Steven W. Thrasher, Ph.D., is a professor at the highly-regarded Northwestern University, and he wrote an outrageous article about policing. He said burning down a police precinct in response to the killing of George Floyd is a “reasonable” one and is a “quintessentially American one.”
A few excerpts from his article:
“There should be absolutely no confusion about the logic of destroying a police station in response to the police killing of George Floyd. You can agree with or disagree with the action. But you cannot deny that there is a logic in targeting a police station after the police have lynched a man in broad daylight, on video. It’s an attempt to create a different order in the society.
“The old ruling assumptions about policing seem neither as necessary or inevitable as they did before…
“What we are seeing in the streets of Minneapolis and Memphis and New York and Los Angeles is the result not just of a decade of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist organizing amped up by the pandemic. We are also witnessing a rebellion against the many inequities exposed by the pandemic…
“As any military tactician or social justice organizer can tell you, direct action gets the goods. The destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response, and a predictable one.
Oh, really? Next time a black person kills an officer or a white person, we should burn down the block he lives on???
Inequities by the pandemic? That’s the fault of who, white people? Republicans?
Did Mr. Thrasher never learn that two wrongs don’t make a right? Don’t be too surprised that this is what a professor at Northwestern says. Northwestern is in corrupt Chicago and it’s kind of the NYU of Chicago.
Just so you know, Thrasher is the Daniel H. Renberg chair of social justice in reporting at Northwestern University, where he is also an assistant professor of journalism and a faculty member of the Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. His research focuses on HIV/AIDS, racism, and policing.
This is the US university today.
Subscribe to the Daily Newsletter
