Dakota Beacon

I received an email today from the CEO of Etsy.  For those of you who are not acquainted with Etsy, here is the description of the company from Wikipedia:  

Etsy is an American e-commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items and craft supplies. These items fall under a wide range of categories, including jewelry, bags, clothing, home décor and furniture, toys, art, as well as craft supplies and tools. All vintage items must be at least 20 years old.

I have occasionally enjoyed browsing there, although I have never bought anything.  So, I opened the email to see what was there today.  It was a letter - an earnest letter proclaiming “ . . . solidarity with our employees and communities who are voicing their anguish, anger, and deep frustration with systems that oppress and devalue Black lives.” It went on to list what its values are:

We stand against police brutality in all forms.

We stand against a criminal justice system that disproportionately targets Black Americans.

We stand against the widespread disenfranchisement of Black and Brown communities whose voices are silenced at the polls.

There are a lot of “when did you stop beating your wife” assumptions there.  Of course everyone is against police brutality in all forms.  What kind of moron would be for that?  (Presumably four, one of whom is now in custody, but I’m talking about the rest of us - “society”.)  Maybe we need to define “brutality”.  But a criminal judicial system that disproportionately targets Black Americans?  That’s a hefty charge. What evidence is supplied for this accusation?  Disenfranchisement of Black and Brown communities whose voices are silenced at the polls?  Who is being disenfranchised?  In 2008 the people of the United States of America elected a Black American to the Presidency.  If the “Black and Brown communities” were, in fact, being “disenfranchised”, who voted for Barack Obama?  People who wanted a Black American president but who would disenfranchise Black and Brown voters?  Please.

There have historically been charges that minorities are more often pulled over while driving.  There have been many instances of police abuses.  One would have been the cold-blooded murder of Justine Damond for the crime of calling 911 when she heard screams.  No one felt it necessary to write a letter about that instance of brutality.

After some self-righteous and facially benign statements about support for Black businessmen and Black women and Black children, Etsy announced a donation of $500,000 to the Borealis Philanthropy’s Black-Led Movement Fund, a leftist organization known for partnering with Black Lives Matter, an organization which tolerates and has participated in street violence - notably over the past week across America, and another donation of $500,000 to the Equal Justice Initiative, a law firm based in Alabama, which supplies free legal services to “the poor”.  I think, coupled with the Borealis Philanthropy’s focus, we can safely assume which “poor” will be helped here, and it will most likely not be the poor small business entrepreneurs who lost their life savings and life’s work when their shops were torched or blown up.  It will not likely be the poor young entry-level workers or single mothers whose jobs at Target or OfficeMax or Dollar Tree helped to sustain themselves and their children.  It will not likely be the poor lady who wishes now she were “with George Floyd” because her neighborhood has been destroyed, or the poor man whose twisted body was left on the sidewalk after he was brutally beaten by a mob.  I doubt they will seize on those causes of action.  In Minneapolis a low-income housing development was burned to the ground by the people Etsy and Borealis and the Equal Justice Initiative are lending a hand to.  Who do you suppose was left homeless in this act of violence?

 For a company that “stands with women” or “Black women”, Etsy has left a lot of good, hard-working and wronged women out of their donations.  For a company that celebrates Black business, it chose to support those who destroyed and burned those businesses to the ground rather than the honest citizens who had built them.  

I have informed Etsy that I want to be taken off of their mailing list, but it didn’t do much good because it went to a “NOREPLY” box.  Instead, I will tell my readers about it.  I hope that Etsy will re-think this.  The Borealis Philanthropy is not the direction we should be looking to for making these injured businessmen whole.  But, going by the company they keep, I think we can expect that $500,000 to be put to use in furthering the cause of social unrest and rioting - that is what they have been doing this week.  It’s what they value.  

If Etsy wanted to “make a difference” and give a hand up to Black businesses and help Black women in America they could do better.  Maybe they could set up a fund to help these people who have been so deeply hurt by this to recover.  Most of them, by the way, are Black Americans. 

What happened a week ago yesterday, on Memorial Day, was disgraceful.  No one is arguing about that.  No decent person wants to see someone abused.  We don’t know that racism had anything at all to do with the violence of Derek Chauvin.  Nothing of a racially-charged nature has been heard on this.  Did he regularly abuse Blacks?  We have not heard that he did.  He might have been an equal-opportunity abuser.  For all we know he didn’t like Floyd because they didn’t get along when they worked together.  Maybe he doesn’t like drunks.  Maybe he just hates people in general.  This was a case of police brutality, not necessarily racism, and it most certainly was not a reflection of racism in Minneapolis.  The people of that city were horrified at the vicious act.  No one wants to see this abuse go unanswered in court.  It will be answered.  We will punish the guilty.  But now - what about punishing those who beat people senseless for trying to protect their property?  What about punishing those who burned the city to the ground, who terrorized a whole nation?  Who desecrated houses of worship and vandalized businesses?  What about justice for these innocent people who suffered?  Maybe Etsy needs to step back and look at the enormity of their gesture and the evil ends to which their million-dollar donations will be used.  Like the millionaire celebrities who posted bail so the vandals and arsonists and batterers who were arrested and taken off the streets could be back out there pillaging some more, Etsy is coming to their rescue as well.  

Etsy does not have a storefront.  Etsy is operated online.  They must feel very safe in their windowless bunker.  But we can’t go to lunch online.  We can’t try on a pair of shoes online.  We can’t meet our friends for a brew online.  We depend upon the kinds of small businesses and stores which were destroyed over the past week from coast to coast.  Shame on you, Etsy, and your CEO, Josh Silverman.  We don’t need to fan the flames of violence in our neighborhoods.

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