If you really want to know what's going on. Here are the three things that are causing the unrest:
1) Three solid years of dog whistle racism from the top and constant suppression of black concerns. "Taking a knee (peacefully, respectfully) is anti-American!" and "Black Lives Matter? How selfish! Blue lives matter. All lives matter." So, the protests (90% non-violent) are the bottled-up response to that tone-deaf, "don't you get uppity now", patronizing pat-on-the-head racism that ignores real life-and-death grievances of black people and their relationship to law enforcement.
2) Systemic indifference to police prejudice and violence against people of color. Is criminal violence more common than state violence? Yes, very. Does that make it worse? No. Car crashes are "worse" (more common) than airplane crashes, right? So, we should do nothing to regulate and prevent airplane crashes?
We, as a society, actually find airplane crashes "worse" than car crashes because we are at the mercy of the airline, its procedures, its mechanics and its pilots.
In the same way, individual thugs doing violence is sad, maybe even tragic (like everyday traffic accidents), but institutionalized, racist practices of violence are abhorrent to the idea of a civil society because we are all dependent on the training, procedures and attitudes of police. People are marching because the risk of being the target of police violence (no matter how small you think it is) shouldn't depend on baked-in racism and belief of cops that they nearly always get away with it, even when it is outright murder. That's not a minor, snowflake issue. It's a major, systemic injustice that has got to end.
2) Systemic indifference to police prejudice and violence against people of color. Is criminal violence more common than state violence? Yes, very. Does that make it worse? No. Car crashes are "worse" (more common) than airplane crashes, right? So, we should do nothing to regulate and prevent airplane crashes?
We, as a society, actually find airplane crashes "worse" than car crashes because we are at the mercy of the airline, its procedures, its mechanics and its pilots.
In the same way, individual thugs doing violence is sad, maybe even tragic (like everyday traffic accidents), but institutionalized, racist practices of violence are abhorrent to the idea of a civil society because we are all dependent on the training, procedures and attitudes of police. People are marching because the risk of being the target of police violence (no matter how small you think it is) shouldn't depend on baked-in racism and belief of cops that they nearly always get away with it, even when it is outright murder. That's not a minor, snowflake issue. It's a major, systemic injustice that has got to end.
3) Economic and health injustice exposed by the bungling of the COVID-19 crisis. While the Federal government was diverting shipments of PPE and ventilators from blue states and handing out $trillions in aid to millionaires, billionaires and corporations, millions of people are unemployed and a stingy, one-time $1200 check doesn't cut it for the under-class just fired from three jobs that barely made ends meet anyway. At the same time, 60% of C19 deaths in Chicago, for example, are black people that represent only 14% of the population. The looting is a response to all that, basically, "if you don't give a flip about us and aren't doing anything for us, we'll take something for ourselves." It's not right, just a gut response to deep neglect. and finally ...
4) There's quite a lot of evidence that some of the initial vandalism and graffiti was kicked-off by far-Right, anarchist militia groups (especially the Boogaloo Bois) who have been seen in video at these protests casually breaking windows, throwing the first stones, flashing white supremacist hand signs and otherwise seeding the violence. They've been plotting online to start a race war and while Bill Barr and the intelligence community have have known these groups were a major domestic terror threat for years, they choose to publicly blame Antifa instead, without any evidence.
So, in short: Ignoring Black Lives Matter didn't make it go away. Economic and health injustice has only gotten worse under this administration and, as it was said about Joker in the movies "Some people just want to watch the world burn."
Some people argue that there are black millionaires in America so cries of injustice are just sour grapes from people wanting to blame their plight on something that happened to their great-great-great-grandfather.
The problem with that argument is that exceptions don't prove a rule. So, we had a black president and black quarterbacks (except Kopernick), black doctors and lawyers. Does that mean systemic racism is over? That's like seeing one daisy pushed through a crack in the pavement of an abandoned parking lot and calling it a garden.
Here's a better litmus test of progress for you: Would any white person in America (say, your son or daughter) be willing to swap places (and skin colors) with anyone in this country chosen at random without you fearing the outcome? In the kind of America we believe in, it is not enough that success is as possible as a lightning strike. It needs to be as likely as sunshine and how cloudy it is shouldn't depend on your skin color.
