Sharing a post by David Meek:
My feed has been so full of people comparing the current rioting to the Boston Tea Party as a justification I thought I should set the record straight as a history teacher.
Modern day rioting and looting for personal gain is NOTHING like the Boston Tea Party.
During the tea party, great care was taken by the Sons of Liberty to target the tea of the East India Company, whom they viewed as an unethical monopoly that threatened local businesses, and avoid any damage to other private property. The only person who tried to steal some of the tea for personal use was beaten and thrown overboard. After the tea was disposed of, the group swept the decks of the ship and gave it a proper cleaning so that the ship's captain could not claim that anything except the cargo had been touched. Then they financially replaced the only piece of private property that had been damaged - the captain's padlock that locked the hold where the tea was stored.
My point is that when people protested during our founding, private property was respected, anarchy did not break out, and the protests were used to target the property that represented injustice. The Patriots were protesting abuses of the law and were careful to only target those abuses in their protests. They recognized that doing any different would compromise their cause in the eyes of the world: which is exactly what looters and anarchists are doing in this case. Part of what is fueling some of the racism alive today is fear of lawlessness. Fear always leads to injustice, it doesn't prevent it. These riots are feeding into that fear and, as a result, will contribute to more racism instead of helping the cause of equality. That is why the family of George Floyd is rightfully speaking against these riots. It's sad because this is a cause that needs to be fought for, but not exactly in this way. If the protests were directly solely at the injustice that had been committed and did not include the destruction of private property, I would be 100% in support of them. But rioting by destroying the property of innocent people is NOT the right way of protesting injustice, ever.
Even the founding protestors recognized that.