Even those attempting to sound calm wound up defending the riots. Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote this in the New York Times: “If you cannot attain justice by engaging the system, then you must seek other means of changing it. That’s not a wish; it’s a premonition.” So rioters are correct to riot.

From his large, comfy armchair, the Boomer filmmaker Michael Moore pretended to command the armies of the angry: “We must rise up. We revolt,” he tweeted, as though watching riots on the news was the equivalent of being a revolutionary and as though anyone born in the last 30 years has the slightest idea who he is. He urged the rioters to keep up the good work: “Riots? THIS IS A REBELLION.” He also said the local county attorney should be arrested, applauded the destruction of the Third Precinct police building, and retweeted a remark from Colin Kaepernick: “When civility leads to death, revolting is the only logical reaction.”

Al Sharpton, calling for calm in a less than ringing way, undercut himself by saying damage done specifically to black-owned stores was “so reckless,” which was correct, but implied that attacks on all other stores were more understandable. Does Mr. Sharpton expect rioters to pause in the midst of an ecstasy of vandalism to look up property records? (“Hey, everybody, stop! Before we do anything we have to break into the Hennepin County deeds office and do some research first!”)

Let’s extend the logic of “Don’t hurt black stores.” If you happen to be a black person who owns an untouched store next to a burned-out store, won’t the riots do massive damage to the value of your property, the cost of your insurance going forward, and the general viability of your business? What about all the black people who lost their jobs when a Target and an AutoZone and other businesses were destroyed? What about the black customers who relied on that Target? Against all these obvious harms, and many more, is there any conceivable upside to destroying these businesses? Even if you managed to walk away from a looted store with an armload of goods or a few bucks from the till, is it really worth the ancillary damage to the neighborhood, the city, race relations?

Those who look at the Minneapolis riots from the perspective of black Americans simply aren’t grasping the information, more than 50 years after the black-separatist movement got started, that black America and white America are not opponents and are tied together in all sorts of ways. Ransacking Minneapolis does not advance black America’s cause.

There’s something gruesome about faraway commentators who will never have to deal with the consequences of what the rioters have done languidly calling for more of the same because, I suppose, it’s entertaining to them, or because they fancy themselves urban guerrillas as they tap away on Twitter.