In the District of Columbia, we now have no: sports, shopping, gyms, vacations, new movies, the arts, parties, celebrations or nice dinners out.
What do we have? Protests.
What a strange confluence of events that George Floyd was killed on memorial day, Monday May 25, 2020. All this upheaval, piled on top of the pandemic, on the cusp of the Presidential election, means that the social change has been and will be astronomical, and our feelings, reactions and intuitions are just that much more intense.
The knee to the neck is visceral and shocking, propelling a perfectly primed, fragile and cooped up public to action.
My amateur analysis as an Asian-Canadian observer living in DC will be imperfect, missing out on gradations of color. But bear with me.
This is a bit of a thought experiment as I try to figure out why any non-white people would break solidarity with BLM. Non-white people have always been marginalized too. Why would they want another oppressed group to continue under oppression?
A brief review of the Korean/Black race tensions during the Rodney King riots kind of helps me begin to understand. See the documentary LA 92 for more context on that.
So in that vein, some of the conservative leaning, non-white folk I know broke into the middle class through what they perceive to be their own sweat and blood. They believe in capitalism and in the attainability of whatever you want as long as you work hard. They think the same is attainable for any other immigrant or poor person, as long as he/she works hard. The social structures have graciously enabled their success. So they are going to cling onto the social structures and resist the cry for revolution. ‘The system worked for me,’ they say. ‘If it doesn’t work for you, it’s probably because you’re lazy.’ If there were to be a revolution, they would lose their rags to riches identity. Capitalism works, they say.
I’ve also come to realize that Canadians don’t realize how much they take for granted in the great safety network they have in free healthcare. Before I moved here, I thought that moving to America would mean less taxes. But in reality, I’m taxed at a very similar rate to what I was taxed in Canada, the only difference being that more of my tax dollars go to the military here in America, and more of my dollars went into the social network back home in Canada. Plus, I have to actually pay for healthcare here—so my quality of life in America hasn’t gone up, even though I’m making more money than I did in Canada.
Many other non-white, liberal leaning folk I know (Canadian ones, mostly) would maybe find it easier to accept that existing social structures are broken because they’ve had the luxury of education and of leisure. They have the luxury to contemplate why they have the socio-economic standing that they do. And for middle class people in general — if there is a revolution, you don’t stand to lose much because ideally, the revolution will bring everyone closer to your level. You also don’t really believe you’re complicit in oppressing the poor because you’re not really thaaaat rich. So it’s easier for you to buy into the revolution.
I confess I can’t speak to the mentality of the non-white blue collar person in this case; I’m not close enough to that socio-economic layer to be able to presume. Cultures where respect of authority is high, perhaps, would cringe at the cry to defund police? There’s been much written about how poor white Americans feel disenfranchised by liberal systems that have allowed immigrants to cut in line in front of them in the path to economic success. Their faith is in the meritocracy, but in their mind, the meritocracy is broken because of government handouts.
My stab at what the ruling class thinks comes solely from a pandemic season spent binge-watching Succession.
If you’re super rich then clearly your implicit biases really come into play because the whole system supports your position of power. You stand to lose the most. You believe that your great wealth and brilliance has buoyed you to the top through sheer genius, and your sheer genius trickles down to feed the masses through job creation and other genius-esqe overflows. “The market has spoken,” you say, “and the market has proclaimed that I get to rule. Capitalism works.” It takes a lot to shake someone at that level of wealth from the belief that their wealth equates to them being superior humans. They secretly fear not having it, or discovering that they don’t deserve it, or that they inherited through unjust accumulation or that maybe the oppression or laborers has caused it, so they cling to the social structures that have nourished them. A revolution would be nothing less than traumatic.
That’s my bare-bones amateur intersectional analysis of potential non-white liberal and conservative reactions to BLM protests—both of whom I have seen spin this as an election issue and make it about party lines, which is really too bad.
Because in the end, for so many it’s simply about what it feels like to live inside colored skin in a society that idealizes whiteness.