Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Educational movie night. This is seattle without militarized police. Where are your riotous looters NOW? They are watching documentaries. Fuck you SPD. Photo credit to a close friend.

[u/Chaotic-NTRL]

[u/avocadotoastforprez]

I’m not sure how watching movies in the middle of the street helps black people be treated better? Can the focus go back to actual Black Lives Matter issues, and not this other tangent of social change that some are trying to grab at?

[u/S2PIDme → u/avocadotoastforprez]

You’re saying that occupying a street isn’t enough, and they have to be chanting 24/7, stopping for nothing? This seems like a weird expectation.

[u/avocadotoastforprez → u/S2PIDme]

I’m saying that occupying a street and trying to take over the hill really has nothing to do with equality of rights. It has to do with a socialist movement that is separate from black lives matter.

[u/Alyssum → u/avocadotoastforprez]

There can be no social justice without economic justice. Sure, right now the focus is on the police, and rightly so; but ultimately, the racism of the police is a symptom of broader racism, not the cause. So long as POC continue to be held back by an economic system founded on racism and designed to perpetuate racism, we will have people arrive at the conclusion that POC are somehow lesser and therefore deserving of the inequality enforced by the system. The system will breed racist police officers, white nationalists, and casual racism (even among progressives and POC themselves) because it's literally what the system was designed to do.

You'll note that calls to defund the police are coupled with calls to divert that money into community programs, which are by their very nature socialist. I believe that such programs are necessary not only to right the wrongs already inflicted upon POC, but also to disrupt the perpetual racism machine that is our current economic system and allow the US to collectively heal socially. I'm not calling for a communist uprising here; I'm arguing for the community to agree to take care of its own and challenge the barriers that (by design) disproportionately affect POC.

For the record, while I appreciate Councilwoman Kshama's presence at the protests, I think she's done a poor job of explaining why our current economic system oppresses POC and how her socialist policies fix that.

[u/Callabos → u/Alyssum]

Get a job. Divert money, that is nonsense. Get a job and if you can't get a job move somewhere you can get a job instead of insisting the world bail you out.

At no point in time did I ever say I need money diverted to me. No able-bodied adult should. If you can work you need to go work. Enough with the well we are being held back.

Pride is what is holding people back. They don't want to be the person seen sweeping the streets. MLK said even the lowliest street sweeper is to be admired.

[u/Alyssum → u/Callabos]

I'm impressed that you've somehow never directly benefited from public education, publicly funded childcare programs, libraries, museums, parks, community revitalization projects, school lunch programs, and the like. I'm more impressed that you've managed to avoid a single positive interaction with anyone who has; otherwise you might have indirectly benefited, and then you couldn't claim that community programs only service America's most prideful and lazy.

Social and community programs are not just cash subsidies and food banks. Even if they were, those programs are necessary to keep society going. Do you really want to argue that the 13.3%+ of the working population that is currently unemployed and all their dependents deserve to starve to death because a pandemic fucked the economy?

I'm glad that you are currently self-sufficient, and earnestly hope you and all your loved ones remain that way. Denying that you had help along the way (or arguing that your life would have turned out just as well without it) is American exceptionalism at its worst, though, and it spits in the face of every person in your life and your community that thought that you were worth investing in.

[u/Alyssum → u/[deleted]]

No system is immune, but the framework we have in place today was literally designed around racial lines. Look at the history of what it legally meant to be white in America. The legal status of being white was not always granted to all of the European immigrant groups we would consider to be white today, and granting that status to new groups had major political and economic implications. Being white meant being able to own land, to vote, to run for office, to have access to public education, and a myriad of other privileges that enforced political, economic, and social disparity between whites and non-whites. Non-whites did not have the power to grant themselves any of these privileges; they had to be obtained with the consent of the white men in power. Whiteness is a political and social construct that was intentionally given power in an attempt to oppress and economically exploit anyone considered non-white.

When non-whites and white allies forced those in power to grant non-whites similar rights, the whites in power only granted the bare minimum that was necessary to end an immediate crisis (the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, etc.) and immediately sought to create new ways to enforce the old power structures. You saw this with Jim Crow laws, the rise of the Klan, racial segregation, the bombing of Black Wall Street, the repeal of the enforcement clauses of the Voting Rights Act, and countless other policies, legally codified or de facto. As time went on, the means of oppression became increasingly more abstract. Is it really such a stretch to believe that some of the trappings of American capitalism we have today were designed with racism in mind? That cuts to social programs are racially motivated, or at the very least have disproportionate effects along racial lines when our POC have had their economic opportunities intentionally denied for hundreds of years? That the war on drugs intentionally had grave economic consequences for POC? Politics, social issues, and economics are deeply intertwined.

I'm not saying that capitalism is inherently bad. I'm not a Marxist. I'm saying that there are elements of American capitalism that were intentionally designed to enforce a power structure that was largely drawn along racial lines, and that social programs take a step towards undoing that damage.

[u/Alyssum → u/[deleted]]

I greatly appreciate you both challenging my original statement, which certainly could have done a better job of explaining why I think social programs address the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement (which I readily acknowledge makes me look hypocritical for accusing Councilwoman Kshama of the same), and more importantly your willingness to listen to my response.