White people: stop talking about the riots and George Floyd in the same breath

A new form of the “fine people on both sides” narrative is emerging. A white person goes on social media and righteously proclaims that they condemn BOTH the riots and the murder of George Floyd. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

I’m going to explain how offensive this is in a 1-minute read.

Let’s say I kill your son or your daughter. Then one of your offspring’s friends burns down my house.

Then, everyone starts talking about how terrible, terrible, terrible it is for people to burn down houses when they get angry. And they don’t condone killing either!

Can you catch a glimpse of how upset that this might make you? That people were putting the destruction of property on the same moral plane as the crime of killing your child?

You may not realize this, but black people are a community under siege. I’m not just talking about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. This narrative stretches endless back to Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and Jim Crow and thousands of people lynched and terrorized and millions of people thrown into prison for crimes that whites are not charged with at anywhere near the same rates.

You want to defend a racist status quo? Fine. You want to act like black people are inexplicably violating a social contract that has done almost nothing but harm them over the centuries? Do your thing.

But get George Floyd’s name out of your mouth.