of metaphors, tastes and social signals. You might find it easy to know which side you're on, but how to represent that and/or aid your chosen group is not at all plain to see.

With the outgrowth of social media and smart phones in the early 2000s, the culture is now primed on a granular level. This could be dangerous, riotous, but more often than not is petty and minimal and burns out quickly. Social media has a more insidious effect--creepy because it is inside of our homes rather than out there in the streets--but at its best it does at least suggest that the 'bad apples' can be singled out. At its worst, though, it is a replay of the Cultural Revolution: each citizen is now a petty tyrant and the People are a mass of judges, juries and executioners. 

The MLK model of peaceful protest is probably dead. From here the cancel culture will mature and take root.

So far in my reckoning I've basically only dealt with the richest of rich and poorest of poor. This makes up roughly zilch percentage of the population, but establishes the visual template seen by the vastly larger middle class. The middle class watches this all play out on their media screens and they choose sides and they go forth in righteous indignation. Race is just a detail but by now this has created a schism within white rhetoric causing people to choose sides, generally based around either preserving the past or looking to the future. Some of the wealthy may enjoy the new middle class war, some may hate it; some rich are unaffected by it, some rich are in great peril. Some poor folks may be encouraged by the turmoil they see in the streets, some may be horrified by it. Some will see the looting as an unfortunate by-product of so much chaos, some will see it as the point all along. Some will become enlightened to the crimes of local police, some will see those police as more important than ever! These may be entirely different groups of people that think they've chosen the same thing. And they don't understand that they're now in opposition to each other. And a lot of the people who think they disagree with each other may be working side by side, while some who see each other as enemies will be doing all the same shit.

We exist in a multiplicity of paradigms and when a variety of paradigms converge, no one really knows what's going on any more. All of life becomes inchoate and the active people aren't really doing anything while the inactive people may have far more influence than they realize. This is, I believe, what is living in our television sets and smart phones right now.

According to Wikipedia, the violence of the past two weeks is pretty much evenly split: protesters injuring cops, cops injuring protesters, protesters injuring each other at a pretty similar clip. Some cities are perfectly peaceful, some are experiencing all kinds of wanton destruction. Some people just want to fuck shit up, some people truly want to be heard, some people want to publicly grieve, some want to express their anger, some want to keep others from expressing anything at all. And they're all doing what they're doing in the same place at the same time. The tangle of desires and motivations and plans of action threaten to be merely a meaningless jumble. 

As for the 'system', all it wants is money. No Lives have ever mattered to the 'system' because the 'system' is going to outlive us all and therefore does not need us as much as we need it. And the only differentiation it makes between us is the money in our pockets--not the kindness in our hearts, not the color of our skin, not the sweat of our brows. It'll take black money and yellow money and red money and white money, too. (It'll take stolen money, inherited money, gambled money, criminal money, found money....) When your ability to make money has been eclipsed, that's when rioting in the streets becomes the only answer. 

Lives matter to other lives. We should be taking care of each other. The 'system' will help us stay healthy, it will help educate our children and it'll help us feed ourselves and have fun. It isn't going to give our lives worth because that's not what it does. We have to do that for ourselves and each other and if we don't no one else will. The 'system' is built for those who help themselves and the enemies of the 'system' are those that attempt to keep others out. Homer Plessy knew that in 1896...and the Supreme Court buckled under the weight of apartheid instead of doing its job. MLK knew that in 1955....and the white churches blew their opportunity to be on the right side of history. 

Right now, the 'system' is trying to repair itself from the corona virus lock downs. The 'system' will be going through a major overhaul in the next 12 months or so and these protests are about (hopefully) positively positioning the Culture to get it right this time. I don't think things are different, I think the Culture has evolved to where they always should've been: namely by realizing that the problem isn't the 'system', it is the lack of 'system'.