What Opens?

Roger Berkowitz

Melvin Rogers argues that the protests and riots convulsing Minneapolis and the United States are about more than the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman. “The anger and rage on display in Minneapolis is not only about police violence, however. It is taking place against a broad horizon of state violence, which among other things takes the form of utter disregard for the pain of black Americans.” The riots and violence are a rejection of the status quo in this country. And the real question, Rogers writes,  is what comes next. 

What opens—what is beginning right now in this country—is a profoundly unsettled space. Something might emerge, something better than what we have, something more satisfying, and more caring. We’ve seen the rays of hope in the solidarity produced by Black Lives Matter and the efficacy of local legislative agitation. But authoritarianism could also fill the void—the president is already singing that song. It is the siren song that has empowered murderous neo-Nazis and militias, whose vision matches the president’s determination to make the United States the domain of white manhood.
The danger is that we just don’t know if the United States is convulsing because it wishes to be something new and better, or is raging to remain something old and twisted. We all should be worried and afraid, but not of the protesters. We should be concerned and fearful that the country may not have the courage to imagine differently, that it may not be able to separate the meaning of freedom from the taking of black lives. How ironic: the taking of black life built the country and that very same logic may bring the country to its knees.