Reactions to Protest

At this time of apparently endless protest against not only police brutality, the spark, but against an entire unjust, uneven, unequal system of racial oppression, I am reading of King’s struggles after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and how, in the doldrums, the movement was lifted to unexpected heights by the action, seemingly spontaneous, of a small group of college students.
How did White America react to that other than, like Blacks, to be surprised and taken off-guard? To my mind, having lived through that period as a high school kid, there are three. The time-honored code of the South whereby discreetly licensed thugs would batter the Black youngsters into their proper state of submission to White supremacy. Then there were the horrified onlookers, most of them surprised that Black people had any ambitions to be able to eat a sandwich at Woolworths, who wondered how and why these youngsters, college students after all, would risk so much and create so much disorder. Didn’t they know they were in the South? Yet and still, the way they were treated seemed incommensurate with their simple goals: to eat a sandwich like anyone else.
And then there were those who saw the image of Gandhi and Thoreau, noble protesters against injustice. Some of these went so far as to join the protests or at least send money.
My question is, where in all this does Attorney-General Barr sit? Was there ever a time in his life of faithful service to the Constitution that he saw “Negro protests” as serviceable to the Constitution? Did he see the protests fitting in to the workers’ strikes, the feminist protests of the earlier part of the 20th century, even the protests of the Patriots against British rule?
I’m of two minds on this: one side of my brain says Barr is blinded by color bias and sees Blacks as having no place in any sort of noble cause and freedom to Blacks simply means freedom of access to White people’s stuff.
But the other side of my brain says Barr does recognize the justice of the cause but wants to maintain a stockade of Eurocentric thought and action against what he sees disorder and chaos. A person like this might very well bring a person of color into his entourage as long as that person supported the goal of a Eurocentric vision of America. 

The latter then brings in its train the request for a definition of Eurocentric…… well, not a definition but a list of the consequences or requisites of Eurocentrism. Coming.

July 8, 2020 Before going off on Eurocentrism, I would like to address the pointedness of the slogan Black Lives Matter. Somewhere in all my blogs I wrote about this but cannot now find it. So here it goes, why black lives matter derives perfectly logically from practices which demote Black lives to less-than-worthy. In Virginia back in the 40s or so when a traffic accident claimed someone’s life and that person was Black, the newspaper would print in parentheses after the name (colored). In this way, readers uninterested in the lives of Black people could skip the notice. They would still like to skip notice but find they are confronted by Black people with their Black lives at every turn. The recent protests reveal a lot of people who are not Black are willing to get int he faces of these aloof bastards. Which leads me to Eurocentrism………..

 

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