What our country needs to hear as protests rage
Eric Weinstein, the Harvard-educated, left-of-center intellectual who is managing director of Thiel Capital and brilliant host of “The Portal” podcast, used an old expression to describe what was needed over this long, hot weekend of protests and fires and crashing storefronts:
“Thread the needle.”
The cable news stations couldn’t do
it.
On the left, MSNBC and CNN were spinning endlessly about the pain of repressed people finding their expression in sometimes violent spasms.
On the right, Fox News nattered on about law and order and Rudy Giuliani in his never-give-an-inch Gotham prime.
Nor could the pull it off.
Donald Trump was all hard ass, promising to sic the dogs and start the shooting.
Joe Biden was all soft pretzel, promising to sit down with the angry folks and really listen this time.
No, the nation needed something different, a mixture of compassion and steel, someone who could understand the generations of suffering that is African American history, while condemning the primal forces unleashed upon our major cities.
Weinstein thought he saw the right modulation in Killer Mike.
The 45-year-old rapper with his effulgent beard and glistening bald head spoke to the people then setting ablaze his native Atlanta:
“I’m mad as hell. I woke up wanting to see the world burn yesterday, because I’m tired of seeing black men die,” he said.
“He (Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin) casually put his knee on a human being’s neck for nine minutes as he died like a zebra in the clutch of a lion’s jaw. … So that’s why children are burning it to the ground. They don’t know what else to do. And it is the responsibility of us to make this better right now.” Then the Killer in Mike came out. Destroying the city is wrong, he said. “It is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy. It is your duty to fortify your own house, so that you may be a house of refuge in
presidential
candidates times of organization. And now is the time to plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize.”
“It is time to beat up prosecutors you don’t like at the voting booth. It is time to hold mayoral offices accountable, chiefs and deputy chiefs. Atlanta is not perfect, but we’re a lot better than we ever were, and we’re a lot better than cities are.”
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was even better threading the needle. She began by establishing her credibility as an aggrieved African American:
“I am a mother to four black children in America, one of whom is 18 years old. And when I saw the murder of George Floyd, I hurt like a mother would hurt. And yesterday when I heard there were rumors about violent protests in Atlanta, I did what a mother would do, I called my son and I said, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘I cannot protect you and black boys shouldn’t be out today.’
“So, you’re not going to out-concern me and out-care about where we are in America. I wear this each and every day, and I pray over my children, each and every day.”
That was the hammer:
“This is not a protest. This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. This is chaos. A protest has purpose. When Dr. King was assassinated, we didn’t do this to our city. You are disgracing our city. You are disgracing the life of George Floyd and every other person who has
nail. Then came the been killed in this country.”
When I saw Mayor Bottoms, the selfdescribed “daughter of Atlanta,” speak, I immediately called my own daughter over and we re-watched it again on my computer. I told her, “Sometimes greatness emerges in the most dangerous times. Remember her name, because you’re going to hear it a lot in your lifetime.”
Here was a strong leader who understands where we are in the year 2020. This is not the America in which Martin Luther King, Jr. stood perilously against Jim Crow and Bull Connor.
Black people have authority and standing as never before. Minorities are taking control of all the major cities in America.
In Minneapolis, where all the trouble started, liberal Democrats, many of whom are minorities, control everything.
In Philadelphia, where there are 17 combined seats on “the district” and “at-large” city council, 13 are minorities. Ten are African American.
Protesters in that city on Saturday defaced the statue of a former Philadelphia policeman and mayor Frank Rizzo. In the early 1970s, when I was a boy living there, he was a kind of strongman mayor who embodied the pungent racism of working-class whites. He once told them to “vote white.”
But it ain’t Rizzo’s Philadelphia anymore. Minorities are the prevailing power in the city as they are in virtually all of our major cities.
Dallas, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Cleveland, Seattle, to name a few, all have black chiefs of police. The police chiefs in Minneapolis and Miami are Latino men. Atlanta’s police chief is a progressive gay woman.
Times have changed. And if minorities, in particular, are disturbed by modern police behavior (and who wouldn’t be after the sadistic daylight killing of George Floyd) they have the power and authority to change it.
That won’t be easy, because they’re probably going to need to smash the police unions, but they’ve got the power to begin the task.
Let the minorities who have felt the abuse of power exercised by bad cops reform the police departments in their cities and show the rest of the country how it’s done.
I was seething watching my television screen this weekend as protesters set fires and destroyed businesses. But I was most angry at journalists and academics and educated talking heads who excused the violence – who put their “ends justify the means” politics before public safety and civilized behavior. They’re the real threat to our society. In the streets, many young black kids who were there to protest the extra-judicial killing of a black man, were stopping the arsonists and looters. Smarter than the idiot TV and newspaper commentators, they understood that violence defiles the cause and strips it of its moral authority.
You can see videos of all these black kids in many of our major cities protecting people and property. There are so many examples now that it is no aberration. It’s happening all over the country.
In one of those videos, mostly black young men in Washington, D.C., catch a white guy in black bloc, the outfit of Antifa (though he could have been a white supremacist) using a hammer to crack up parts of the sidewalk. The man was creating chunks of concrete to throw at police and through store windows.
The mostly black kids tackled him and then carried him over to the “Metropolitan” police. “Here is he! Here is he! Kick ’is ass!” they said.
The cops were happy to accommodate, grabbing the white vandal, putting him to the ground and zip-tying him for delivery to the D.C. jail.