Even If Everything in "The Fall of Minneapolis" Was Correct, It Doesn't Really Matter
A riot is a riot, no matter the cause.
Note: You can watch a video version of this article here.
I haven't watched the new documentary The Fall of Minneapolis yet, but you can get a pretty good sense of the film's general position from its trailer. The film argues that Derek Chauvin, the cop who killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck and chest, was performing an officially a
pproved restraint as detailed in the Minneapolis Police Department training manual. It argues that Floyd had a high level of fentanyl in his system and that this was his likely cause of death. It makes the case that Chauvin and his fellow officers were made to take the fall by effete politicians simply because violent leftists were burning the city down. Being charitable, it seems the film is arguing for the platonic ideal of justice in the face of leftwing overreach. Being less charitable, it seems the film is a bootlicker’s manifesto.
I read this rebuttal to the film written by journalist Deena Winter who covered the Chauvin trial as it unfolded. I'm not sure if Winter’s argument pokes holes in every single claim made by the documentary, but it certainly provides some more nuance and context, particularly with the fact that director Liz Collin is “married to retired Minneapolis Police Federation President Bob Kroll, a fact she leaves out of the documentary even though Kroll was a major figure in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder.”
But really, this back and forth over the supposed injustice of the Chauvin trial is irrelevant to what happened with the 2020 uprisings. It does little to illuminate the reality of our collective condition.
The particular details of any case such as George Floyd's are largely, unfortunately, immaterial to the response such cases provoke in the society at large. You cannot expect an unjust system such as ours to deliver justice, neither for a killer cop nor for the person he killed. Our criminal justice system is too perverted to ever deliver anything resembling justice with any kind of consistency. When it comes to the rule of law and our faith in it, consistency is key. In America, there is no such thing.
I highly recommend the documentary O.J.: Made In America because it demonstrates this point beautifully. The story of O.J. Simpson is the story of race in America. You cannot understand Simpson’s acquittal without understanding the black experience in Los Angeles since the Great Migration. A people menaced by injustice for generations, for lifetimes, for all living memory, will eke out whatever pyrrhic victories they can, even at the expense of true justice. O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of a horrific double homicide that he plainly committed (sue me for libel I dare you) because the mostly black jury said Fuck You, and I don't blame them. This isn't justice — of course it's not. It's payback. I have no pity for people who act surprised when that payback bites them in the ass. Such naivete suggests a profound parochialism and a deadly dangerous innocence.
L.A. did not burn in '92 because the cops who beat Rodney King half to death were acquitted (part of their defense was that smashing someone's face in with a club was part of the official LAPD training. Just because it's official and everyone does it doesn't make it right). L.A. burned because they beat Rodney King. It burned because Latasha Harlins was shot in the back of the head for nothing. It burned because Eula Love was shot in front of her daughters by police over an unpaid utility bill. It burned because 39th and Dalton was destroyed by rampaging Gestapo-like LAPD officers. It burned because the system has communicated to us, over and over again, that nothing matters, you cannot fix what is broken, and you are wrong to think otherwise.
Watts did not burn in '65 because of a traffic stop gone bad. Cities all over the country did not rise up in '68 because MLK was assassinated. Ferguson did not become a warzone because Michael Brown was shot with his hands up by a cop. A healthy society would be able to deal with single instances of injustice such as these on their own terms. We do not have a healthy society. These uprisings happened because there is a permanent underclass in our nation, the social contract has been broken, and the power our state exercises over us is illegitimate. You can pick apart the specific details of any of these particular inciting incidents, find them less "deserving" than initially perceived, and then chalk the whole reactionary uprising up as misguided. This is indeed the all-too-common narrative sequence. Rodney King had speed in his system. Eula Love threw a knife. Gang members hung out near 39th and Dalton. Michael Brown punched a cop. But this is all missing the forest for the trees. It does not change the underlying fact that our society is always ready to blow, and matches are being lit every single day.
It doesn’t take a saint to cause the explosion, just an inexorable accretion of deep indignities and the right person in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that person could be you. The list of the martyrs is long, James Baldwin said. We are not in want of victims. And we didn’t choose our victims — you did, said Dave Chappelle. The 2020 uprisings did not happen because George Floyd was murdered (he was), they happened because of everything. Because shit is fucked up and bullshit. Because there is kindling everywhere you walk.
In regards to the predictable violence that results from such longstanding injustice, it can certainly go too far and take unhelpful forms. Three years after George Floyd was murdered, I walked around burned-out city streets in Minneapolis, lots formerly locally owned now bought up by big property investors. I went into a Mom and Pop bookstore across the street from where the police precinct was burned down, Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s, owned by a couple sweet Baby Boomers, specializing in Science Fiction and Mystery books (Hugo Gernsback and Edgar Allen Poe, get it?). They were totally restocking their shelves because their previous building had burned in 2020. To quote my Minneapolis friend about being there in the midst of everything: "It was surreal. Mmmmm, that’s not even the right word. It was horrific. Everybody knew George. He volunteered at the Salvation Army and knew everyone there. He dated one of my high school teachers. My mom knew him. Seeing how the cops responded, the way we were brutalized, it was horrific. People are afraid to come out now when we’re always getting tear gassed. There's a lot of distrust in the community now."
If you feel you must decry the violence of the mob, well, decry away, but that violence is to be expected. It is stimulus and response. You can be shocked by it. You can find it counterproductive. You may think it's unwarranted. Innocent people will be destroyed. But still it happens. We are, all of us, dancing on kindling. You don't fix that danger by arguing against matches. You clean up the kindling. My general feelings on the violence of uprisings are summed up quite well by Vijay Prashad in Struggle Makes Us Human: "You don’t need to direct the dispossessed to act in a certain way. As [Franz] Fanon pointed out, the dispossessed, the wretched of the earth, will act like this because they are mirroring the structure of violence in which they survive. Their violence is a symptom of a violent society.” He goes on:
If we had a nonviolent society, then the spontaneous response would be nonviolent. In a violent society, the spontaneous reaction of people is violent. That’s a sociological rule. A violent society produces a violent response when something violent happens. I’ve used the word violent three times in the previous sentence. At no point has the phrase people’s movement entered that sentence or this thought. There is no people’s movement involved here. There is a violent society, something violent happens, such as the killing of an innocent person by a police officer, and then there is a violent reaction by some sections of society. That was a social reaction and not the political reaction by an organization. Some people on the left will interpret that uprising as a political rebellion. It’s not a political rebellion but a symptom of the violence of capitalism, a social rebellion — a part of capitalist society, not its antithesis. … We are against the violence of capitalism, against the violence in the structure. We do not need to take any positive or negative position regarding that spontaneous violence because that spontaneous reaction is a reaction to the violence of capitalism and is not occasioned by any organized political force. There is a great difference between the armed struggle that emerges out of the strategy of a political force and the spontaneous uprisings. We want to change the underlying conditions. When people ask, “Are you in favor of nonviolence?” I answer, “Absolutely” — but should the sanctimonious call for nonviolence be pressed into service only when the wretched of the earth rise up? How do you expect people to be nonviolent in a violent system? Nonviolence is the demand to the system, not to those who are oppressed, crushed by it. The capitalist state is not a dignified state. It is a state of police officers not social workers, a state of tax collectors not teachers and health workers. The capitalist system burns clothes and wastes food. It is not dignified. It is an abomination, an obscenity. It is decadent. The system is violent. So we are not abstractly in favor of nonviolence. We want to create a nonviolent system, a socialist system.
Should the sanctimonious call for nonviolence be pressed into service only when the wretched of the earth rise up? The answer is no. Always.
The documentary LA ‘92, free to watch on Youtube, is remarkable because it demonstrates the seemingly intractable cycle of uprisings in our cities by using only newsreel footage and home movies of the L.A. riots. No talking head interviews. No dramatic narration. The film’s closing sequence is devastating in its cyclical outlook. “I don’t think it’ll ever stop, really,” said one Watts resident in 1965, his voice played over footage of Florence and Normandie burning in 1992. “I mean, it may not be like this, but, it’ll never stop.”
So long as we all accede to our capitalist system that benefits from mass social cruelty, so long as our two-tiered justice system undermines any faith in the clichés of liberalism, so long as men with guns have the power to make good on the deadly implications of their dehumanizing rhetoric, and so long as our collective imaginations are ground down by the bootheel of neoliberal domination, that black Watts resident, staring off into the distance of the burned city streets, will be correct — forever.