The biggest, we’ll say, complaint that I’ve seen about the current civil unrest in this country is about the rioting.
Granted, not all the rioting is done by POCs, but yes some are burning things down and damaging property. People can’t seem to grasp why people would burn down their own neighborhoods. It seems counter-productive.
Allow me to provide a different perspective.
Let’s say we’re all sitting down at a dinner table that is filled with delicious food. Just before we start eating, someone pushes all the food just out of your reach. As others start to fill their plates with food, you ask someone to pass you to pass the potatoes. Or the corn, or the roast beef.
Everyone ignores you. No one will pass you the food. So, you ask a little louder.
Still, no one will allow you to eat.
So, you get up and walk over to where the food is. As you reach for a serving spoon, your hand is smacked away, and the food is moved once again out of your reach.
Feeling annoyed yet? Are you suspicious that some people don’t want you to have anything?
When you ask why you can’t have any food, you’re told, “If you wanted food, you should have sat closer to it.” When you respond that it had been within reach until someone moved it, yet again, you’re ignored.
Ticked
So now you’re ticked. In a raised voice, you demand to be given food. This time, they hear you, but since you yelled you don’t deserve to eat. They tell you that maybe if you learned some manners and how to ask for things nicely and when it was appropriate, you’d have food.
Now you’re angry. Everyone except you has food, and it’s been made clear that if the people seated at the table have their way you will never get any. Out of frustration, you flip the table over. If you can’t eat, no one eats.
And this is why there are riots.
For years, POCs politely and quietly protested for equality. They weren’t looking for a handout, just a fair playing field on which they could build their lives with dignity and respect. Those requests and protests were met with ignorance and violence.
So, we asked louder. The response was the same. Silence. Our requests were ignored.
So, we got louder. Same demands, but with the understanding that we would no longer be ignored. The response? Violence. Killings. Lynchings. Gaslighting.
Mad
Now, we’re mad. And like the table in the scenario above, if we can’t have nice things and be treated with dignity and respect, NO ONE will have nice things or respect. If it takes burning it all to the ground to make us all equal, then so be it.
Do I condone it? No. Personally I’ve worked too damn hard for the things I have. I’m not destroying them to make a point, no matter how important the point might be.
But do I understand it? Damn right I do. Black people have been dealing with this crap for more than a century and a half. We’ve been free-ish since 1865. We didn’t get “equal rights” until 1964.
To put that in perspective, that was only five years before I was born. Yet we’re still being ignored.
That’s a long time to sit at a table and not be allowed to eat.
We’ve even tried building our own tables, growing our own food, and sitting down in our own neighborhoods, and even that was taken away. Tulsa, anyone?
So, we can’t sit at your table, and you won’t let us have a table of our own. Why would we possibly be angry?
We’re starving for equality. We’re hungry for a fair playing field, one where POCs don’t have to police what they wear, where they live, the car they drive or the stores where they choose to spend their money. When our kids miss curfew, we just want to worry about their punishment, not that something horrible might have happened because someone thought they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We just want to sit down and eat.
