These cities:
🌲Eugene, Oregon.
🌴La Mesa, California.
Two places I’ve lived recently. Eugene for three years, where I started my marriage and ended grad school. La Mesa for just a month, but what an eventful month. It’s where I learned I was gonna be a dad.
This weekend, I saw the complex right behind my house in Eugene destroyed. A black female organizer tried to get three young, white twenty-somethings to stop smashing their skateboards into the windows of a Five Guys or T-Mobile, to no avail.
Multiple parts of La Mesa were set ablaze. I keep wondering about the taco shop where I told my parents they would be grandparents, the mom and pop Italian restaurant where we had a date night, or the used bookstore I could easily get lost in.
It’s disturbing to see cities you know set ablaze, but it’s important to be nuanced about what is happening. You can feel grieved to see your city in chaos. It’s wrong and inappropriate to police the emotions and response of the black community.
In most instances, demonstrations began peacefully, until tear gas was fired at the slightest discomfort. From Philly to Seattle to Beverly Hills. It was the opposite of de-escalation.
The protestors advocating for Black Lives are being met by agents of chaos with no real purpose, white supremacists, and disorganized people who aren’t following the leadership of activist leaders. It’s important to make these distinctions because the message of this moment should not be obscured. We must change.
MLK’s words still apply to this situation: A riot is the language of the unheard.
And I’m moved by the owner of Gandhi Mahal, an Indian restaurant destroyed in Minneapolis: “Let my building burn, Justice needs to be served.” Indeed you can repair buildings and restore cities. We cannot bring back lost lives.
We need peace- but not just the kind where our cities go back to “normal.” We need new systems where black lives are no longer senselessly lost like we’ve seen far too often.
The Language of the Unheard
