One thing I’ve noticed about Brooklyn street protests following George Floyd’s murder by cop: focus. Almost every leftist action I’ve attended over the last four years — heck, four decades — has been attended, if not inundated, by other leftist groups seeking attention. Marching for climate change? Here’s a pamphlet exhorting us to redress economic inequality. Protesting injustice in Puerto Rico? Don’t forget the Palestinians.
It makes sense: there’s plenty to protest; organizers rightly sow in ground they perceive as fertile.
Not this week. Everyone seems to be following the lead of Black Lives Matter organizers; at five actions I’ve not seen a single banner, flyer, or demonstrator distract from the message of police brutality. Speakers have ranged widely in age, occupation, spiritual practice, gender, sexual orientation; they’ve all been people of color. The Trump administration has brought the dangers of authoritarian government closer than I or any Americans have here experienced; protests have maintained message discipline.
The political left is famously fractious. I’m under no illusions that groups now marching together would long maintain harmony once and if we navigate this desperate moment. Joe Biden is few people’s idea of progressivism’s standard bearer.
But the U.S. justice system’s violence against black and brown bodies has become the cynosure around which millions are rallying (more than than 150 cities, all 50 states; a BuzzFeed reporter is keeping an impressive thread of small-town actions). Some energy stems from disgust with a corrupt, inept response to a virus that has killed more than 100,000 of us, disproportionately people of color. More than that: Muslim bans; children in cages; unchecked militarism; environmental destruction; income disparity; political corruption; a stolen Supreme Court seat; assaults on media; disinformation; destruction of constitutional norms; voter suppression; homophobia, transphobia, misogyny; white supremacy — each Trumpian assault has become stitched into the Black Lives Matter banner that progressives and moderates of all hues proudly carry. I’ve never witnessed the like.
New York City’s response has been remarkably ham-handed. For several nights, police strategies to disperse demonstrators sparked looting, atomizing crowds, disintegrating the marchers’ peaceful ethos. Mayor de Blasio’s subsequent curfew has been a disaster, an excuse for police to ramp up the very brutality being protested, giving demonstrators first-hand experience of the trauma so many people of color experience as routine. After 8 p.m. the past two nights, in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, police have used tactics to trap protesters in spaces without easy exits, then charged with batons, mace, pepper spray. They’ve assaulted or arrested medical workers, food deliverers, judicial observers, innocent bystanders. The tactics are deplorable, the optics worse.
So far, they’ve also incited more protest. The letter signed by hundreds of current and former staff members of de Blasio, describing his kowtowing to a police force whose union leaders despise him, is a remarkable rebuke to a man elected as a progressive champion. Meanwhile, the mayor sounds almost Bushian in his “heck-of-a-job” descriptions of police action, his rhetoric reduced to recycled John Lennon lyrics — a sad joke.
One person I think of as I head out for each day’s action: my mother, who a few days ago expressed bewilderment at what our president is doing, what our nation might become.
More than anyone’s, her politics birthed mine. Her father, who died when she was 10, was a union organizer, he and her mother passionate supporters of FDR’s New Deal. She and her sisters oppugned the racist right-wing radio bloviations of Father Charles Coughlin, echoed by her stepfather. Her sense of Catholic social justice was inspired by the radical activism and pacifism of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. Later, she left the church as a matter of feminist principle, sparked by her desire to use contraception to check her family’s growth, not least so she could resume work as a social worker and, later, a marriage and family therapist. She influenced the politics of my father: in 1960 he voted for Nixon, never the GOP thereafter; by 1965, he was flying to Selma to march with Dr. King. An early memory is playing with Eugene McCarthy 1968 campaign paraphernalia she’d stored in a closet; in 1972, when my uncle saw our station wagon sported a George McGovern bumper sticker, he asked my aunt, “Are they kidding?” For years she refused to buy table grapes, following the boycott of labor organizer Cesar Chavez. She built a bulwark against the Reaganites and Prop 13 fans who populated the Central Valley of my youth. She served for years on the board of an organization that fed, clothed, and provided services for the San Joaquin County poor.
Justice for all, Mom made me understand, is an idea worthy of whatever battles it demands. I carry her message to the marches.
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