MINNEAPOLIS IS THE NEW HONG KONG
It seems like we’ve crossed some sort of event horizon or cultural Rubicon when I scroll past protest photos and videos on Twitter and I have to look closely to see if they’re from Hong Kong or Minneapolis.
The parallels are striking, from the excessive and indiscriminate use of tear gas and gratuitously pepper-spraying and arresting reporters to pundits and leaders calling protesters thugs who should be shot and blaming teachers and church leaders for encouraging them.
And not just in Minneapolis, of course. Protests are popping up in other major cities. Even the White House was in lockdown temporarily.
And, you know:
1. To get the obvious out of the way, yes, all four officers should be arrested (Derek Chauvin has finally been charged with murder - the others should at least be charged with accessory), though it seems the police seem to be going with the defense that George Floyd would still be alive if he’d lived a healthier lifestyle, and I don’t see that helping to ease tensions.
2. And yes, institutional racism in America is most definitely a thing, and has been since we were still colonies of the Crown. Trump’s so-called presidency has made things worse, but the problem existed long before he invented Birtherism.
Indeed, the protests are not just about George Floyd. They’re about Kenneth Walker, Breona Taylor, Sean Reed, Ahmaud Arbery, Steve Taylor (and that’s just in the last month) and so on and etc all the way back to Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and the thousands upon thousands before them - to say nothing of the whole stupid Amy Cooper saga.
3. So IMO the anger and fury of protesters is 100% justified. The violence, not so much, but it’s understandable. MLK Jr told us this way back in the 60s: riots are the language of the unheard, and the inevitable result of systemic injustice - they don’t just magically pop up out of nowhere.
That said, it’s worth adding that protest violence is often the result of police handling the protests badly by escalating tensions rather than defusing them, whether intentionally or by accident. In cases where the police themselves are the object of protest anger, simply showing up in riot gear is almost guaranteed to make a bad situation worse. I’ve seen anecdotal accounts that this is the case in Minneapolis. It’s certainly the case in Hong Kong. Like the saying goes, when you send in riot police, you get a riot.
4. Like in HK, the law-and-order response from Trump and those who worship him has been predictably awful and likely to get people killed. One thing going for the US is that the police is not just one force that takes orders from the White House - it’s a diverse array of local and state forces, and at least some of them are trying to defuse tensions rather than escalate them.
5. It’s hard to know how bad this is going to get. Past history isn't much help - usually, things die down after a few days and we spend the aftermath discussing the problem and generally doing little to address it. Here in 2020, we have a white supremacist in the White House with a cult army of supporters fuelled by paranoid conspiracy theories that liberals, the media and PoC are all out to get them.
I guess we’re lucky the Open Carry buffoons who stormed capital buildings because they couldn't get haircuts on demand haven't shown up at these protests to “help” - not yet, anyway. That could change.
And I don’t even want to think about what all this could mean for the 2020 election.
6. Anyway, as I said, we’ve been living our own version of this in HK for some time now in terms of protests and police brutality. And it's almost like we’ve become a template for Minneapolis - not just the police going crazy with tear gas and targeting reporters (at least the non-white ones), but protesters reportedly throwing tear gas canisters back at police.
So there’s a certain hypocritical irony that Trump advocates shooting black protesters for rioting while he simultaneously takes steps to punish Beijing and the HK govt for oppressing protests here.
That said, I’m not sure he even knows what’s going on here. His statement on HK doesn’t say a word about police brutality or human rights. He’s concerned mainly with HK’s loss of autonomy under 1C2S, and I think he only cares inasmuch as it’s something else he can add to his anti-China rhetoric, which he deploys mostly to entertain his cult and push the nonsense narrative that China - not Trump - is to blame for COVID-19 killing over 100,000 Americans.
Which I only mention because a number of HK people seem to think Trump can somehow save us if he takes action. Thing is, Trump doesn’t care about us, or about human rights in general. He pals around with oppressive authoritarians and ruthless dictators, and even talks about Xi Jinping as a good friend. Sure, it's all in his head. The point is that if his actions do us any good whatsoever, it will be by sheer dumb luck.
And okay, when things look increasingly hopeless as they do here, you can't afford to be picky. If Kim Jong-un or Rodrigo Duterte intervened to save us, we’d probably take it.
Still, the thing about Trump is that his whims turn on a dime, and he regularly undermines his own policies on Twitter. Also, his “plan” is pretty vague and hasn’t actually been enacted yet. Everything depends on details and execution, and it’s always possible that his “solution” to HK will be worse than the problem.
7. Oh, BTW, shoutout to Laura Ingraham for coming up with the worst attempt so far to convince black people that Trump totally understands what they're going through.
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