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Mass protest works, even when participants break the law in acts of targeted civil disobedience. Random lawbreaking like vandalism and theft on city streets does not.

The nonviolent protests that were a famous hallmark of the civil rights movement in the United States were not passive. Organizers executed direct actions linked to their political goals, including those that required breaking unjust laws, like sitting at segregated lunch counters and in prohibited seats on buses. Organizers knew that white onlookers and police would respond with violence and spur chaos, and they faced that violence with courage and dignity. Those heroic actions spurred passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

Anti-Trump resistance in the streets in 2017 was not as bold, but it included acts of defiance. Protesters shut down access to airports and agitated and confronted members of Congress. The targeted disobedience had an impact, delaying and scaling back Donald Trumps efforts to enact some form of a Muslim ban and mobilizing a sustained level of heightened political engagement by a huge cohort of mostly women. They spurred electoral change in the year to come.

Black Lives Matter is driving progress in reducing police violence. Protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere refused police orders to disperse. They disobeyed curfews. They disrupted Democratic candidates events. They forced their issue onto the political agenda and got results. Trump signed a criminal justice reform bill, and reforms have led to fewer police killings in big cities where liberals hold political power.

Much of these public protests looked chaotic in the moment, particularly when police responded violently with military-grade equipment and wartime tactics, firing tear gas, releasing dogs, and turning power hoses on fellow Americans. But they were part of a concerted campaign of political action that continues today in the form of large mass demonstrations against police violence and racial injustice in many American cities.

But over the past week, weve also seen a significant number of incidents that look like random theft and vandalism. Windows have been smashed and stores burglarized as targets of opportunity or outlets for fun, closer in spirit to a sports riot than targeted civil disobedience.

And research shows that on a larger scale, vandalism can be very damaging to vulnerable communities, while also creating a counterproductive distraction from real efforts at political action.

Nobody is speaking in favor of vandalism or theft, but theres unquestionably a sense in the air on the left that its inappropriate to condemn these actions. The sentiment is pervasive on social media, where many on the left make the point that human life matters more than property, as if theres a hard trade-off between the destruction of property and saving the lives of African Americans.

To be clear, if a few smashed windows or a looted Target were the price we had to pay for racial equality, it would be one well worth paying. But this is not the trade-off.

Nobody leading real movements for change is suggesting that people engage in indiscriminate acts of destruction. In fact, there are many examples of protesters intervening to stop looters and vandals (many of whom are white) whom they realize only serve to discredit their work. Nationwide, protesters are challenging the multiple, interlocking injustices faced by African Americans. Right now youre either helping or exacerbating the problems and its clear where the vandals stand.

The kind of nonviolent direct action something that requires more courage and discipline than mere peaceful protest spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King Jr. in the US is one of the hardest and most underrated tactics for political change in the history of the world.

Defenders of more aggressive forms of physical force are correct that their approach can also bring about useful change. But their examples, like the Boston Tea Party, do not capture the current chaos.

The essence of the Boston Tea Party is that New England radicals protested an act of British Parliament that was designed to help the British East India Company. They boarded the companys ships and destroyed its tea in an act tied directly to their political message.

Some sympathetic voices argue that the current looting and vandalism have a similar political connection to the protests. Speaking to Voxs Terry Nguyen, sociologist Darnell Hunt gamely tried to posit that protesters are not indiscriminately burning things. They seem to be more focused on chain stores, like Target, or specific cultural icons that represent a system people feel has not served them.

The reporting from the ground does not fully support this theory. The vandalism and looting is not exclusively targeting big-box stores or symbols of transnational capitalism. Instead, journalists are capturing incidents of indiscriminate looting and vandalism being carried out by opportunists from Los Angeles to Washington to Miami to Philadelphia. Local black- and immigrant-owned businesses have been robbed and torched, along with a labor union headquarters and whatever else happens to be nearby. Theres no meaningful connection between much of the vandalism and the protesters political messages.

One could have a separate conversation about things like pulling down the Robert E. Lee statue in Montgomery, Alabama, or attacking the one in Richmond, Virginia. These gestures may or may not be politically effective, but the symbolic meaning of physical assaults on inanimate monuments to white supremacy is very clear. Even setting police cars on fire is a legible form of political action, albeit a political risky and substantively dangerous one. Spraying graffiti on one of Trumps hotels or smashing in the windows would be a form of protest. Smashing windows that just happen to be nearby is not.

Many riot skeptics have pointed to Princeton political scientist Omar Wasows research showing that while nonviolent protests helped boost the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the long hot summer of rioting in 1968 shifted white opinion sharply to the right. There is some countervailing evidence suggesting that the 1992 Los Angeles riots actually did inspire constructive political change, though Wasow himself argues that they are likely picking up the effect of genuine shock over the events that precipitated the rioting.

A recent Morning Consult poll, which is broadly full of encouraging information about public views of the protests, does also say that 64 percent of people have heard a lot about looting and over 70 percent think its very important to prevent it.

And beyond politics, its actually worth thinking about not just the secondary political consequences, but the actual direct impact of vandalism on the communities where it occurs.

The rioting of the 1960s was concentrated in majority-black neighborhoods, and William Collins and Robert Margo find that it meaningfully depressed property values in impacted neighborhoods. This is perhaps not a shocking finding (of course property values decline when buildings burn down), but they show that the effect was large enough, systemic enough, and lasting enough that that the racial gap in the value of property widened in riot-afflicted cities during the 1970s. In a separate paper, they find that the same set of riots decreased labor market earnings for black workers in impacted cities.

One piece of good news about 2020 is that, so far, absolutely nothing on the scale of the big 1960s riots has taken place. The point, though, is that you really are hurting people when you engage in indiscriminate property damage, and the more that happens, the worse things will be.

In theory, the division of labor in a protest situation in the United States should be very clear. People are allowed to protest (its in the Constitution!), but they are not allowed to destroy property and steal. Police officers are supposed to enforce the law by arresting and deterring criminals while protecting law-abiding citizens.

This is obviously not what has been happening over the past week in the United States.

Because the protests target police misconduct, many police officers have been acting as counterprotesters engaging in further acts of misconduct by beating or gassing peaceful demonstrators and oftentimes seeming to target members of the press. Some of this seems to come from grassroots cop sentiment, some from police leadership, and some from the president of the United States himself.

In New York Monday night, NYPD officers appeared to take out their longstanding grievances with the citys mayor and overall public opinion by completely standing down in Midtown Manhattan to allow looters to run rampant.

The fact that police can choose to engage in either broad or selective underpolicing is one reason the realities of municipal governance are a bit trickier than people sometimes allow. Officers in Baltimore appear to have responded to the Freddie Gray protests by staging a years-long de facto police strike that sent the murder rate soaring.

But while navigating these issues on a practical level is tricky, on an ethical level its an easy problem those looting and vandalizing are in the wrong, and police officers who focus their ire on peaceful protesters while letting vandals roam free are also in the wrong, and political leaders like Trump who use the existence of vandals as a hazy excuse to fire tear gas into law-abiding crowds are the wrongest of all.

Last but by no means least, virtually nobody in this country whos accountable to a black electorate thinks this is constructive.

What I see happening on the streets of Atlanta is not Atlanta. This is not a protest. This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said on Monday. This is chaos.

The day before, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser cautioned that tearing up our beautiful city is not the way to bring attention to what is a righteous cause.

Rioting, looting, and burning is not the way, according to civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis.

This sentiment extends beyond moderates like Bowser and Bottoms and veterans of the 1960s like Lewis. Ilhan Omar has a very different ideological orientation than those mayors and comes from a different tradition than Lewis, but she shares the same perspective that looting and vandalism are antithetical to the causes she is fighting for.

Some political leaders have been trying to make this same basic point by perhaps exaggerating the extent to which mayhem is being wreaked by out-of-towners or even false flag operations by white supremacists. But the sentiment all these elected officials are expressing is clear this is not what they and the people they represent want. It is not helping them, and while they dont want vandalism to be the center of attention, they also have no interest in soft-pedaling their criticism of it.

We should not obsess about vandalism and crowd out attention to the dignified conduct of the much larger group of legitimate protesters, to the underlying injustices they are highlighting, to the potential for solutions, or to the intersecting catastrophic failures of national leadership that we are currently living through. But we cant deflect the basic reality that at a time when millions are struggling to address serious problems, the people running around smashing windows arent helping.

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Vandalism and theft versus civil disobedience: The differences, explained - Vox.com

Do the Boston Tea Party and Jesus' Cleansing of the Temple Justify Violence? John Lewis and Jesus Show Us the Way Forward

Saks Fifth Avenue surrounded its flagship Manhattan store with razor wire yesterday to keep thieves from stealing expensive merchandise. While protests across the US were more peaceful last night, the Associated Press announced this morning that at least 9,300 people have been arrested since George Floyds death.

Yesterday, I made the claim that violence is not the right response to violence. Ive seen two counter-arguments we didnt have space to consider in my article.

One is that violent protests are as American as the Boston Tea Party. New York Timescolumnist Charles Blow tweeted: It is estimated that the Boston Tea Party, the riot that gave birth to this country, resulted in $1.7 million (in todays dollars) in property damage (tea). Im just going to leave this right here for whoever needs to read it.

Im not certain the Boston Tea Party was a riot (it was conducted by men in disguise under cover of darkness) or that it gave birth to this country (our origins are far more complex). George Washington voiced strong disapproval of the perpetrators conduct in destroying the tea; Benjamin Franklin insisted that the British be reimbursed for the lost tea and even offered to pay for it himself.

Columnist Joshua Lawson noted: Though many witnessed the events aftermath, it was a moonlit, covert act completed in three hours. No harm came to the ships and crews ... No violence or confrontations of any kind took place between the British soldiers, colonial patriots, or Tory loyalists that night.

Except for the tea, the only property that was damaged was a single broken padlock on one of the ships, which was replaced the next day by the patriots. The sole injury was to one of the patriots, who was knocked unconscious when he was struck by a crate of tea.

To make the Boston Tea Party analogous to the violence perpetrated after George Floyds horrific death, the patriots would have destroyed the property of their countrymen, threatened members of other militia companies, rioted in the streets of Boston, and burned down the homes and businesses of their neighbors. None of which happened, of course.

Another justification for the violence of these days is a meme picturing Jesus turning over tables in the temple while using a whip to threaten the moneychangers. The caption says: If someone asks, What would Jesus do? Remind them that turning over tables and breaking out whips is a possibility.

However, as Nathan W. OHalloran notes, the Greek of John 2:15 clearly states that Jesus used his whip to drive the animals from the temple, not the moneychangers. At no point did he endanger or harm humans.

To make this event analogous to the violence were discussing, our Lord would have harmed innocent bystanders, destroyed their property, and burned down their homes and businesses. None of which happened, of course. To the contrary, Jesus acted on behalf of people very much like those being victimized by the violence of recent days.

If violence is the wrong way to respond to Mr. Floyds death, what is the right way?

John Lewis, an icon of the Civil Rights movement, stated a few days ago: Rioting, looting, and burning is not the way. Organize. Demonstrate. Sit-in. Stand up. Vote. Be constructive, not destructive. History has proved time and again that non-violent, peaceful protest is the way to achieve the justice and equality that we all deserve.

This week, were applying Jesus teachings to this crisis. Today, lets focus on our Lords instructions in light of Rep. Lewiss call to be constructive, not destructive.

First, taking his precepts in reverse order, we must be sure we are not part of the problem.

Jesus taught us, If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift (Matthew 5:23-24).

In the context of racism, how do we know if your brother has something against you? Ask the Lord to bring to mind any attitudes, words, and actionsor inactionsthat have offended someone of a different race. Then ask someone of a different race the same question. If needed, do all we can to seek forgiveness and reconciliation.

Second, we should find ways to be part of the solution.

Jesus commissioned us to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19); the Greek word for nations is ethnos, from which we get ethnicities. In response, early Christians welcomed Jews from fifteen different language groups (Acts 2:9-11), then shared Christ with Samaritans (Acts 8:5-8), Gentiles (Acts 10:34-43), slaves (Philemon 10), and women (Acts 16:13-15), thus breaking down every cultural barrier in their day.

You and I cannot do all that must be done to combat racism and injustice in our culture. But we can do something. We each have been given resources, abilities, spiritual gifts, and influence that can make a real difference in other lives and our society. We must not allow the enormity of the crisis to keep us from doing what we can in response.

To follow Jesus teachings, we need to be like Jesus. We need his love for all people and his bold initiative to make a difference.

Oswald Chambers advised us: Never trust anything but the grace of God in yourself or in anyone else. How can we grow in such grace?

Chambers: God expects my personal life to be a Bethlehem. Am I allowing my natural life to be slowly transfigured by the indwelling life of the Son of God? Gods ultimate purpose is that his Son might be manifest in my mortal flesh.

Will you ask Jesus to manifest himself in your courageous compassion today?

Publication date: June 3, 2020

Photo courtesy: Getty Images/Stephen Maturen/Stringer

For more from the Denison Forum, please visit http://www.denisonforum.org.

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Do the Boston Tea Party and Jesus' Cleansing of the Temple Justify Violence? John Lewis and Jesus Show Us the Way Forward - Christianheadlines.com

ELMO, Mo. The Elmo Betterment Club has announced the Elmo 70th annual Fourth of July Celebration will be held Saturday, June 27 at Elmo Park.

The day will kick off at 7 a.m. with a 5K run/walk.

From 7 to 9 a.m. a free-will donation Pancake Breakfast will be held at the Elmo Park Shelter. Pancakes, eggs and sausage will be available.

A concession stand will open at 10 a.m. serving hamburgers, hot dogs and pulled pork sandwiches.

A Princess Tea Party will be held from 9:30 to 11 a.m.

The Baby Show will begin at 11:30 a.m. Registration starts at 11 a.m.

Bingo will be held from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the park shelter.

Yard games will begin at 2 p.m.

Vendor booths will be open from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m.

The parade is scheduled for 4 p.m. with registration at 3:30 p.m. one block west of the park.

The flag raising will be held at 6 p.m.

Outlaw Creek will perform at 6:15 p.m.

A fireworks show will begin at dark.

For more information visit the Elmo 4th of July Facebook page.

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Elmo 70th annual Fourth of July Celebration | Event Calendar - The Maryville Forum

The protesters who took to the streets after the killing of George Floyd have something in common with Donald Trump: they share an interest in his re-election.

The protesters want nothing more than to see Trump defeated, of course. But for the last 15 years, American politics has seen new social movements rise in response to a presidential administration they oppose and fade away once a new president is elected. Remember the antiwar movement of 2006? It didnt survive the Obama administration. The Tea Party movement and its calls for restraint on government spending havent been a force since the election of Donald Trump. And if Joe Biden wins in November, what are the odds that woke young Democrats will be protesting outside his White House the next time a black man dies in police custody?

The predictable next turn in American politics, should Biden win, will be the rise of a new right-wing opposition. What form it will take is anybodys guessperhaps recrudescent neoconservatism, after the libertarian moment of the Obama era and the nationalist turn under Trump? Given Bidens agehe would turn 80 in his second year in officeyouth will probably be a theme Republicans try to develop. But the new opposition movement could take any form, depending in part on what events provide the occasion for organizing.

A Biden administration would have no shortage of big events to deal with: the post-COVID world order, including relations with China, would be enough by itself, as would the post-COVID future of the U.S. economy. But there will be much more besides, and making a priority of fighting with police would have obvious risks. A law-and-order backlash from the right is easy to envision. And the demands of current protesters are classic instances of idealistic overreach with the potential to create nightmarish results once implemented. Like the Tea Party and the antiwar movement, the movement for a crackdown on cops is only plausible so long as there is no need to take responsibility for the inevitably imperfect policy solution. The real politics of war, spending, police reform, or, say, healthcare reform is messier than the ideals of protesters can ever accommodate.

Thus, if the protests wind up helping Trump come November, the presidents re-election may paradoxically be a godsend to the activist left as well. Thats not a reason for the protesters to vote for him, of coursenot any more than its a reason for Trump supporters to hesitate about his re-election. Politics is still about winning power; its just that being out of power has certain compensations of its own. Opposition is always easier than governing.

Trumps re-election prospects are better than his lackluster poll numbers suggest. Yes, Biden leads in most national polls. But recent state-level polling shows a tight contest, which is all the more telling in light of the great burden that the COVID crisis and Floyd protests have imposed on Trump in recent weeks. End-of-May battleground polling by the Democrat-leaning Change Research and CNBC finds Trump ahead in Pennsylvania by 4 points, up in Arizona by a single point, tied in Wisconsin, and trailing by three points in Florida, two points in Michigan, and one point in North Carolina. The good news for Trump here is that he appears to have a good shot at winning Pennsylvania for a second time and he remains competitive in the upper Midwestthe winning map he drew in 2016 is plausible in 2020 as well. After the coronavirus and the nationwide riots, things can only get better, or so the presidents campaign must hope. A bit of economic recovery, relief at a return to normalor normalcy, as Warren Harding called it after the traumas of World War I.

The millennials-and-younger who seem to comprise the bulk of the protesters want to believe that America is ready to become one vast college campus. The police forces attached to colleges and universities are not supposed to enforce the law too thoroughly, lest they scare away paying customers. Even those universities with such large endowments that they dont need any income from tuition have an overwhelming interest in appeasing the demands of student radicals, in part because they lend a certain elite fashionability to a school, and in part because administrators themselves are usually progressives and see in student rebels a romantic reflection of their own youth.

Young progressives dont see why all of America cant be like the campuswhere opinions deemed insensitive are not allowed in the student newspaper or the lecture halls, where all expenses are covered (by loans or parents), and where authority is only affirming rather than threatening. The worst that can happen to you is expulsion. This is how the workplace should be, and this is how Chicago and Baltimore, Minneapolis, and D.C. should be, too. So defund and disband the police, or at a minimum open them up to more civil suits by getting rid of qualified immunity and break up the police unions. Ideally, legal proceedings should be as close to campus Title IX proceedings as possible. If this makes it impossible for police to use force, or discourages them from doing so for fear of complaints, well, thats the whole point. A campus doesnt need cops.

Campus America is the political ideal of a generation. And the college-educated professionals who subscribe to this ideal may have little to fear and much to gain from it. The losers will be, as always, the less well-off, especially black Americans, whose lives are significantly more threatened by criminals than by police officers. Black Lives Matter is a slogan that doesnt apply to black-on-black crime, certainly not with anything like the force it applies to the rarer instances of white-on-black crime and police abuse. This doesnt matter to the socially awakened young elite of todayhow many of them ever plan to set foot in a place like Ferguson, Missouri? See no evil, hear no evil.

In decades past the scenes of arson and looting that followed the Floyd protests in many cities would have driven voters to a Richard Nixon or Ronald Reaganor a Donald Trump. The Campus America kids think the country has changed, and their parents and grandparents will now see the police as bullies who sadistically pick on their always well-meaning if sometimes troubled and delinquent, sons, and daughters. Older voters may in fact have other reasons for drifting toward Biden, including reasons diametrically at odds with the youngsuch as a sense that Biden will make a tough as well as a competent leader. Whether Biden can balance these different demands will be a test of his mental flexibility. So far hes seemed inclined to campaign as his old self, and he didnt lose any appreciable numbers of black voters in the primaries by doing so. Quite the contrary: black voters may have been especially drawn to his record on crime. They are its primary victims, after all.

But the general election will be a trickier propositionBiden will be stuck with Campus America whether he wants it or not. He needs young voters as well as black Americans if hes to recreate the Obama coalition. His running mate will inevitably change the ideological mix of the ticket, too. If Trump wants to make Campus America and its hostile attitude toward police an issue in November, hell have an easy time of it. If he wins, Campus America will stick around. If he loses, it will lose momentum on the streetsthough it probably wont lose its luster in the minds of the young elite. The campus is the institution that made them, and they yearn to remake the world in its imageno matter the price less privileged American must pay.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor ofModern Age: A Conservative Review,and Editor-at-Large ofThe American Conservative.

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Is the Left Trying to Get Trump Reelected? - The National Interest

When protests broke out across Chicago following the 2015 release of video showing the police shooting of Laquan McDonald, JaMal Green was on the frontlines demanding changes in the city.

Five years later, hes back at it following the death of yet another black death at the hands of police. Since then, hes run for mayor, been a surrogate for Bernie Sanders and become a radio host for Soul 106.3. Nowadays, hes got a bit more political capital and the mayors ear.

Green spoke with The Chicago Reporter to discuss the current protests, where this movement is headed and whats going down on the ground.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Since its not Mayor Green, what is your title?

(Laughs) The mayor. The mayor without the title and salary, but community advocate is fine.

What is your relationship with Mayor Lori Lightfoot?

Were pretty close friends. And I advise, if she needs it.

For those who dont know your background, howd you get into this? Whats your first memory of organizing?

It was actually about 10 years ago when I was about 15. I was going to Phillips High School. It was a turnaround school so they didnt have folks that did anything with the young people. They allowed me and my history teacher to do all the organizing for young people in the school. Essentially, what ended up happening was we organized our first peace march that went down 47th and King Drive to 63rd and King Drive and demanded peace. It was my first march. I was 15 and I organized hundreds of young people, lots of politicians, and some of everybody was there. That was probably my first taste of real organizing and then from there, going around the country.

What are the current protests about?

The current protests started because of George Floyd. This man was kneeled on by a police officer with the help of three other officers and killed in Minneapolis. The protests, now, is a spark from all the cases, not just George Floyd. He created the spark and made people start protesting in 50 states against police departments that brutalize the communities and brutalize the schools all around this country. What people are stepping up and saying is that theyre tired of this racist system thats been oppressing them for so many years and now its time for a change.

Its really a revolution. Youve never seen people step up in 50 states all with unified messages and that is the case now. So it started with George Floyd and sparked around the country.

What have you seen in the streets in the last week? What is the media missing?

Most of the protests, I believe, were peaceful. But when you got people that are fed up, you got folks who are going to act out in other ways. Its a small group of people, but somehow theyve taken up all the media.

Riots have always been the language of the unheard. Riots have been here since the beginning of time, since the Boston Tea Party on down. People riot and loot for less reasons like the Cubs winning the World Series.

Folks here are arriving because they dont want to see another black man die by the hands of police. Then you have those who have taken advantage of the situation. They have just literally went in and was filling things and not being a part of the movement. You have a few different groups of people.

How does this feel different from the Laquan McDonald protests?

Whats different is that this was something that was enough for folks to just be fed up. This is that fed up moment. It took a long time for a case to make people fed up. We watched a lot of videos, but now people are at a point where theyre just tired of seeing these videos. They already got PTSD waiting on the next one. At the end of the day, theyre just tired of seeing these videos. This was that spark that made people step up all over the country, instead of folks just looking at one city and seeing what they do about it. They said we gone get up, we gone do something as well and be in solidarity.

What are the demands? What would have to happen to end the protests?

I dont know if you can end these protests with demands, but there are definitely demands on the table in all cities.

The bigger demand is to defund the police department. Were giving billions of dollars, here in Chicago, billions to police each year. One-point-six billion just for payroll, $165 million for police misconduct, $33 million for the schools, $10 million for the park districts. They got contracts everywhere. We got $2 billion that were giving police departments. What folks are asking for is to defund the police and move that money to more preventative measures. We cant police our way out of anything. All it is causing is more brutality in these communities.

For example, one of the demands that theyre talking about today is they want CPD out of CPS schools. Minneapolis was the first to do it. Basically, were spending $33 million on policing our kids. We should be spending $33 million on counselors, clinic staff members and programming for our young people that we dont have. The majority of schools on the South and West sides dont have one person in the school to deal with counseling, or a clinical staff member. So how do we deal with mental health in these schools? We are not.

Instead, were policing them, which causes black and brown young people especially those with disabilities to be referred to law enforcement for adolescent behavior, more than any kid.

Its better to spend that [money] on preventative and restorative measures for the schools, instead of policing. Thats a demand here, to defund the police and put the money where it should be so that we can reduce crime, educate better and create better citizens.

What do you tell the folks who may be angry and may want to act out?

We shouldnt look at this and say looting should stop, but killing the black man is horrible. We have to flip and prioritize correctly. Black men have to stop being killed by police. We know the looting is horrible, but we got to focus on human life. We cant focus on property; it can always be rebuilt.

There are some who are acting out not in the name of the movement, but taking advantage of the movement. Were going to hold them accountable. Whats important is that we stay focused on this racist system, and whats happening to folks like George Floyd, Eric Garner and Laquan McDonald and get them to understand the message and the narratives.

Lets not forget about white people doing it: looting and rioting and burning stuff down and knocking stuff over for something far less. People have acted out all over this country for many years. Dont allow this protest to make you look at a different message because essentially what it will show is that you have racist intent.

Its just like folks who looked at Colin Kaepernick when he kneeled and turned it into the flag and America. It was just about police brutality and they never talked about it. Folks only did that because they did not want to talk about the realities of America. Realities that are happening in these communities.

I need folks to understand that privilege. I need folks to listen, try to be allies and support.

Who are the young leaders on the ground that folks should be paying attention to to understand the moment?

There are a lot of young people that are on the ground and are doing some good work. You got GoodKids, MadCity doing good work. I got a couple mentees in that group. You got folks like Assatas Daughters doing some good work as well.

Theyre a lot of younger activists who are just stepping forward and fighting folks like Diego Garcia, Jalen Kobayashi and Alycia Kamil.

You were also on the ground in Pilsen and Little Village, where tensions between black and brown folks are running high. What was that situation like?

They try to take the focus off of the movement by putting Latinos and black folks against each other and thats a problem. What I wanted to do was show up and basically say, listen, right now we got to fight together, okay? And at the end of the day, we dont have time for beef. We dont have time for black folks to brutalize these communities. We just dont have time for it. At the end of the day, all of our problems are the same so either you guys can get behind us in this movement so that everybody can win or not. But right now, we got to cease this beef for the community and make peace.

Theres still some work that needs to be done because you got some knuckleheads who just do their own thing, but we got to keep pushing the message of what this is about and keep controlling our narrative.

Where do we go from here?

Its gonna be a long haul. You just got to keep fighting all the way until we get some sort of justice. The young peoples now stepping up, let them lead.

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'It's really a revolution': Ja'Mal Green on protests taking over Chicago and the nation and what's next for the movement - Chicago Reporter