No one would call having a fire extinguisher in your home or office or business racist. Rather, people would look at that as a sensible way of preventing or at least limiting damage if a fire did occur. I can’t think that any (sensible) person would see construction codes designed to limit damage from earthquakes or floods or structural collapse as somehow designed to discriminate on the basis of race. Boarding up your windows if you live in Florida or Carolina, and a hurricane is approaching? that’s perfectly sensible!

But, if you hear news that has a strong possibility of inflaming tensions and perhaps start a riot, boarding up your windows is raaaaacist, at least according to one writer in The New York Times:

Minnesota Values White Comfort More Than Black Lives

As I walk around my hometown, I see so many boarded up buildings. Who is really being protected?

By Justin Ellis | April 16, 2021

MINNEAPOLIS — The morning the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, began, I was visiting my mom at a hospital just blocks from the courthouse. I remember noting that it was unseasonably warm for late March in this part of the Midwest. But that wasn’t the most striking part of the day. Nor was the long line of satellite trucks or the reporters from around the world surrounding the Hennepin County Government Center. Instead, what gave me pause was all the plywood that encased the ground floor of the hospital’s emergency department.

I came back to Minneapolis late last year to work on a book about how Black families have endured racism in the city where I grew up, and to support my mom during her cancer treatment. I’ve been keeping a mental list of the spaces that, since video surfaced of George Floyd’s final moments beneath Derek Chauvin’s knee, have become barricaded versions of their former selves. You can’t move through this city without noticing the hardware stores with floor-to-ceiling wood coverings, the shuttered restaurants that didn’t survive Covid or last summer’s fires, and the brunch spots and boutiques that have hired local artists to soften their fortifications with strained messages like “In This Together,” “Know Justice, Know Peace” and “Love Is All Around,” which reads like a cringeworthy homage to the theme song from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

But there was something especially crushing about the plywood surrounding a building meant to give aid and care to people suffering in the city, leaving just enough room to expose signs reading “EMERGENCY” and “TRAUMA CENTER.”

In the lead-up to Mr. Chauvin’s trial, city officials and business owners often talked about “bracing” for the public reaction, their focus seemingly on protecting the city’s buildings from any harm that might come from a repeat of the demonstrations against police violence that took place last summer.

Well, yes, they would. Justin Ellis, the author, had already noted that some businesses “didn’t survive . . . last summer’s fires.” Wouldn’t it make sense that businesses which did survive would want to protect themselves from potential riots this year if Derek Chauvin is acquitted, or at least convicted on some of the lesser charges rather than the grossly overcharged Murder 2?^[1]To be convicted of second degree murder, the prosecution would have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Derek Chauvin intended to kill George Floyd.

Mr Ellis was upset that a hospital boarded up its ground-floor windows, perhaps not considering that hospitals don’t get to close down for repairs when vandals bust out the glass. That hospital, all hospitals, have to treat patients without regard to their race, so in trying to protect the premises, that hospital was also trying to protect its ability to treat black patients as well as white ones.

Law enforcement made a plan for managing security around the Chauvin trial, a massive team-up between Twin Cities area police departments, state police, local sheriffs’ deputies and Minnesota National Guard members capable of flooding the region with thousands of officers at a moments notice.

The goal, as the Hennepin County sheriff put it in an op-ed for The Star Tribune, was “to preserve the First Amendment rights of those who wish to protest while, at the same time, fulfilling our mission of protecting property, ensuring public safety and guaranteeing the sanctity of the judicial process.” Naturally they named it Operation Safety Net. It’s not subtle. They want to offer comfort to those they deem worthy of saving, rather than the Black and brown residents who are subject to relentless brutality.

Why wouldn’t a Sheriff’s Department charged with keeping the public safe name an operation “Safety Net”?

How are we to read Mr Ellis’ OpEd piece other than allowing the potential demonstrators to burn, loot and destroy at will?

They’ve lived up to that promise almost every night outside the Brooklyn Center Police Department for the past week. In their quest to maintain order they’ve met demonstrators with increasing numbers of police officers and National Guard members, armed with tear gas, flash bang grenades and rubber bullets. All these defensive measures have upended the lives of families living across the street from the police headquarters at the Sterling Square Apartments, a complex filled with Black and immigrant families. It should be the safest place in Brooklyn Center; now residents are evacuating into area hotels.

Really? Are they evacuating into area hotels because the police are defending their headquarters, or because rioters have surged against the Police Department? The Police and National Guard wouldn’t be using there “tear gas, flash bang grenades, and rubber bullets” if there were nobody there, or if the Mostly Peaceful Protests™ weren’t somehow less than peaceful, weren’t trying to break in and burn the place down.

In reading Mr Ellis’ article, I came away with the undeniable impression that he was filled with rage, utter rage, when he wrote it. You can follow the link to his original and read it for yourself, and perhaps your impression will be different, but, to me, Mr Ellis wants the people of Brooklyn Center and Minneapolis to take to the streets, to express the rage he feels themselves, and to do so through violence and vandalism and arson. He said so pretty explicitly:

Whether you call this the result of white supremacy, or a white majority, the consequences are the same. The state has its boot on the necks of the Black people who make up less than 10 percent of its residents. When you are left at the mercy of the state and given no option to heal, fury becomes your voice and your only tool. And in preparing for the Chauvin trial and protecting property against the reaction to whatever verdict is announced, those who have power in Minnesota made clear to us, yet again, what matters most to them.

If “fury becomes your voice and your only tool,” why would Mr Ellis be surprised that some would choose to defend themselves and their homes and their businesses against that fury, against the violence for which Mr Ellis seems to be calling? Derek Chauvin is on trial, and may well be convicted on some charge. Kim Potter has been charged with second-degree manslaughter. But that isn’t good enough for Mr Ellis; he wants the people of Minnesota who did not kill George Floyd, and who did not kill Daunte Wright, to be punished as well. To him, resisting being beaten, burned or bombed is racist in itself, and you are racist if you don’t agree.