Good morning, everyone!
I have to admit that I am somewhat amused...and a little irritated...that the Dr. Martin Luther King quote “...a riot is the language of the unheard” is getting thrown around everywhere nowadays.
For a lot of reasons, I don’t feel like getting into them this morning.
I will say that I have known the quote and the specific context of the quote for about 20 years or so. I learned of the quote, itself, in the context of reading another literary giant so...I just wanted to share those contexts with you and then we’ll read some pundits.
Etymology of Riot/Online Etymology Dictionary
riot (n.)
c. 1200, "debauchery, extravagance, wanton living," from Old French riote (12c.)"dispute, quarrel, (tedious) talk, chattering, argument, domestic strife," also a euphemism for "sexual intercourse," of uncertain origin. Compare Medieval Latin riota "quarrel, dispute, uproar, riot." Perhaps from Latin rugire "to roar." Meaning "public disturbance" is attested by late 14c. Meaning "something spectacularly successful" first recorded 1909 in theater slang.
Dr. Martin Luther King addressed the Grosse Pointe Human Relations Council on March 14, 1968 at Grosse Pointe High School in Grosse Pointe, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit). The name of the speech from which the quote”...a riot is the language of the unheard” comes from is “The Other America” (and yes, I know the book title that Dr. King is alluding to).
Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
I will only note here that Dr. King’s universal about “riots” is, in fact, a specific interpretation of a specific set of riots. The maxim “a riot is the language of the unheard” remains true of the rebellions/riots of the last few days but, IMO, the interpretation would not be the same. In fact, these riots seem to have multiple (often contradictory) messages being spoken in multiple languages.
The origin of my knowledge of the Dr. King “riot” quote is not the speech that Dr. King gave in Grosse Pointe, Michigan on 3/14/68 but the poem “Riot” by Gwendolyn Brooks.
I think that I first read Ms. Brooks’ poem in a black literature anthology. I will say there is a certain line from Ms. Brooks poetry that I recalled about a black couple living in Winnetka that I have obsessed about for over a decade because I could not remember the specific Brooks poem that contained those lines. That poem is “Riot.”
But enough of these musings.
Time to read some pundits.
Dara Beevas, a black resident of Minneapolis, writes for the New York Daily News on what it is like to be an African American living in Minneapolis. (I’m going to push fair use with this one.)
As I speak to the many black people in the city, there’s a resounding collective message: We are tired.
An officer off to the side of Thursday’s protest, a Somali-born sergeant, pleaded with me for understanding. “I have no clout in my precinct,” he said. “Even my subordinates are disrespectful, and I’m constantly fighting racism from within,” he told me. He’s also tired. I challenged him anyway.
“Would you have watched idly as a man begged for mercy? Would you have let him die?” Without hesitation, he explained that he would have stopped it and has de-escalated such incidents before. To me, it’s one more person saying the words you say after another senseless preventable black death — another hollow admission of helplessness.
As I write this, my city is bracing for what promises to be one of the most restless and brutal weekends in Minneapolis history. On Friday night, citizens have been placed under curfew, businesses boarded up. Pleas for civility are palpable.
But I say to my white neighbors: The utopia you so carefully constructed with your preference for black and brown communities in their designated spaces and places is imploding. Your parks, restaurants, bike trails and Minnesota Nice cannot hold your little utopia together. The truth of the matter is that you don’t have to work that hard to go days, even months without seeing a single black or brown face if you don’t want to — a foreign experience for most white folks in other “woke” liberal cities. It’s not surprising that the Minneapolis Police Department reportedly has more officers who live outside the city than within its borders. The distance between you and the communities that are enraged widens by the day.
Yes, Minnesota tired is a thing.
Roxane Gay writes for the New York Times about the one constant of American life: racism
Some people are trying to provide the salvation the government will not. There are community-led initiatives for everything from grocery deliveries for the elderly and immunocompromised to sewing face masks for essential workers. There are online pleas for fund-raising. Buy from your independent bookstore. Get takeout or delivery from your favorite restaurant. Keep your favorite bookstore open. Buy gift cards. Pay the people who work for you, even if they can’t come to work. Do as much as you can, and then do more.
These are all lovely ideas and they demonstrate good intentions, but we can only do so much. The disparities that normally fracture our culture are becoming even more pronounced as we decide, collectively, what we choose to save — what deserves to be saved.
And even during a pandemic, racism is as pernicious as ever. Covid-19 is disproportionately affecting the black community, but we can hardly take the time to sit with that horror as we are reminded, every single day, that there is no context in which black lives matter.
In order to catch the sense of fatigue that Ms. Gay feels and that Miss Beevas feels and that I feel...you really need to read Ms. Gay’s entire essay.
Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker says quite simply: It’s all connected.
These seemingly disparate American trials are not unrelated; they’re bound by their predictability and by the ways in which the Trump Administration has exacerbated them since they began. In March, the President claimed that “nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion,” and he has echoed that sentiment throughout the course of the emergency. But virtually everyone paying attention to public health saw something like the novel coronavirus coming. In less than two decades, we have seen epidemics of the SARS, MERS, Ebola, and H1N1 viruses. The Obama Administration created a National Security Council Directorate to mitigate the impact of such events; the Trump Administration largely disbanded it.
On Friday, Trump tweeted that the protesters in Minneapolis were “thugs”—a term with deep-rooted racist connotations—and later noted that the military was present in the city. “When the looting starts,” he warned, “the shooting starts.” This situation, too, is part of a long-building problem whose warning signs have gone unheeded by the current Administration. Progressives have widely criticized the 1994 Crime Bill, which was spearheaded by Joe Biden, but an element of that legislation has been underappreciated. The 1992 Los Angeles riots broke out after the acquittal of four police officers who had violently assaulted Rodney King (an incident that was also captured on video). As has often been the case with riots, the chaotic fury in Los Angeles was not simply a response to one incident but an accretion of anger at innumerable issues with a police department which had gone unaddressed for years. The Crime Bill authorized the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice to intervene in the instance of chronically troubled departments, by negotiating consent decrees that laid out specific reforms to be followed, and provided for monitors to oversee their implementation. Like the precursors to the coronavirus, Los Angeles—and later Ferguson and Baltimore—was an indicator of how such problems could play out without intervention. But, in this area as well, the Trump Administration has functioned like a building contractor who can’t recognize a load-bearing wall.
Lachlan Markey and Asawin Suebsaeng /The Daily Beast
But his immediate jump to a forceful and potentially deadly resolution to the unrest underscored what knowledgeable sources said is deep distress at events that, in Trump’s view, make him appear weak. He told reporters at the White House on Friday that he didn’t want Minneapolis to "descend further into lawless anarchy and chaos."
There’s a personal branding aspect to that desire, one former senior administration official told The Daily Beast. “He sees civil disturbance as a referendum on his leadership,” the source said. "A show of force like sending in the National Guard is a way to reassert that authority and show he's in control.”
And on Friday, protests continued to spread across several U.S. cities, hours after the former Minneapolis cop was charged. The chants reached Trump’s doorstep when a crowd of marchers and activists gathered near 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., leading to the Secret Service briefly locking down the White House. The president reacted on Saturday morning by tweeting through his anger at the people protesting police violence.
“I was inside [the White House], watched every move, and couldn’t have felt more safe,” Trump posted to Twitter, adding that the Secret Service “let the ‘protesters’ scream & rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard - didn’t know what hit them.”
I understand what they’re getting at but I think that The Damn Fool has a primitive vision of what presidential “strength” is supposed to look like whereas Markey and Suebsaeng seem t be evaluating him more as a typical POTUS. Interesting hypothesis, though.
From the Los Angeles Times Obituaries
Ira Howard Sokoloff passed away on May 28, 2020 at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, NJ from complications of Covid-19. Born April 26,1941 in Newark, NJ, Ira was the son of the late Sol Sokoloff and the late Minnie Sokoloff. He lived in Macon, GA, Malibu, CA, Atlanta, GA and most recently Cherry Hill, NJ. Ira graduated from Weequahic High School and Fairleigh Dickinson University….
Paul Butler, Georgetown University law professor and a frequent guest on MSNBC during the Russiagate story writes, for the Guardian, that American policing is about enforcing white supremacy: don’t be fooled.
White progressives love to focus on class subordination (I see you, Bernie Sanders!) but there is something sticky about race. Jimenez’s professional status and calm demeanor did not stop the police from treating him like a regular black dude – the subject of their vast authority to detain and humiliate. They didn’t have an actual reason and they didn’t need one. Jimenez’s dark skin was the offense.
This is how powerful a drug white privilege is. Here we have the cops policing a rally protesting police brutality against a black man. Even in that context, when the whole world is watching figuratively, and CNN’s audience is watching literally, the cops can’t help themselves. They go all brutal lite. They play “who’s the man” even when the black man, like Jimenez, goes out of his way to show he already knows who the man is. “You are, officer, Sir.” What the cops round up are the usual suspects and the usual suspects are always black and brown.
The whole world has seen the sordid violent recording where George Floyd narrates, over 10 minutes, his own demise. Actually, there is not 10 minutes of narration because Floyd goes limp and silent after several minutes, but that does not cause former officer Chauvin to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck. The officers had received a radio run to go to a local store, where Floyd had allegedly tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill. Floyd is across the street from the store, chilling in his car with a couple of friends, when the officers approach like they are apprehending violent offenders. They order Floyd and his friends out of the car, put Floyd in handcuffs, order him to lie face down on the ground, and pin him down with their knees and hands. Floyd complains he can’t breathe. A cop responds: “Well, get up and get in the car.”
Michael A. Cohen at the Boston Globe on that matter of 100,000+ Americans dead in the COVID-19 pandemic; a death toll that will continue to rise.
There has been no national moment of silence; no day of remembrance; no attempt to honor those who have been lost; no effort by our political leaders to put this loss of life in a broader context. The carnage intensifies, and yet the mind-numbing death toll doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
The reaction to so much wanton loss of life brings to mind a phrase uttered by the one of the worst mass murderers in human history, Joseph Stalin — that one death is a tragedy, but one million is just a statistic. When we see the portraits of those killed in a mass shooting or watch their families being interviewed it seems real. When they are just an unending list of names on the front page of a newspaper or an ever-rising number in the news chyrons on cable news, it feels like an abstraction.
There is no one reason why this is happening. Part of it is, unlike past tragedies, the coronavirus pandemic is affecting each of us directly. More than 40 million of us have lost our jobs. We’re stuck at home, away from our family, friends, and colleagues, juggling work and school, and buffeted by stress, anxiety, and uncertainty. We don’t have time to grieve for people we don’t know.
Cady Stanton of Washington Monthly does an interview with Alexis Madrigal, the Atlantic reporter who, with other Atlantic reporters created the COVID-19 data project, The COVID-19 Tracking Project.
Do you think the federal government should be offering this service, probably through the CDC? And do you feel like you had to do this work because the government wasn’t?
We would have never done this work if the CDC had been doing it. The CDC has begun to put some information onto what they’re calling the “CDC COVID Tracker” website. The problem is that they’re not providing historical data. We need to be able to see the trends. Right now, the CDC is only providing current day snapshots. People need to know what happened before so they can predict what’s going to happen in the future. We just did a large analysis of the CDC data. Since that report came out, we’ve realized the CDC was including antibody tests in their totals, which is a huge problem. Mixing those results, as one expert told us, makes those numbers uninterpretable.
Honestly, it’s the kind of mistake you just cannot believe. It throws off some of the very key measures that people are using to try to decide when to allow increased social activity.
Government officials have spent so much time preparing for a pandemic. I haven’t seen a plan, though, that really thought about how data would flow. If one outcome of this crisis is that people take into account that they’re going to need high quality data to reduce uncertainty and make better decisions, that will be a great service that we have provided...
Dan Balz and Emily Gaskin of the Washington Post report that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has a 10-point lead over The Damn Fool among registered voters, 53-43. It slips to a 51-46 lead among likely voters.
Overall, Americans offer mixed assessments of Trump and Biden, and although the presumptive Democratic nominee is viewed less favorably overall today than he was last fall, he fares better than the president on several personal attributes. At the same time, Trump’s supporters are notably more enthusiastic and committed to voting for him in the fall than are those who currently back Biden.
Biden leads Trump 53 percent to 43 percent among registered voters nationally. That 10 percentage-point margin compares with what was a virtual dead heat between the two candidates two months ago, when Biden was at 49 percent and Trump 47 percent. Among all adults, Biden’s margin widens to 13 points (53 percent to 40 percent).
Marc Caputo and Natasha Korecki of Politico argue that the George Flynn murder and the nationwide reactions to that murder might “reshape” Joe Biden's VP search.
As a former Minneapolis-area prosecutor from 1996 to 2006, Klobuchar had already earned the antipathy of social-justice activists for her tough-on-crime record and history of handling police violence. But those issues are now radioactive with the caught-on-camera death of a black man at the hands of the same officer who was once probed in a police-related death while she worked as a local prosecutor.
Progressives — and right-wing trolls — have also hammered Harris, a former Democratic presidential contender herself, for her resume as a state attorney general and local prosecutor, going so far as to push a “Kamala is a cop” narrative designed to diminish and disqualify her in the eyes of the left.
At one point during her presidential bid last spring, Harris expressed “regret” for backing a controversial truancy law, only to later lean into her record as a prosecutor.
Demings, who served as Orlando’s first woman police chief, oversaw a department that has had a history of criticism for using excessive force.
A good solid report but Politico looooooves to stir that pot, don’t they?
Chris Smith of Vanity Fair interviews U.S. House Majority Whip James Clyburn.
Vanity Fair: What was your reaction when you saw the video of a Minneapolis cop kneeling on the neck of George Floyd?
James Clyburn: I don’t know that I would describe my emotion as anger. I guess I should be angry. Maybe at my age, and as many of these kinds of things as I’ve experienced, you get to the point where you say, but for the video, I would not have seen it; other people would not have seen it; and the official word would be all anyone knew. I do feel, though, that at some point the country is going to have to wake up to this reality.
What do you tell black Americans, particularly young black male Americans, who say the country is long past the point when it should have awakened, and that the reality is just racism and hatred?
Going back to the student movement and the civil rights movement, I’ve really questioned many times whether or not what we were doing made any real sense. Whether there was any possibility of success. But along with people like John Lewis, who I met in October 1960, he’s held on to his faith in the country, and I’ve held on to mine. I went to jail several times. I ran for office three times before I got elected. You ofdon’t give up. You aren’t going to win by giving up.
Everyone have a good day!