Ken Burch
1 min readSep 18, 2020

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What you described as looting happened almost exclusively in the first couple of weeks of the rising. It's past now.

There's no reason to demand condemnation of something that never really mattered.

Martin Luther King Jr- the left-wing and antiwar black freedom movement leader white conservatives like to pretend was a lifelong Republican-actually, he was a lifelong registered independent, as was everybody else in Georgia who was allowed to register in his day- said "A riot is the language of the unheard". If the white power structure was listening to black America, the rising would never have happened.

Nothing you are defending was necessary. It was never necessary to train the police to always treat black people as more suspicious and more potentially violent than white people; it was never necessary to destroy the economies of black neighborhoods with redlining and then refuse to do anything that would have allowed black or brown people to rebuild those economies on their own terms; it was never necessary for BOTH major parties, in the Nineties, to decide that out of wedlock births, welfare fraud, drug use and crime were things the black community was collectively to blame for; it was never necessary of justified for white America to decide that black America had had its chance and failed, and now needed to be "put in its place" and subjected to something like collective probation.

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Ken Burch
Ken Burch

Written by Ken Burch

Retired Alaska ferryboat steward, grandparent, sometime poet. Radical yet independent of dogma. Likes nice days, playing banjo and not as yet dying of Covid.

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