"While we’re working to abolish the police, we must also work to dismantle what the police were put here to protect: property." –@kandistmallett t.co/ubBIRMdpxb
— Teen Vogue (@TeenVogue) July 31, 2020
via teenvogue:
It’s been four months since the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic first highlighted the failures of capitalism and the incompetence of the United States government. There was an opportunity for our country to become less horrible — to finally deal with some of our institutional failings. This, of course, did not happen.
Congress did not rise to the occasion, providing or even seriously considering necessary, transformational policies like universal basic income (UBI), universal health care, rent suspension, or debt forgiveness. Instead, they gave us crumbs through a one-time payment of $1,200 and $600 extra in unemployment (for those who qualified), while many of the well-connected — including several lawmakers themselves — cashed in via the Paycheck Payment Protection (PPP) loans program intended for small businesses.
The response to this crisis has made it even more clear that party politics are a sham, and the real political affinity lies within class and race. While we’re working to abolish the police, we must also work to dismantle what the police were put here to protect: property. What is more evident of the legacy of settler colonialism and its violence than the idea of the ownership of land? What helped shape the unequal distribution of wealth and enduring segregation of our cities quite like centuries of racist property laws?
As millions of people, particularly Black and Latinx Americans, are on the verge of eviction, it is time that we look at the idea of private housing and the role it plays in maintaining economic violence in those communities.
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Has the pushback against Democrat overreach begun? “One of the things that struck me today was how many stories involved people pushing back. They’re pushing back against the Black Lives Matter narrative, they’re pushing back against cancel culture, and they’re pushing back against the Wuhan virus lockdown. In other words, after being beaten around the head for a few months, Americans are beginning to remember that they’re a free people in a constitutionally run nation. They’re finally getting mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.”
h/t GR