“Is it still about Black Live Matter, or has it turned into something else? Why do they keep showing up and doing what they do?” A friend of mine asked me these questions and I honestly wasn’t quite sure how to answer them. The answers are annoying complex, but in fairness to my friend (and any other of my readers asking similar questions) I’m going to try to answer these questions as completely as I can, to the best of my ability.

So, the short answer is: Spurned on by the death of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement, large groups of people have collectively decided to protest the use excessive force by law enforcement on people in general and disproportionally towards Black Americans specifically. For whatever reason, local and federal law enforcement decided to respond with violence. Seeing that their point about law enforcement was being proven by law enforcement, the protestors continued their protests. Of course that answer barely covers what’s actually happening and doesn’t cover the root of why it’s all happening.

Now, I’m going to stop here and warn readers that the rest of this essay may be hard to read, especially if you have a historically conservative mindset. This country (The United States of America) has a lot of skeletons in its closet. In fact, it has so many skeletons that I can’t go into any reasonable detail, I’m just going to have to rapid fire them to explain things. If you unwaveringly and unconditionally love America then there’s a good chance a lot of the following sections are going to read like someone telling you dirt about your favorite celebrity. All I ask is that you read with an open mind.

This country, which constantly tells its citizens that it’s the best country in the world (and history) is founded on two things: Violence and exploitation of non-European people. It’s everywhere in its history. The initial colonies were built on slavery. All the wealthy, and thus leaders, of said colonies were slave owners. The massive expansion efforts (which, as one of the more patriotic songs proudly proclaims reached from, “sea to shining sea”) was done so at the cost of either extermination or subjugation of indigenous people already living on those lands. There’s wonderful things like the three-fifths compromise where black slaves were counted as three-fifths a person when assigning government representatives, but not allowed to vote. The Trail of Tears when thousands of Native Americans were forced on a death march to their “new home,” the least livable land the United States had available. We even have things like the exploitation of Chinese immigrants  to build the western half of the trans American railroad. And this is just a small selection of highlights.

The biggest highlight, of course, is the American Civil War (cause we can’t forget that violence inherent in America). Usually, this tends to be thought of as the end all, be all of racism. It’s a fairy tale ending and even if, as adults, we know it’s not, we like to think of it that way. But it’s not, we know it’s not. It’s, in fact, pretty much the opposite happened; the South almost immediately tried to bring back slavery in everything but name. They instated things like Jim Crow laws, Grandfather clauses (in terms of voting), and of course segregation.

Here’s the thing: Each of these things had to be fought against, and it was a hard, uphill fight. And anytime one measure was defeated another rose to take its place, playing the same racist stunts with a different form of language. Nowadays we have the closing of strategic polling locations, specifically stringent ID requirement to register to vote (but only for a certain class of people), and the push to keep Voting Day from becoming a national holiday. The current attack is the attempt to delegitimize voting by mail in the middle of a pandemic. Don’t fool yourself, racism was ingrained in the American political system before the country was founded, and it’s still alive and kicking today. It just has a shiny, new coat of linguistic paint.

This systemic racism inherent in American politics permeates every part of society. Black Americans are much more likely to be the victims of unwarranted police violence and lethal police violence. White supremacy groups like the KKK and The Proud Boys are jokingly shrugged off as fringe elements while black civil rights movements are usually depicted as thugs and brutes. These images permeate society to the point where white, suburban kids are (unconsciously) taught to be wary of black thugs, and black junkies when wandering the “wrong” neighborhoods. So are the Portland protests still about Black Lives Matter? Yes, fundamentally all civil rights protests have been. Racism is still alive and strong and so must those who stand against it.

Have the protests turned into something else? Also yes. Your mileage may vary depending on the specific protestor you talk to, but there is a general feeling that there’s something larger at stake here. In my opinion there is definitely something larger at stake, and it directly relates to the Black Lives Matter movement. It turns out that the American economic and political systems aren’t just stacked against Black Americans specifically; they’re also generally stacked against low income families. Here’s a real life example: It’s pretty much impossible to get any sort of career advancement without a college degree. When my wife, who comes from an economic background lower than mine, first tried to go to a four year college she failed miserably. She couldn’t keep up with her classes, she had trouble studying the material, her constant falling behind keyed off anxiety and depressive attacks which just further compounded the issue. After a lot of discussion and attempts at supporting her she finally told me the real issue: she’d never been taught how to attend college. Her school system just assumed she (and others like her) would never bother with higher education. By contrast, my school system assumed everyone, even the dullest among us, would eventually end up at a four year college. We were groomed and had a skill set unknowingly ingrained in us that my wife just didn’t have. Now, obviously people have overcome this issue and gotten bachelor degrees and doctorates despite coming from lower income families; so it’s not really a difficult obstacle to overcome. But the point is: it’s still an obstacle low income families need to overcome and high income families don’t. And there’s a thousand other obstacles just like it. Little issues and problems that are just part of our system that no one thinks about, but functionally they keep the poor poor and the rich rich.

So, how’s all that relate to the Black Lives Matter movement? Well, it all goes back to the way Black Americans are portrayed. How white girls are taught to be careful of black thugs, and how black civil rights groups are always anarchist villains. More specifically, it relates to how that portrayal interacts with a lot of the Pro American rhetoric we were taught in schools. Here’s one that I believed right up until my epiphany at age 34: If you work hard, you’ll succeed. Pretty harmless right? Actually a good message for children; it teaches them a good work ethic from early on. The only problem is that it’s a blatant lie. I guarantee you that the single mother with three children working four jobs works harder than any white collar middle-manager. But she’s on a fast track to nowhere. A postman probably works just as hard as a CEO, but the difference in buying potential between the two is astronomical. Hard work doesn’t even vaguely correlate to success, coming from a wealthy family with good connections does. Worse still is that implicit in the phrase “If you work hard, you’ll succeed” is the idea that those who didn’t succeed, didn’t work hard. It’s a very comforting idea to a lot people because it absolves them of any responsibility to help the less fortunate. After all, it’s their fault for not working hard enough. The whole mentality is a set up to allow victim blaming of a group of people that were put into a system designed to cause them to fail.

That’s just if you’re a low income White American. Low income Black Americans have to deal with all of that, and police profiling, and having their job applications thrown away based on their names, and getting subpar healthcare due to their skin color, and countless other little things that, just like the countless little things working against low income families in general, work against Black Americans that most people don’t even think about. So (and I’m going to put this indelicately because the right side of the political fence is making it hard phrase it any other way) people who actually care about other people (even strangers) try to put in laws that protect the most vulnerable.

And here’s where the portrayal of Black Americans interacted with constant pro-American rhetoric in the most horrifying way. Suddenly, American leaders had a convenient excuse for why, “work hard and you’ll succeed” doesn’t work. Blame it on the Blacks, blame it on the immigrants, blame the gays. You didn’t get a job? It’s because companies HAVE to hire black people now. You can’t make a living wage? It’s because we HAVE to provide social welfare for those lazy immigrants. Uptick in violent crimes? Obviously it’s because those godless gays can get married. I wish I was exaggerating about this type of thinking, and it was all just a baseless conspiracy theory. But this is the rhetoric that’s being shouted at the protestors. This is the rhetoric that’s been shouted at me when I walked down the street minding my own business.

So the movement is still about Black Lives Matter, but it’s also about exposing the lies and changing the system that allows racism to perpetuate itself. You didn’t lose your job because the company hired a Black American; you lost it because the company outsourced all its production and tech support to India and China. Immigrants have nothing to do with you being unable to make a living wage; it’s the billionaire that makes millions of tax free dollars every month just by existing. Violence isn’t caused by gays “undermining moral fiber,” it’s caused by people with untreated emotional disorders having easy access to firearms due to poor gun control laws. As long as people refuse to see these types of truths, racism will run strong in the United States.

The final question ,”Why do the protestors keep doing what they’re doing?” requires a bit of context. I was just asked if protestors were burning American flags and bibles. The answer, by the way, is no. That’s some crazy narrative being spread by what I suspect is a racist, white person that gets all their information from Facebook and Fox News. What the average protestor actually does is: Show up at an agreed upon place and time (usually around the Portland Justice Center). Hang around, chill with friends, probably feed some houseless people, and just generally wait around for nightfall. At nightfall the police show up and antagonize the protestors in an attempt to get the protestors to attack the police. At some point the police give up trying to get the protestors to throw the first punch and start attacking with tear gas, concussion grenades, pepper bombs, rubber bullets, LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device), and other ‘less than lethal’ methods. Oh yeah, and beating. There’s a lot of beating protestors with clubs. The protestors universally respond by running for their lives because they have no weapons. If they’re lucky they’ll avoid immediate bodily harm and get away with just exposure to tear gas and damaged hearing. Avoiding armed white supremacists that are being encouraged by the police is usually on the list, but not always. When you say it out loud (or read it in plain writing), “Why do the protestors keep doing what they’re doing?” is a perfectly valid question. Only an insane person would show up to be attacked every night for over two months. Then again, what kind of person unthinkingly continues to beat up the person that shows up night after night to get beaten up?

Or to put it another way, “If there was a real problem, there’d be armed revolution on the streets.” That’s phrase I commonly heard from my conservative ex-friends. It’s an idea rooted in the violence inherent in American culture. You either show up ready to fight for you rights or you don’t show up at all. To them things like the American Revolution and the Civil War were great examples of violence in the right place, and proper American patriots doing their duty. That’s not how the protestors would see it. To them (and me) those wars (and similar actions) just highlight the failures of an already broken system. Human life is paramount above all else and violence should only be used as a last resort. Resorting to violence, particularly prolonged, large scale violence (better known as War) means that something has gone horribly wrong. The fact that violence is not only used frequently to solve issues, but actually glorified in our society is horrifying. The very point of protests is to object to the over use of violence by law enforcement, and to prove that violence in general is not a viable solution. Responding to the violence with more violence is counter-productive to the core of the movement. And not showing up would just prove to the police and federal authorities that violence does solve problems.

Of course that’s my perspective. I have the luxury of analyzing the situation from news articles, twitter feeds, and historical documents whiles I sip diet Dr. Pepper and munch on peanuts. But I have spoken to a lot of protestors and I’ve been able to generalize them into four groups. Most of the protestors feel like they don’t have a choice. They’ve seen what the American system has to offer them and it’s slavery in everything but name until they’re thrown into prison because the American legal system is stacked against you if you happen to be Black. There’s no future for them unless they take every chance they can to effect some change. Many of the protestors just care about other people, more than they care about themselves. They’ve spent their whole lives helping those in need and this is just another way for them to help. There’s a surprising number of young, white protestors that are just realizing how privileged they are compared to Black Americans and people of color. They’re angry that the American political system has been lying to them their whole lives and are trying to change it. Finally, there’s actually quite a few people that feel like history is being made, and just want to both be part of it, and be on the correct side. Whatever their personal reason, understand this needs to happen. The American system is broken, politically, socially, and economically. It’s been broken since before it was founded. We have to start changing things on some level or we’ll be in for another war, and there’s a good chance we won’t recover from this one.