Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
The protests here are largely not destructive. But mostly white hipster suburbans, and the po po is watching them so the neighborhoods have a spike in shootings/ murders, of black people. Grand Rapids got burned up. I don’t think from white suprematists, but maybe?
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We haven't had much in the way of protest here. We had the initial protests in late May/early June, and then the funeral, and that was pretty much it.
We're a minority/majority city, with a quarter of our population Black. I'm sure there are some organizations doing something right now, but we don't really have a focal point for protesting.
More people have been upset about the missing/murdered soldier of late. (She was Hispanic, her killer Black, his girlfriend who helped dismember her is White, and I assume Ft. Hood is pretty diverse. The complaints are about how the Army treats minority women. He had harassed her and apparently killed her because he did not want her complaining about it.)
OTOH, Austin (170 miles away) has been pretty active with the protesting, to the point someone was killed at the protests a few days ago. Its Black population is pretty small, 8 percent of the whole. It feels a lot more white there, roughly half of its population is non-Hispanic white compared to our quarter of the population.
Maybe it's because it's a college town (though the students aren't generally around because summer/Covid). Maybe it's more "liberal", though Houston is pretty damned liberal for Texas. Maybe their police are more of a pain in the ass than ours are. Art Acevedo (who we stole from Austin) has been pretty good about being a public face of the police and seems to care about the inequalities. There are some questions about some cop shootings and the body cams, but they haven't risen to the outrage level yet. Maybe it's because Covid is pretty bad here in Houston right now and our population is focused more on that than Austin's is. Or maybe having the funeral here, being actually able to say goodbye to George Floyd gave some closure to the folks down here. I know a lot of people who went to the public viewing, and I think a good hunk of people watched the funeral here.
