"Respect/Empower/Include."

Murals on the boarded up windows of State Street, photographed today, in Madison, Wisconsin.

Madisonians in shorts trudge past a mural of Barack and Michelle Obama that is painted on the boarded-up window of Which Wich Superior Sandwiches:



On the boarded-up window of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, a drooling troglodyte cop observes what might be a pile of burning doughnuts that give off smoke that reads — like a thought balloon — "Defund the Police":



A longer view of the side of the museum featuring an ironic "Right turn only" sign:



There's the notion that "being a revolutionary" has an element of being fun, loving, and beautiful:



There's the grievance that you can't play your music really loud without people calling the cops:



More Madisonians trudging along, this time past dripping letters that few will read, but I'm seeing "Tell the President/To prepare the bunker/When he flee/Because until we see/Justice you will/Never see peace!"



"Yes, we can!" the old President says, as a waiter sets up an outdoor café table.

"We've researched it and it has nothing to do with slavery. James Penny was a slave trader, but he had nothing to do with the Penny Lane area."

Says a Liverpool tour guide, quoted in "The Beatles 'Penny Lane' Controversy, Explained/The street the song is named after has come under fire for a potential link to a slave trader" (radio.com).

Madness Penny Lane Defaced 😡 pic.twitter.com/IARaqO9zcP

— 🔥🔴David McGrady🔥🔴 (@Djmc76) June 12, 2020

"Urban trekking around Denver the other day, I happened across a protest march of maybe a thousand people. Here’s what I observed. The marchers were almost all white...."

"Most were young women looking vaguely guilt-ridden. They were well-dressed, well-groomed and well-fed.... But one sign troubled me. It appeared in various incantations, but the gist was 'Justice NOW for George.'... I’ve watched the video of George dying, and it was horrifying. If no exculpatory evidence turns up, then I hope those cops rot in jail. I’m guessing nearly all people – including other cops – hope for the same. But notice the 'if' in the preceding paragraph.... Here, the cop has been arrested and is in jail on a million-dollar bond awaiting... trial. Given that, what exactly does the shouted word 'NOW' mean in 'Justice NOW for George'? Are the protesters demanding that we bypass the trial and just lynch the cops right now?"

From "A report from the big white suburban guilty girls picnic march" by Glenn K. Beaton (The Aspen Beat).

"Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway came up with the idea for the murals and tasked city arts administrator Karin Wolf with the job."

"Wolf says she reached out to community cultural partners the city already has a relationship with in order to tap local artists. 'We definitely wanted to amplify the voices of people who have been directly impacted by racial injustice,' she says.... Not all the murals are part of the city program, says Wolf. Some store owners arranged for their own art and others artists went rogue. 'People didn’t know better,' says Wolf. 'A lot of people wanted to help and didn’t know how.'" — Isthmus reports on the murals of State Street.

There was a noticeable change from the condition of the plywood 4 days ago, the last time I'd checked. There's an effort to replace harsh graffiti with real murals and, as you can tell from the quote above, a prioritizing of black artists — with spaces marked as "reserved" and this message to white artists that "giving up some white privilege means saving this space for artists of color"...



A space that looked like this 4 days ago...



Is now painted over in yellow and marked "Reserved for a black female artist/Please respect this space":



I think some white artists were painting flowers rather than a "Black Lives Matter" image, and this looks as though someone who'd chalked out her design thought better of it, quit in the middle of things, and requested that a black artist "claim this space":



At the art museum, they were painting out the graffiti, presumably prepping for a nicer mural...




Some of more on-topic images were colorful and optimistic, like this...



And this...



Others had a harder edge, but were, I would say, respectful toward the city:



I wasn't sure which of the art was part of the city's program. This has more of a graffiti quality but it's also pretty positive...



This, I think, is the kind of thing the city is trying get painted over...

Sign posted in my neighborhood tells white people we "don't get to criticize" the choice of protesters to resort to rioting.

It's "white privilege," we are told, to express a desire for order and security:



A second sign attempts to convince us to abolish the police because they "uphold an inherently racist system" and "protect whiteness and capitalism":



ADDED: I anticipate that my post title will be criticized on the ground that there were a lot of peaceful protesters and we don't know whether any of them participated in anything that can properly be called "rioting." I want to keep the facts straight, and I want to know the facts. I agree that that those who broke windows and looted shops may have been an entirely different set of people from the people who were there to protest police brutality. I await the news reports and investigations that can bring these facts to light. I keep looking!

But that post title is just telling you what the sign says! It's one of the many problems with the sign. Whoever wrote that sign made no effort to separate the peaceful protesters from the rioters. It tells me to shut up about any objection I might have to the rioting because those in the oppressed group get to choose how to fight their oppression. This implies that the form of protest chosen was, in fact, theft and vandalism, and white people are not even allowed to criticize this expression.

"If facts are the seeds..."

Text: "If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow."