As long as there is injustice, poverty alienation, there will be push-back and protest.

What happens when a people feel they are being unjustly oppressed, such as the

13 colonies in the run up to the War of Independence? Many an American

“patriot” will gleefully declare that violent means, such as the Revolution, were

required. Now, take the millions of non-White Americans who feel just as

oppressed today. The right to revert to protest or even violence? Good Lord

no! That’s just un-American! Americans would never do that sort of thing.

Yeah right. How selective a memory is that?!

Violence of any sort is never desirable. Yet sometimes it is required. Nazism,

for example, needed to be met with overwhelming force to see it vanquished.

Black America continues to languish in the mire of poverty, discrimination and

police brutality. To say otherwise is a borderline delusional version of see no

evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. Add to that the crushing effects that the

Coronavirus pandemic has added to that to that mix, particularly for non-white

communities and businesses, and it is no wonder that tempers boil over.

According to Poverty USA, while 10% of white Americans live below the poverty

line, 20% of black Americans are in the same situation. [1] That statistic is

deeply concerning alone. But tellingly, it’s not alone. In 2018, black Americans

were five times more likely to be arrested than white Americans in 800 police

jurisdictions. In a further 250 jurisdictions, that number jumped to ten times

more likely. [2] And the list could go on – and it does. Genuine socio-economic

justice for non-white Americans continues to be way out their reach, while

income disparity between the mega-rich and the impoverished continues to

grow. Job losses amongst black Americans during the pandemic have been way

higher than any other demographic.

With just that in mind, it’s surprising that every city across the country isn’t

experiencing protests, civil disobedience or worse every single day and night.

Quite how a country can proclaim to be “the land of the free”, vociferously

bought into by millions of (predominantly white) Americans, is mind-numbing.

That freedom that there is, and that’s debatable for white folk too, is even

more diluted for the rest of non-white America. The country has been built on

a centuries’ old legacy of slavery and white supremacy, injected with a toxic

blend of establishment violence and monstrous wealth inequality. The Trump

years serves only to confirm that that was that and if you “sons of bitches”

don’t like it, well just shut up and dribble / suffer in silence / get a police bullet

in your back.

When citizens are denied equal opportunity in civil rights, employment,

education, housing, voting and equal representation in the face of the law, what

then are the options available to try and change that? Hell, the country literally

had a bloody Civil War over the issue of slavery and still that wasn’t enough to

move the blockage of widespread discrimination in the United States. The same

can be said of the Civil Rights movement. The fact that we are still having to

address these appalling statistics on the basis of skin color, in the early twenty-

first century, in the wealthiest country on Earth, is a damning indictment of a

society gone badly wrong for centuries of time.

As long as there is injustice, poverty alienation, there will be push-back,

protest, civil disobedience and even riot. A single vote, that is often

disqualified or amounts to virtually nothing in a decayed, not fit for purpose two

party system, is simply not enough. The oppressed have to be heard and, just

like the Revolution, they inevitably have to take to the streets to do that. The

glaring reality, as bright as driving into a bright winter sun, is that people of

color in the United States remain the victims of a white establishment riddled

with not only institutional racism, but the out and out kind too. That is simply

intolerable and is a damning indictment of a country that has practiced the

moral duplicity of preaching to other countries as to their supposed

shortcomings in terms of democracy and human / civil rights.

There is a solidarity to be found out on the streets and in economically deprived

neighborhoods. That is something that the white establishment has never

properly understood, never will and can certainly never contain as long as there

is this level of cruel injustice perpetually on display and in action in the modern-

day United States.

As long as there is injustice, poverty alienation, there will be push-back and protest.

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