Some liberals aren’t even pretending anymore that the protests over George Floyd’s death are about police brutality experienced by black Americans.
No, for them, it’s as if now changes to policing are something that might be nice to have but kind of beside the point.
New York Times writer Charles Blow came out and said it this week, explaining in his latest column that any bills proposed by Congress or the White House that don’t go beyond the policing issue are more or less a waste of time.
“In this fight, our sights must be set high, our demands comprehensive,” he wrote, later adding, “If we are serious about battling racial injustice in the public square and not just on the police squad, we need nothing short of a new civil rights act, the Civil Rights Act of 2020.”
If that doesn’t sound corny enough, Blow’s proposal behind it is even worse. “To truly tackle these issues,” he said, meaning economic inequality, “would deal in some way with wealth redistribution, and the mere mention of that concept throws the comfortable and the rich into a tizzy.”
A tizzy? You don’t say. I can’t imagine why anyone might grow a little nervous when they’re threatened with having their money taken from them and given to strangers as a way to right some wrong that they didn’t commit.
No, people aren’t comfortable with that idea, because it’s bad. (Though Blow got it right in his column when he complained about all those videos of cops dancing with protesters — they really are annoying.)
His colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones said basically the same thing as Blow in a TV special with Oprah Winfrey this week. “We can’t just be talking about policing,” she said. “If we’re going to talk about that, we also need to be trying to put forth an economic agenda that would have to include reparations, because there is no way without actually paying reparations to the descendants of those enslaved, that we can deal with the economic gap that black people perennially have.”
Per usual, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, was ahead of the game. She had already been saying back in May that the current upheaval wasn’t about police brutality so much as it was about supporting her platform for free healthcare, sternly advising the public that if they want the protests to end, they “better be calling for healthcare as a human right” and “better be standing up to for-profit real-estate developers.”
For some people, “Justice for George Floyd” is now a justification for a lot of other things that have nothing to do with George Floyd.
