• Frank [he/him, he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    2 hours ago

    Yeah. I agree.

    Minneapolis in the first days after Mr. Floyd was murdered would be a really good case study on, idk, permissions to do violence.

    The pigs and the mayor were spreading misinformation about "outside agitators", the whole white Minnesotan world was losing it's damn mind, BIPOC people were throwing together adhoc neighborhood defense groups.

    It all happened very, very, very fast. Like hours in some cases, a few days at most. But people threw together community defense groups. I was confronted and asked to explain myself moving around the city several times. Folks were out on their porches in the evenings, idk, kind of watching?

    I've never seen so many normal people with guns. For a few months everyone was strapped. I had no idea BIPOC people were so heavily armed. There was serious we're not going down without a fight energy. I even met a kid who was standing guard in a protest camp with a katana. Dude could not have been seventeen. I remember crying after talking to him because he was just a kid, armed with a sword, protecting people from all the shit that could go down at any moment - vehicle attacks, shootings, anything.

    And this was all while the cops in Minneapolis were going berserk, riding around suburban streets forty deep armed with machine guns and grenade launchers, firing paintballs and rubber munitions are random white people for being outside on their porches, doing drivebys with rubber bullets and gas grenades.

    So like there was this constant threat of white supremacist attacks, police attacks, and a whole lot of other potential threats, and all these people who would otherwise never think of openly carrying a gun linked up with their neighbors and allies and started very seriously protecting their neighborhoods.

    And that's just the side of it I saw from where I lived near the middle of it all. There must have been all kinds of white supremacist shit happening out in the very white, very reactionary suburbs. The mayor was trying, badly, to do divide and rule shit by convincing people "outside agigtators" were behind everything to get people to turn on their neighbors.

    I haven't looked in to other people's accounts much bc i've been trying to shake off the trauma of it all for years, but there's got to be a huge amount of valuable information out there.