What the current demonstrations themselves demonstrate is not malevolence on the part of the demonstrators. Whatever ill will is at work is to be found, not in the demonstrators, but in those who wish to silence them: the police and the coercive power they serve.
The resort to force is always the answer of those who have no answer when their authority is called into question. The demonstrations demonstrate that.
In fact, that same thing has been demonstrated time and time again by other, earlier demonstrations. To give just three examples, it was demonstrated in the 1967 in Detroit, in 1969 at Kent State University, and in 2011 on Wall Street.
Another thing the demonstrations demonstrate is the inequality rampant in our society. Indeed, it is precisely in order to call that pervasive inequality to our collective attention that the demonstrators are demonstrating. Since the fault-lines of inequality in American society always above all follow racial divisions, their greatest weight falls most heavily upon people of color — just such people as George Floyd himself. That is exactly what the protests are consciously protesting against, and that protest is precisely what calls those who presume to have the authority in our society into question, thereby eliciting the very response to violence already addressed.
Yet a third thing that the demonstrations demonstrate is the solidarity of objective interest that unites all of the oppressed with one another, and with all those who stand with them in protest against inequality. The demonstrations demonstrate that there is just such a unity of objective interest, regardless of all the differences that may exist between the apparent, perceived interests of the diverse segments of the oppressed.
In fact, it is in the interest of the oppressors to create and to foster just such diversity of perceived interest among the oppressed, thereby setting one segment of the community of all the oppressed against other segments of that same community—for example, setting white unemployed or underemployed people against people of color. That is the same old and effective strategy of divide and conquer that has always served coercive power.
The demonstrations demonstrate that.
