Asking For Protests to Stop After NYPD Killings Is Standing on The Wrong Side of History

The current wave of mass protests in the US is about more than police brutality and impunity. The demonstrations are a struggle to assert that black lives matter in the United States, and thus take aim at the institutions that repeatedly dismiss and denigrate black life.

The anti-racist struggle has historically catalyzed around police brutality, from Birmingham in 1963, to Los Angeles in 1992, to Ferguson in 2014. The issue of counter-violence against police has also been contentious in civil rights history. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that "We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality." Meanwhile, the Black Panther Party's embrace of armed conflict with police left 15 officers dead, as well as 34 radicals, and earned the group a fraught place in civil rights history — both maligned and martyred.

But even the most critical view of Panther activity must look back on history's passage and be thankful that anguish over the death of police officers did not derail anti-racist activism altogether. If we view the protests of 2014 as more than knee-jerk reactions to specific impune police killings, and rather as a continuation of the civil rights struggle, then protests cannot be shut down because of the ambush killings of two NYPD officers Saturday in Brooklyn.

When President Barack Obama said Monday in response to the officers' deaths that "it is a time to put aside political debates, to put aside protest," the first black president of the United States positioned himself on the wrong side of history. It is of no disrespect to the lost lives of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos to continue to forcefully assert — as thousands of protesters have long been doing — that Black Lives Matter. To call for an end or even a pause in protests, as Mayor de Blasio has done, perniciously suggests that the actions of one Baltimore man, hellbent on revenge, delegitimize anger at patterns of police racism, killing, and impunity.


https://news.vice.com/article/asking-for-protests-to-stop-after-nypd-killings-is-standing-on-the-wrong-side-of-history