Calls for nonviolence as anti-Black racist expressions

Almost three months to the date of May 29th, unnamed folks hit up San Jose mayor’s house, Sam Liccardo. Anti-police terror and pro-Black lives messages were written all over his house.

After the tagging of Liccardo’s house, his bootlicker neighbors quickly took to their knees to clean up and condemn the taggers for their “violent” means of expression. The “bad protester” trope was uttered and spread through the local media promptly—this remains the oldest tactic of the nonviolent (racist) self moralizing crowd.

Some of Liccardo’s neighbors and online supporters even pointed to the fact that he has a Black Lives Matter flag that hangs in his front window as a sign of his commitment to “good protesting.” This can only be true if you ignore the fact that this man is a millionaire with power over the murderous San Jose PD and a staunch supporter of Silicon Valley’s gentrification & death policies.

 

Yet, again the peace police jumped to the rescue to say that they too condemn violence, as if paint on a millionaires house equated to the murders of folks at the hands of the state. This argument is disingenuous at best and deeply white supremacist at worst.

 

Vicky Osterweil says it best in Chapter 7 of In Defense of Looting, “Nonviolence puts the entire moral weight of politics onto the backs of the oppressed. It takes the history of white supremacy and settler colonialism for granted and says that the responsibility for changing the violent nature of that history lies entirely with the people who are currently being crushed by that violence…”

 

“Nonviolence turns this historical accounting upside down. The nonviolent worldview, focusing entirely on protestors and not on police, ultimately obscures the responsibilities of the state, racists, and fascists, because it frames their much more extreme repressive violence as ‘natural’ and normal.”

“Nonviolence lets the police, and the systems they defend, off the hook.”