In our lecture on the French revolution, one of the questions was why should we care about the history of revolutionary violence? This really resonated with me, as a white woman from South Africa and as a watcher of the protests in America. There has been no generation of my family that has not seen racial segregation until me, and now I am watching as Americans desperately fight for their right to be treated as humans.
The history of revolutionary violence is not just something we should study to understand why people did what they did. We are living through a revolution right now, instead of condemning the actions of violence people are being forced to commit, we should be looking in the past for methods to create a better future.
Black lives matter protests and riots have been going on for centuries but today, the day I am writing this is the seventh straight day of BLM protests in America after the murder of George Floyd on the 25th of May in Minneapolis. Of course, they are not just protesting the murder, they are protesting the centuries of systematic oppression people of colour face in the US. These acts of police brutality – which has surpassed that title, to murder – are faced by every country but, I want to focus on America and its modern-day French Revolution.
Reading any article or book on the French revolution can show you that there were countless ways people protested the feudal system in France. From underground salt and tobacco trades to the Storming of the Bastille. Understanding that there is no correct way to protest is the first step in allies helping the BLM movement. It should be the main takeaway from the question of historical revolutionary violence.
Take away the details and the French revolution and the BLM protests sound the same. A group of people attempting to overthrow a detrimental regime, taking advantage of them. So why we do not condemn the actions of the French, yet focus on the small percentage of looting in the protests in America, which are largely peaceful until police arrived.
America was built on the backs of slaves and changes are only brought about when destruction begins to affect the economy. The US places the value of products above the lives of black men and women, and if you think I am overreacting you need only look at the thousands of people spamming social media with comments like “looting isn’t the way to do this”. They are calling people thugs because of the vandalism of property, during a protest in which police are brutally gassing and shooting men, women and children. But, yes, the looting is clearly the problem here. The worst part is that the protesters are often not the ones looting, it is others taking advantage of the situation or seeking to cause police retaliation.
But imagine it was only protestors looting.
Target can survive a week of vandalism. Black people cannot survive in America.
Below are resources, bail donations and petitions:
https://blacklivesmatter.com/petitions/
https://www.greatbigstory.com/guides/how-to-become-a-better-black-lives-matter-ally
https://www.change.org/t/black-lives-matter-en-us
https://blacklivesmatter.com/resources/
https://minnesotafreedomfund.org/
https://www.legalrightscenter.org/donate.html
https://bailfunds.github.io/
https://www.welovelakestreet.com/
https://secure.everyaction.com/zae4prEeKESHBy0MKXTIcQ2
https://www.suu.edu/diversity/allyship-guides/black-ally.html
Hi Storm, thank you so much for this. You’ve raised so many excellent points and done so incredibly well. Your last line, most of all, really resonated with me, but there are some other aspects I’ll touch upon before I get to that.
You mention how the history of revolutionary violence can be used today to understand the way people are taking action today, and I think that’s an excellent point. History is not only a tool for understanding the past but more importantly the present. It not only explains how we got here, essentially, but also allows us to understand why we act the way we do.
And you’re absolutely right – if we’re going to celebrate the French Revolution, we ought to celebrate this too. Mainstream media in particular, and I think a lot of foreign channels, are fixated on the looting and violence, without really acknowledging why it has come to be this way. One video that really stuck with me was that a split screen of Trump walking towards the church for his photo-op. One side showed his peaceful walk towards it and then another how police had violently dispersed the crowd. It’s so bizarre and macabre it’s almost hard to believe it’s real. This is the kind of thing that rightfully makes people furious. Even if protesters are the one looting, even if they are the ones destroying public property, they do so with a completely justified rage. They have protested peacefully. They have worked through lawmakers. But it hasn’t been enough. Like you put so well: black people cannot survive America.
I’m sure you’ve seen this already, but I watched the last episode of Last Week Tonight and this clip at the end stuck with me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kjrYaqhtPs (the clip I’m speaking of starts at 2:16).
Thank you so much for this article Storm – it was really well written and you’ve made great points.
Hi storm 🙂
I’ve also been similarly aggrieved with many people’s sentiments that “there’s a better way of protesting” in reference to the lootings, riots, and vandalism. it’s infuriating that people will find a way to diminish the movement any which way to invalidate the requests of BLM protestor’, and maintain this hegemonic idea that Black people are “thugs, looters…”
From this, it’s also interesting to understand where they’re coming from and why they feel so threatened (and not rush to the conclusion that they’re simply just racist apologists like I have many times in Twitter arguments.) A lot of the fear is propagated from Trump’s MAGA sentiment, an inherently white-supremecist saying that the “great” times were when White people were “on top,” and anything less than that means America’s “no longer great.”
And to them, the systemic oppression that has kept Black people as slaves, Brown people as min-wage workers, prisoners as slaves, the very constitutional, education, heal there, and judicial system, has greatly benefitted their skin tone for hundreds of years that anything less feels like “reverse racism.”