I am about to read to you an excerpt from an article I wrote in June 2017 called

If you're Black in America riots are spiritual impulse not a political strategy.

In the summer of 1967, the city of Detroit burned.

Milwaukee, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Newark were all engulfed in flames.

Even forgotten towns like Cairo, Illinois, and Cambridge, Maryland,

descended for some nights in that torred summer into anarchy.

The havoc seemed to be catching.

The fire in one town sparked the fire in the next.

America seemed to be coming undone. Yet for most Americans, the

riots of that summer were viewed from afar through the lens of the evening news and

front-page headlines. They were not seeing their own homes burned,

their own streets occupied by uniformed troops. From this safe distance, the uprisings looked

like senseless violence, the reckless and

short-sighted actions of a damaged people, a people with no strategy, no hope. But the

truth of riots is something entirely different, something entirely

more sacred. America is unsettled land, and it remains so because it was founded on white supremacy,

and white supremacy is by nature an unsettling force.

The centuries long attempt to subdue the continent by nakedly ransacking its resources only

for the benefit of some creates by necessity a vast army of angry people who will forever for the sake of themselves, for the sake of their children be forced to resist.

Far from an ugly side effect of our nation's character, white supremacy is a

core American principle. This country didn't just end up this way. It was made this way.

To be black in a country like this is to forge your entire life in the dank valley between America's ideals and its actions. We are told we have been created equally, but we are treated as a separate class.

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