If you’re like me, you’ve been glued to the television for much of this morning watching the events unfold in Charlottesville, Va., as white nationalists descended into the city for a Unite the Right rally in protest of an earlier City Council decision to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
If you’re like me, you’ve watched protesters on both sides engage in fights, pepper spray on one another, throw shit, break shit, punch each other, erupt into a melee and basically engage in any manner of what can best be called societal anarchy.
If you’re like me, you’ve ALSO noticed just how ABSENT the fucking police have been during the entire shit. You almost never hear me, a black man, ask the following question, but where the fuck were the police? I’ve been watching for HOURS, and in the vast majority of footage broadcast nationwide, you ain’t seen nan’ police officer breaking up shit, de-escalating shit or arresting people. It’s all been reminiscent of what happens after some big state school loses a game in any college town where white people burn shit to the ground and some random dude goes to jail for jaywalking.
It took HOURS for the police to show up ANYWHERE. For a fucking rally they KNEW was happening. JUST LAST NIGHT, a bunch of racists marched through the campus of the University of Virginia with torches saying shit like “white lives matter.”
How in the fuck is a police force unprepared for what was clearly a coordinated, planned and organized rally taking place? This wasn’t tweeted out the night before, like some fucking flash mob white racist river dance and a bunch of groups showed up. How the shit did the state government whiff this badly?
Oh, WHITE PEOPLE.
Let’s be real (and clear): When a bunch of black groups plan peaceful protests, the National Guard shows up. People get arrested. Somehow, in a white-ass city like Charlottesville, where a planned rally included SEVERAL white nationalist, racist groups, the entire fucking police force slept in or decided that, “Oh, it’s just racists, they’re cool.” OF COURSE there were going to be counter-protests, and of course folks were going to clash. Because of course all of it was going to happen. But white folks whitefolkin’ is OK.
White nationalists rally = no police presence.
Black peaceful protest = National Guard and arrests.
How bad do you have to be at your job to not be prepared at all for this? Pretty bad, fam. Pretty bad. Unless, of course, a bunch of white nationalists aren’t considered a threat to civil society.
Except they kind of fucking are.
Dear Virginia State Police or anybody involved in local Virginia law enforcement ... the dog? You fucked it. Luckily, nobody was killed.
But unlike every protest featuring black people ever, we’ve not heard about a single arrest (yet) either.
‘Murrica.
Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017, 4:15 p.m. EDT: The mayor of Charlottesville confirmed that one person was killed after being rammed by a car during the white nationalist rally Saturday afternoon.