One of the most curious rhetorical tricks these days is that when the woke refer to violence, it’s limited to acts done to the person, not a thing. Words can be violence. A Molotov cocktail thrown into an empty store is not violence, but property damage. Property can be replaced. Lives cannot. The law values life above property, which is certainly correct, and so there can never be a justification for use of force against the person when the person’s only offense is burning buildings or looting stores, property damage.

Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.

—Nikole Hannah-Jones

As a laundry list of words have been untethered from any cognizable meaning over the last ten years, from rape to racism, so that they can be accused at random, it’s interesting that this one word, “violence,” has been tightened up in such facile fashion. Then again, there is a somewhat consistent rationale here, as all are defined by outcome rather than conduct. If a “victim” feels that she’s been raped, then it’s rape. If arson destroyed a business that somebody sunk their life into, but no one dies, then it’s just property damage.

We’re still a few days away from a verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial for the killing of George Floyd, and people in Minneapolis were not unaware of the potential that an adverse outcome to the protesters might have an adverse impact on their homes and businesses. So they prepared. This, too, the New York Times reliably informs us, demonstrates how the otherwise nice white folks in Minnesota care more about their property than black lives.

Still, Black drivers account for the majority of traffic stops and searches by Minneapolis police. Officers use force against Black people at a rate seven times greater than against whites. According to a Minneapolis Star Tribune database of police-related deaths of Minnesotans since 2000, Blacks account for 27 percent of the deaths in police encounters.

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.

Whenever someone offers disparate outcomes without any consideration of why there are disparate outcomes, you realize they are determined to make their point without regard to facts. It may well be racism, but it may be other causes as well, or a combination of things. Blacks account for 27% of deaths in police encounters since 2000. The total number is 55. Whites account for 57% with a total number of 118. Altogether, the raw number is relatively small, though disproportionate to their general population (although the demographics of the population of people committing crimes isn’t quite as clear), but the fact that more white people are killed than black suggests the opposite of the presumed narrative of many. White people die too.

In the interim, two deaths, Daunte Wright and Adam Toledo, have pushed the Chauvin verdict somewhat off the front burner for the time being. While people were gearing up to protest a verdict that failed to provide whatever they deemed “justice,” new reasons to don masks and carry umbrellas appeared. No need to wait for the verdict to take to the streets and light a match.

When Kim Potter, a police officer in Brooklyn Center, a town some 10 miles north of Minneapolis, shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright last weekend, history repeated itself in Minnesota: the fences and barricades to keep protesters away from the Police Department, the tear gas used to disperse crowds, the nights of anger and destruction giving way to curfews imposed by local and state officials. Across the metropolitan area, contractors drilled plywood into place, all to protect structures from violence being done to — and in the name of — neighbors. All to protect the city from the unyielding reality facing its Black citizens.

Is it racist, white supremacy, as the writer Justin Ellis—who returned to Minnesota to write a book about “how Black families in his hometown endure the racism they experience”—says, to put up plywood, to protect one’s home or business from damage? And this is what, he argues, the police exist to protect. Not black lives but white property.*

As the city awaits a verdict in Mr. Chauvin’s trial, Minnesota’s leaders are posturing for peace while fortifying against the cries of the most vulnerable. It’s an act of desperation — if not outright cowardice — to spare no expense in military might while investing in the cheapest plywood, all in an effort to protect this state’s investment in whiteness. If power has to be maintained through overwhelming force, or even hastily built barriers, those of us standing in trauma on the other side have to wonder who’s really being protected.

Why Ellis perceives himself as “standing in trauma,” whatever that means, is unclear, but irrelevant. So what if he needs to pretend to be a victim. It’s not exactly unusual among the unduly passionate. But his attempt to create a preemptive argument that people who try not to have their businesses and homes destroyed are manifestations of white supremacy is just the sort of advanced idiocy demanded to create an atmosphere where rioting, burning and looting aren’t violence, but putting up plywood is racism.

*A comment to Ellis’ op-ed from “Deborah,” also from Minnesota, was poignant.

I also live in Minneapolis. All of what Mr. Ellis says is true.

What is also true, is that in last summer’s riots, 1500 buildings, minority owned homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed. Whole swaths of neighborhoods in south Minneapolis still have damage.

What is also true is that, night after night, for weeks, helicopters circled south Minneapolis all night terrifying people, gunfire rained out, marchers took over two major thoroughfares, Lake St. and Hennepin Ave., breaking into buildings, looting, burning, assaulting people, and destroying cars.

What is also true, is that after a week or so of this, people in nearby neighborhoods were told by the city to watch out for dark colored cars w/o license plates that were roaming the areas looking for places to break into or fire bomb, and to search their bushes, back yards and alleys for Molotov cocktails. watch of people who patrolled in shifts for nights. Again, we were terrified.

What is also true is that many, many, businesses were unable to come back obviously affecting the ability of people to provide for themselves and their families.

What is also true is that services like post offices, banks, the public library, pharmacies, hardware stores, grocery stores, and the local police station all closed, some permanently and some just for a really long period of time.

Does all of that mean the city is valuing buildings over people, or that the city is valuing what makes a city safe and livable?