Title: The current riots in the United States are justified and should continue until justice is actually achieved for all of America - A discussion primarily informed by Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.
Warning: this post is very long, coming in at roughly 2,500 words, i.e. 5 double-spaced pages. Also, I couldn't really think of a relevant TLDR.
Admittedly, I am not a hundred percent sure that this is indeed an unpopular opinion, but, from watching American media and the way the events following the murder of George Floyd have been received, it appears to be.
I am just a random pleb who is about to start my Master in Political Science in the Fall, so I do not feel like my own words or incites mean much here, but I did thoroughly study The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon throughout the writing of my Honours thesis and have become quite familiar and endeared to his work, which I vehemently feel applies very well to this situation in America if you just switch out "colonizer" for "racist white American establishment" and "colonized/native/peasant" for "average black American."
For those who are not familiar with Fanon or his work, I will offer a brief bio here before I go into just listing out a bunch of relevant quotations from The Wretched of the Earth which are completely relevant, accompanied by some personal commentary. It is likely that quoting directly from Wikipedia would be the most telling way to explain this: "[Fanon] was a French West Indian [sychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique ... whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon). Notably, Fanon was significantly involved in the Algerian fight for independence (one of the most brutal decolonization processes of the era) and an official member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Unfortunately, Fanon died at age 36 when he succumbed to Leukemia in the one nation that he had hated the most, America. Fanon's good friend and political philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, declared that Fanon likely would have lived if he had gone to America for treatment earlier in his illness. Some of the quotations to follow will actually be by Sartre, as he had a very influential "Preface" that was published in the first edition of the Wretched of the Earth and is largely considered to be an intrinsic part of the work. Sartre "was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre ).
For reference, all pagination will be based on this free PDF of the work: https://libcom.org/files/[Frantz_Fanon]_Wretched_of_the_earth_(tran(BookZZ.org).pdf.pdf). Additionally, these quotes will mostly be in order, but there will be some jumping around just because I thought it made more sense this way. Also, I am sure that I missed a lot of important quotations, but this is what I was able to find going over my notes for a couple hours.
As mentioned earlier, Fanon was talking about Africa during the continents various processes of decolonization but is still completely pertinent to the modern situation in the United States which has most recently been symbolized by the separate cold blooded murders of Ahmuad Arbery (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2020/may/29/the-killing-of-ahmaud-arbery) and George Floyd (https://globalnews.ca/news/7001252/george-floyd-death-police-critics/). Because Fanon was talking about a different time and place, some of his language needs to be substituted, primarily the "colonizer" for "racist white American establishment" and "colonized/native/peasant" for "average black American," and I will specify any other substitutions as I go in my commentary, which I will try to keep to a minimum, especially since most of these speak for themselves.
“Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together—that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler—was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing "them" well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system” (Fanon, 36).
“Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of his "nation," and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure.” (Fanon, 236).
-- While this has definitely become more subtle in the States the days of Martin Luther King Jr., it is still a permeates American society and culture for many people and institutions, including the general institution of the police.
“Violence in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these enslaved men at arm's length; it seeks to dehumanize them” (Sartre, 15).
--In this context, the "aim" of these people in power is to keep the African American minority in ghettoized communities and uncertain situations as a mean of their dehumanization.
“…read Fanon; for he shows clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man recreating himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten it—that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them” (Sartre, 21).
--To be read in the context of centrists/those decrying the riots as completely negative:
“Let us look at ourselves, if we can bear to, and see what is becoming of us. First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip tease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it's not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggressions. A fine sight they are too, the believers in nonviolence, saying that they are neither executioners nor victims. Very well then; if you're not victims when the government which you've voted for, when the army in which your younger brothers are serving without hesitation or remorse have undertaken race murder, you are, without a shadow of doubt, executioners. And if you choose to be victims and to risk being put in prison for a day or two, you are simply choosing to pull your irons out of the fire. But you will not be able to pull them out; they'll have to stay there till the end. Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors” (Sartre, 24-25).
“Pacifists and legalists, they are in fact partisans of order, the new order—but to the colonialist bourgeoisie they put bluntly enough the demand which to them is the main one: "Give us more power." On the specific question of violence, the elite are ambiguous. They are violent in their words and reformist in their attitudes.” (Fanon, 59).
Continued in Comment to this Comment.