It’s the tenth straight day of ever-growing protests against police brutality across the United States and around the world. It’s our 86th day of coronavirus distancing. Everything feels simultaneously like too much and not enough.
As I’ve watched the street protests grow and grow and grow over the past ten days, I’ve been holding my breath. Waiting for the wave to break. Waiting for people to be intimidated back into their homes, for the numbers to dwindle down to a core of activists blocking highways, as has happened in the past. For the nice white liberals to change their profile pictures, post their beautifully graphically designed slogans, and go back to their lives. That’s how it’s gone every other time there’s been an outcry about a police murder of a Black person, a peak of interest and outrage and then a retreat, leaving me the lone voice of an angry sociologist ranting into the wind of the suburbs once more.
This time feels different. This time, coronavirus has already disproportionately decimated Black communities with job losses and deaths of family members. People have nowhere to go and nothing to do, nothing left to lose by being in the streets. At the same time, white people are home as workplaces and schools close, with nowhere to be and nothing to do to distract from the images of police violence and the voices of Black people. This time, it is harder to turn away, and we are all emotionally open in a way we have not collectively been in a long time.
What I see is not a dwindling, but a joining. I hear racist oppression and institutional violence named and described in the public discourse with a clarity and consistency that has not happened before in my lifetime. In the past I have heard endless cries of “why don’t they wait, why don’t they lobby”; this time, I’m hearing “of course people are angry, why shouldn’t they act.” I am not the only one in my neighborhood pushing back, I am not the only one arguing for action. Maybe these years since the murders of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and thousands of others have mattered, maybe all of these various actions have made a difference. Maybe the accumulation of grief and anger in the spirits of white people has been happening in ways that haven’t been visible. Maybe, finally, we have reached a tipping point that will contribute to meaningful change in our systems.
I have a friend who works in international conflict resolution, and we sometimes argue about non-violence. I am not a pacifist, as much as I might aspire to be, and the arguments are usually about the social value of punching Nazis. My friend really is a pacifist at heart, and it grieves him to put more violence into the world, even if that violence might be necessary to push back fascism. When we talk about what it means to be non-violent in the face of racist state violence, I remember that the non-violence of Dr. King was always a strategy, a way of exposing white supremacist violence without being blamed for provoking it. When TV news broadcast footage of police officers beating and hosing protesters, of angry white mobs attacking Black students at sit-ins, the truth of those images was impossible to deny. There was no way to turn away, not without the shame of knowing that you were taking the side of the oppressor. White people acted because the violence of other white people was both undeniable and unconscionable, and they wanted to stand outside of it, not because they recognized in the non-violence of Black people something they had failed to see before.
This week, I have seen dozens of videos of cops attacking protesters and journalists. Opening fire with tear gas and rubber bullets, beating with batons, kicking and shoving people to the ground, ramming with bicycles and shields. People have been blinded, permanently and temporarily. At least one person has died after being sprayed full in the face, others have been shot to death. Whatever guidelines departments have in place, police have uniformly failed to follow them. None of these behaviors are isolated or unusual: when the cameras roll, the violence follows, in every city around the country once the daytime marchers with children go home, and sometimes before. As someone quipped on Twitter, “The amount of police brutality at the anti-police-brutality marches is proving a lot of points.”
This, then, is what the protesters are achieving: they are putting their bodies into the streets as the foil against which the intractability of police brutality will become undeniable. We are seeing these videos as they happen live on TV and the internet; they are being archived and rebroadcast, catalogued and used to challenge the city and county councils who have been so accommodating of this violence over the decades when the police have received more money than education, transportation, and health services. People are no longer willing to pay for this, no longer willing to believe that more violence makes us safer, no longer willing to accept the cops who stand by and do nothing as “good,” no longer willing to stand apart as those who are protected from the ones the police beat, no longer willing to have this done in our names or under the guise of keeping our children safe. We want all our children to be safe, we want our “we” to encompass those Black and brown people whom the police have treated as disposable for too long. We who cannot march need to keep pushing our officials, keep donating money to bail funds and to local organizations who have been doing this work for years.
We have allowed this by looking away. We are not looking away now.