“Peaceful Protest” is Code for an Explicit Preference to Whom the Violence is Inflicted Upon.

They simply want maim, mutilate, hurt, and kill civil rights protesters.

If this insistence ever felt strange, this is the reason why.

“I don’t support that because it’s not a peaceful protest!” ~ Random Whiteness Rangers

The term “peaceful protest” began to have the socio-psychological register of a micro-aggression, and I at first couldn’t really put words to it. It’s like a damning test looking for a string of 100% perfect nondestructive protests within the spacial span of 3.8 million square miles of the United States, with a human population of 328.2 million people, across a long measure of time as long as justice isn’t served. It’s an impossible standard, literally, in every realistic way possible.

It’s an impossible task. It is the “he was no angel” rhetorical-device equivalent to a whole civil rights struggle. The only difference is unlike the murdered Black man, woman, or child, and this movement will be harder to kill (so white supremacy, takes more effort).

White people really like demonizing shit.

The Understanding of Violence

This “peaceful” protest demand is made impossible not just by the fact that we’re dealing with a rhetorical device that seeks to stigmatize, but because the concept of “violence” is also a moving target.

Violence is commonly written in dictionaries as “the use of physical force to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy.” As a concept, the definition of violence includes harm or destruction to non-living things. But that’s not where the spirit of the word rests, however. When people summon the concept of violence into their minds, the immediate thought is harm upon living things, with people being first, animals second. So when a protest with property destruction is called a violent protest, it carries the notion of violence inflicted upon people.

As a photographer, there’s this saying: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” As a writer and photographer, I have this other one: “Imagine the thousand pictures from what a word is worth.”

Words matter, and due to this fact, word selection has meaning. There’s a reason why right-wing media prefer to use the term violent protest when it’s more descriptive to call it a destructive protest. These people want to infer the thoughts of harm upon others, danger, and a threat to life. The people prefer to upkeep inequality; they prefer to maintain systemic racism.

How Come They Never Consider the Police Violent?

Ironically, these people never consider police violent, even when they are. The moment police push, shove, pull, grab, slam, slap, strike, or shoot a person, that police officer is committing an act of violence.

When a police officer shows up with an exaggeratingly high measure of force, such as a sniper rifle, submachine gun, or an up-armored militarized vehicle (civilians call them all “tanks”) at a mere protest, that too, is an act of violence.

As a matter of fact, the moment a police officer taps his holster or unbuttons his holster, or even floats his hand over his gun, that officer is committing an act of violence.

Horrendous muzzle discipline, aiming firearms, ranging from pistols to shotguns, assault rifles in a protest or civil unrest, is an act of violence.

Most commands given from a police officer are tangentially related to violence. White people of America explicitly give their endorsement to police violence in their “always obey what the cop says” bullshit. Step outside your vehicle is an act of violence. Can I step inside your home, is an act of violence. Any search or seizure is an act of violence. Infringing on the Constitutionality of any matter is an act of violence (and this one is coming from the right-wing talking points). The monopoly of violence alone makes the policeman’s presence a violent one by default.

Coercion via violence is universally considered a failure of professionalism in careers that require influencing others, but white people do not care.

Violence upon Black people — or those who speak up for Black people — is always okay for white people.

Hell, when arresting officers detained Dylan Roof after he murdered nine random, innocent Black churchgoers, peacefully detaining this racial terrorist and giving him Burger King implies added violence onto anyone surviving Dylan Roof’s racial murder spree. The angelic treatment of racial terror implies added violence onto Black people.

What about the very act that initiates the police accountability protest? How is Breonna Taylor’s murder not considered violence? How is George Floyd’s murder, not violence? How is Ahmaud Arbery’s death — at the hands of civilians — not considered violence?

The problem here is that white people of America enjoy the police’s monopoly of violence because they view it as a monopoly of their violence. Police seem to function at the behest of white irrational fears and concerns (read: Afrophobia), white people adore police violence, police applied immunity to reasonable law and authoritarian police practices. Police in America works at the command of white identity.

If all parts of society are capable of committing violence, then only demanding peace in one direction is evidence of a preference on who is the preferred violent actor and who is the preferred recipient of said violence. It’s like watching a teacher in an elementary school never correct one student, but persistently over-correct the other. It’s classic favoritism.

Or classic racism. White people are so racist, they in fact created a new race. Allow me to present evidence titled “blue lives matter” before the jury. Explain to us, what exactly is a blue life, if not an artificially created race to divert attention to in the race of systemic racism?

Absentee Landlords

It’s also not a moot point that those who demand only peaceful protest never care to actually observe or attend to them. Out of all the peaceful protests I’ve covered (99.45% of them in Washington, D.C.) I never saw a white person, especially a white conservative, ecstatically grab one of my photos proving peaceful protest and running full speed in support of the said protest.

I have never seen a right-wing “violent protest” hater actually move their stance in the face of evidence of a peaceful protest.

The details, matter.

Watching white folk call for peaceful protest but never consume them is like watching bratty children calling for more vegetables on their dinner plate, only to throw them at the wall. Eat your spinach, Junior.

Many people never think about what is required of something when something is called for or begged for. “I support peaceful protest” is an interesting phrase, but it’s not as telling as what’s in the details. When whiteness beg that all protests are peaceful no matter what, they are essentially asking, no — demanding — that pacifists take bats to the face. Whiteness requires that these protesters submit themselves to being beaten bloody by sticks, clubs, and “nonlethal” munitions. These white folk is literally asking for people to submit to the monopoly of violence they are protesting against in the first place.

Rubber bullets, 40mm rubber rounds, often aimed at the head (which they shouldn’t be, but you don’t care) mutilate people, doing permanent damage to the eyes of American citizens.

White people, by way of this white supremacy they protect by negligence or dutiful purpose, are the absentee landlords of civil rights protest.

Since police have already exercised the ability to strangle and murder a detained man for eight minutes in broad daylight while being recorded, what standard of restraint could one expect them to have? On the strength of the grotesque moral depravity, it requires to commit to strangling a man for eight minutes with one’s full body weight over a knee, what respect to humanity can a police officer exercise?

It’s interesting to watch right-wing political identities in America, mostly white, champion “Western Culture” above all else as if it’s the most advanced society in the world, when this largely white supremacist culture routinely devolve into clamoring for human sacrifice in the face of civil rights struggle.

There is a very brutal, savage, barbaric underbelly to whiteness that doesn’t get enough attention. Some people do not know how ugly their souls really are.

“I support peaceful protest” is an interesting phrase, but it’s not as telling as what’s in the details.

The details reveal a particular moral depravity of not just the police who engage in horrific acts of violence upon Black life, but also to the folk who demand more violence by way of demanding all protesters to infinitely get smacked around and submit their bodies to the same state-sponsored violence that repeatedly take the lives of those they already mourn the loss of. Sandra Bland. Darrien Hunt. Tamir Rice. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd. Korryn Gaines. Too many names. Too many murders by the state. Public executions.

When that policeman kept that knee on George Floyd’s neck, strangling him for eight minutes, they didn’t just kill a Black person; they also killed the respect of their own uniform as well as murder white morality. Each time a cop unjustly murder a Black person, they are equally destroying white morality in America, if not worldwide. Cops are killing white morality. Police are killing the morality of the Western culture. West is best? Or what, exactly? The West isn’t best at morality, that is for certain.

The Vanity of Whiteness

Part of the opposing force to civil rights is technically protecting this world image of white people. Progress requires disregarding this lie of superiority.

There’s something categorically profane in the details. White people, or whiteness in America, hunger for Black human sacrifice. That’s exactly what this is. From arrests to maiming and mutilations to killing, it’s all a form of modern human sacrifice, proving that white society today is no different than who they’d consider savages, like a Aztec or Mayan society, killing someone on top of a monument.

But we are the sacrifice. This train of thought — begging for peace in the face of tyranny — needs to stop. When people with a rigid white reference group orientation infinitely call for “peaceful” protest, they are only telling us to whom they prefer the violence to be acted upon. They are only telling us who they prefer to be harmed.

The details matter. “I support peaceful protest” is an interesting phrase, but it’s not as telling as what’s in the details.