All of these declarations and admonitions against looting. Looters don't likely read DU
...there just is no connection between folks here and looting, so the back and forth is senseless and just silly.
I get the sense that some think they're appealing to protesters in these posts scolding people who steal, but protesters aren't looting, looters are, and there's virtually or otherwise little way to reach them by posting here.
Moreover, a party with our constituency should recognize the root causes of this kind of unrest, and address those factors. That's much more productive than the public scolding. We used to recognize this dichotomy between political goals and the realities of the real world. Hungry folks will steal. People who don't have other means will take advantage of situations where goods are there for the taking. It's wrong, but it's part of a society which regularly subjugates people into jobs which don't pay enough to live and no jobs at all. That's just reality. Debating those who point these things out in response won't change that landscape, at least overnight, no matter how much one might object to it being said.
I saw a fine group of protesters from Howard U. today, marching, I think, to the WH. Nearly everyone was firmly masked-up and these good folks were in earnest to be heard. Those are the actions and voices we need to highlight if our concern is losing focus on our election chances. Lift up those who are doing the right thing, and hopefully avoid conflating these very correct protests with the actions of folks who have nothing at all to do with them.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...to the actual point made in the op.
President Lyndon Johnson constituted the Kerner Commission to identify the genesis of the violent 1967 riots that killed 43 in Detroit and 26 in Newark (above, soldiers in a Newark storefront), while causing fewer casualties in 23 other cities. (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
Released 50 years ago, the infamous report found that poverty and institutional racism were driving inner-city violence
by Alice George
smithsonianmag.com
March 1, 2018
Pent-up frustrations boiled over in many poor African-American neighborhoods during the mid- to late-1960s, setting off riots that rampaged out of control from block to block. Burning, battering and ransacking property, raging crowds created chaos in which some neighborhood residents and law enforcement operatives endured shockingly random injuries or deaths. Many Americans blamed the riots on outside agitators or young black men, who represented the largest and most visible group of rioters. But, in March 1968, the Kerner Commission turned those assumptions upside-down, declaring white racism—not black anger—turned the key that unlocked urban American turmoil.
Bad policing practices, a flawed justice system, unscrupulous consumer credit practices, poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter suppression, and other culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination all converged to propel violent upheaval on the streets of African-American neighborhoods in American cities, north and south, east and west. And as black unrest arose, inadequately trained police officers and National Guard troops entered affected neighborhoods, often worsening the violence.
“White society,” the presidentially appointed panel reported, “is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The nation, the Kerner Commission warned, was so divided that the United States was poised to fracture into two radically unequal societies—one black, one white.
____President Lyndon Johnson constituted the Kerner Commission to identify the genesis of the violent 1967 riots that killed 43 in Detroit and 26 in Newark, while causing fewer casualties in 23 other cities. The most recent investigation of rioting had been the McCone Commission, which explored the roots of the 1965 Watts riot and accused “riffraff” of spurring unrest. Relying on the work of social scientists and in-depth studies of the nation’s impoverished black urban areas, or ghettoes as they were often called, the Kerner Commission reached a quite different interpretation about the riots’ cause...
read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/1968-kerner-commission-got-it-right-nobody-listened-180968318/
The Kerner commission confirmed that nervous police and National Guardsmen sometimes fired their weapons recklessly after hearing gunshots. Above, police patrol the streets during the 1967 Newark Riots. (© Bud Lee, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)
