Is it time we learned to live with the coronavirus?
WHO warned the virus may become endemic, and some scientists warn 'second wave' of infections inevitable........... several countries have reported a resurgence in new infections as they gradually return to normalcy. Iran's president threatened to reimpose restrictions after doctors recorded the highest total of daily cases. Schools, museums and parks were closed in Seoul shortly after they reopened. The World Health Organization recently warned the virus may become endemic, similar to HIV.
![People protest the death of George Floyd outside of a burning fast food restaurant on May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis [AP/John Minchillo]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2020/6/7/0cc543fcdcc042abb08368d0d13ebb37_18.jpg)
The racists' peace To praise the peacefulness of a protest is to assert the right of those resisted to determine the ethics of resistance. ........ Their peace, their regular order is a place where Black people are killed with impunity. ........ Peace is never peaceful in a colony. The peace of the slave master is not the peace of the enslaved. The slave master finds placid the view of the masses of enslaved people working for him under the whip of the overseer. The enslaved finds peace in a plantation on fire. ......... It is not peaceful in the prisons, in the slums, under parole, under-employed, or under arrest. ........ When their innocents die, they launch wars. Their protests to their innocents dying are wars on countries they say harbour terrorists and wars with countries they say look like they harbour terrorists. Their protests are with artillery, with 20-year wars, with the violent removal of regimes, the remaking of societies in their image, the Shock and Awe that is to serve as a message to the entire world that they will not be suffering this again. ............ Their protest is a full course meal. When they are finished with it, they give us the "peaceful protest", the bones and gristle and entrails of their protest, thrown out like chicken feed to the slave cabins. I am not that hungry. ............ To order that our protests must be peaceful is to demand that when we ask to be injured less, it is in a tone that is respectful and polite. To praise the peacefulness of a protest is to assert the right of those resisted to determine the ethics of resistance - their right to command and to direct it, their right to lay out how resistance must be conducted. ................ The right to command Black people - even in their resistance - is so absolute in white supremacist society that media personalities and police officers, in full confidence, take it upon themselves to determine when the protest against them is "marred" and to sort out the good resistance from the bad. ................ A revolution cannot be marred. An uprising cannot be marred. A peaceful protest always is. .......... This is just as well as the "George Floyd protests" are not protests. It is an uprising that is beaten so badly by rubber bullets and kneeling cop photos that the pulp which remains can be mistaken for a solemn, toothless demonstration. But it is not. It is an uprising. An uprising about George Floyd but it is also about the unnamed. ................ Reducing the uprising to "anger over George Floyd's death" is like reducing the Arab Spring to "anger over Mohamed Bouazizi's death". In both Tunisia and Minnesota people angry at a killing marched into the streets, clashed with officers and faced down tear gas. The US press calls one the Tunisian revolution, it calls the other the "George Floyd protests". One has its "violence" spoken of as the predictable consequences of oppression; the other's "violence" is seen as marring a peaceful protest, or, proof of the protesters' criminality. ................ Soon officials will say "we have heard you, we will reform, but to do that, we have to return to regular order". Or, if more conservative, "Get back to work!" And we would return, bitterly, to the status quo knowing our time is up. ... revolutions have no deadline ........... The language of peaceful protest handcuffs the revolt. ........... The goalpost of ending Negrophobic sport-killing will be moved so that it will seem that the goal was always to be heard. ........... Their peace is a racist peace. Their feelings of rosy, universal love is our holding cell. .......... At this moment racists are biding their time. They are hoping for a quick return to regular order. They are waiting for the return to the kind of peace where Black people are killed with impunity. At this moment, famous liberals are on the world stage attempting to strong-arm the narrative of an uprising from radical activists ............ The media, the police and liberal society are coalescing into a repression that aims to put down a radical uprising against the colony of anti-Black killing. They are diverting a march towards the end of colonialism into a march towards an opened dialogue. Something we have not asked for. We spoke with fire. .............. In our peacetime every prison is an anachronism; every police officer is in the wrong era. Pro-police TV shows with their funny Black sidekicks, books and films that tell the story of Black suffering to tell the story of American redemption, settler flag-waving and all settler-colonial institutions are now as out of place as seeing a man walking down a street in Boston in full King George III attire.
