“When property is destroyed by black protesters, it must always be understood in the context of the historical racialization of property,” the journalist Raven Rakia wrote in 2013. “When the same system that refuses to protect black children comes out to protect windows, what is valued over black people in America becomes very clear.” The piece, published in The New Inquiry in what feels like a very different time and also the same time, has been circulating this week in response to protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that started after George Floyd was killed on Monday by city police. 
 
Cops had shown up in response to a call about a supposedly counterfeit bill. Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who had moved from Houston to Minneapolis a few years back, was arrested and, already in handcuffs, thrown to the ground. Derek Chauvin, a white police officer with a record of using force, kneeled on his neck, choking him. Three other officers watched. Floyd asked to live. The smallness of the reported offense—an allegedly fake $20—feels grotesque but also doesn’t matter, really. Police kill for less. For nothing.   
 
As protests gained numbers throughout the city, mainstream coverage seemed mostly mesmerized by a ransacked Target and a burning police precinct. (“Nothing gets the attention of the elite like taking away or destroying what they value above all else: property,” Rakia wrote.) The framing that came from this focus was the predictable bifurcation of Good protesters against Bad protesters; what “hurts” a movement and what “helps.”
 
Coverage like this seeks to tell a single story about events and how history moves, but protests at the scale taking place right now in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country—like those turning out for Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky—don’t work like that. These are mass, multitactic responses to intentional and long-festering crises, something that last week Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw described as the historic “unmattering of black lives.”
 
Right now, black Minnesotans, who make up 6.6 percent of the state’s population, account for at least 29 percent of all known cases of Covid-19, and, nationally, black people are dying of the virus at disproportionate rates. This is based on the incomplete data available, since many documented cases don’t include information about race or ethnicity. We may never know, with real specificity, the scale of what we are losing. 

Nearly one in three black workers in the state have applied for unemployment benefits since the pandemic began. Before that, Minnesota had one of the most severe black-white income gaps in the nation. It has one of the highest black-white incarceration gaps in the nation. These are the obscenities of normal order; Minnesota was already on fire.  

Reading Rakia’s piece this week, nearly seven years after first encountering it, I was struck again by its clarity. Then as now, she saw condemnations of protesters coming from both liberal and reactionary media coverage as an effort to deny the political coherence of their protest (and the ways in which black protest is coded as rioting, while white protest is not). She identified these media frames, rightly, as efforts to distort mass uprising into narratives about racialized greed—the white imaginary of black people as thieves—rather than a refusal of life-stealing systems.
 
To condemn these protests is to endorse the routine violences of daily life. “One cannot discuss the immorality of damaging property without devaluing the rage that brought protesters to this point,” she wrote. “You, too, have to decide which one you value more: human life or property.”
 
Her use of “you” felt like a catch in my throat. The state response to the protests in Minnesota is still unfolding. The president has attempted to conjure more violence and white vigilantism, but Rakia’s question is alive: Do I choose bloated police budgets that feed death or redistributed funding that prioritizes life? White people in the United States can decide to reject the theater of safety of militarized policing and mass incarceration.
 
But it is also a moment in which we could see—may likely see—a re-entrenchment of state violence, as capitalism and white supremacy often find their strongest self-justifications at the moments when they are most exposed. That question gets answered every day. 
 
As a white person writing this, I have been trying to find ways to make these responsibilities something I can commit to in the immediate and long term. This is a process of fits and starts. A place to begin, today, is donating to bail funds (in Minneapolis and wherever you call home) and taking up calls from black and other community organizers to demand our cities, towns, and states prioritize life over death and people over property: No budgets for killer cops. Health care for all. Safe housing. Green space. No pretending the crisis has clean margins or that the urgency dies when the fires in Minneapolis go out.

It’s been a long week.

—Katie McDonough, Deputy Editor