The current crisis and the structural inequality it represents are the direct results of historical political failures. Early civil rights activists called for socio-economic inclusion and were ignored. The result is the growth of a deeply segregated state, where law enforcement protects the white and the wealthy from minorities.
The argument
Dr. Elizabeth Hinton argues that there has been little effort to deal with the fallout from racial segregation since the 1960s. Issues such as unemployment, poor housing, poverty, and poor schooling were not resolved when the formal system ended, and left in place they have all led to a low level of general social unrest sustained over decades. On this account, what followed George Floyd's murder is not a sudden development but the surfacing of that long-running discontent, which recently exploded on a large scale. The record of what governments did instead is what makes the failure protracted rather than accidental. Attempts at funding grassroots programs to deal with economic inequality have been promptly shut-down or defunded since the late 1960s, so the interventions aimed at the underlying conditions were precisely the ones that did not survive. Particularly under the Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan administrations, government legislation has focused on stamping out crime rather than tackling the root causes of inequality — an approach that treats the visible symptom as the problem and leaves the conditions producing it untouched. The same preference is visible in the response to the unrest itself: the use of police crackdowns and military force instead of sweeping social reforms demonstrates the opposition to institutional change. Read this way, the events become legible rather than inexplicable. Many sociologists have highlighted the social and economic factors that may have provoked looting during the riots, and the demands protestors actually made point the same way, since a call for police reform names the institution that was expanded as the alternative to reform elsewhere. After George Floyd's murder, it galvanized the disaffected masses to action, but the root cause of the wave of violence spreading across America is present in those demands. Many have voiced their opinion that these long-standing social issues have gone unaddressed for far too long.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Political radicals are causing the current crisis, and it has nothing to do with racial inequality. Left-leaning radicals have hijacked what would have been peaceful protests and caused violence and chaos. The rioters are not truly interested in racial politics but are using one event as an excuse to loot and destroy neighborhoods. The majority of protestors want to spotlight the racist attitudes of some police officers and departments. Their concerns are not with economic policies. Militant communists have been using Black Lives Matter to promote anti-capitalist ideas, which have nothing to do with the protests. Their real concern is not racial inequality, but the redistribution of land and the abolition of private property.