Who is Out There on the Streets?

[This post was written as protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police were spreading around the U.S.. Curfews were beginning to be set in major cities and National Guard being mobilized. Major media outlets were alternating clips from the video of officer

I hear a lot of people asking that question Marvin Gaye promised to answer for us in his 1971 protest song, "What's Going On." What is happening now on the streets of America's cities? Who is really out there? And why?

Anguish, anxiety, and anger are now high for so many in America. And in times of uncertainty, many people want a simple story to cling to. It's understandable, but it's unfortunate. The fact is that what is happening on the streets of America as June 2020 begins involves multiple groups and forces, and any simplistic narrative is a false one.

Out on the streets during the past days and nights have been African Americans and people of all races protesting racist violence, particularly the use of deadly force against black people by police. Most have done this by marching, chanting, holding up signs, and demonstrating peacefully. Some have done this by adopting the tactics used at colonial America's Boston Tea Party: destroying the property of the group harming them to get their attention and demand better treatment. Both tactics are time-honored and familiar responses to racist violence.

But there are many other people out on the street with different motives, because the situation is complex.

One group comes from the large swath of people put out of work by the coronavirus shutdown who have no income. That was hard enough to cope with when everyone was in lockdown, talking about shared suffering, and of food banks and stimulus checks. But after a couple of grueling months, states opened back up--and the news was full of pictures of middle class white people drinking at bars and eating at restaurants and partying and shopping like nothing had happened. The news also turned to inexplicably cheering that the stock market was coming back strong.

Those who had been living paycheck to paycheck on jobs that disappeared are disproportionately people of color, but a lot of them are white as well. Now, with eviction bans being lifted, many are potentially facing homelessness. And they have been feeling overwhelmed with anxiety and resentment, looking at their news feed full of vacationers enjoying their restored lives.

Some of those people experiencing great economic precarity felt watching the murder of George Floyd replayed over and over on the news was the last straw. Others barely noticed the news about Floyd, too overwhelmed with their own problems, or flat-out disinterested in hearing about a black man being killed. But when the media started blaring that people were "rioting and looting," they ran out to where they heard it was happening, desperate to grab some needed goods. Look at the photo of the man with a Target cart in the middle of the collage above--inside it were a car baby seat, a big bag of diapers, and a couple of clothing items. Sensationalistic news stories focus on people looting alcohol or fancy athletic shoes, but much of what people have taken have been essentials--food and basic clothing.

So, thus far on our list of those out on the streets, we have people protesting racial injustice, and we have unemployed people frantic for goods.

But if you listen to the Trump administration, the people out there are an alliance of "criminal thugs" and "the Antifa." Right wing social media are overflowing with stories about George Soros funding "the Antifa" to destroy our beloved chain stores. Another spin on this is that the goal of "the Antifa" is to stop Congress from giving any more help to American small businesses and righteous white working men. The claim is that knowing that Congress obviously cannot disburse more funds if some might go to criminal leftwing rioters, "the Antifa" has instigated riots, shooting its own foot because it doesn't care, so long as hardworking Republicans are thereby also shot in the foot!

Trump says he has declared "the Antifa" to be a terrorist organization. And Attorney General Barr has ordered the 56 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate and apprehend "outside agitators" and "Antifa and other similar groups."

It's important to bear in mind the ugly history of the FBI's COINTELPRO from the 1950s-early 70s, in which the FBI infiltrated and worked to disrupt or destroy a wide range of civil rights organizations. This was eventually deemed unconstitutional and intolerable by Congress--but like threatening protesters with vicious dogs, the Trump administration wants to "make it great again."

But the thing is, there is no organization called "The Antifa." It's just shortened term for "anti-Fascist." I'm anti-fascism, and I hope you are too. This leads to the deeply disturbing concern that Barr is giving permission for any organization to the left of neo-Nazis to be targeted at will by the FBI.

You may think this is an overblown fear--but that probably means you are not an immigrant or a person of color or trans or Muslim or otherwise socially marginal. For those on the margins, there are no illusions left that this administration will leave us unscathed. But I'm getting the sense right now that a lot of middle class liberals have reached a disorienting and shocking breaking point, as the pandemic and its aftermath impact them, and now watching military vehicles drive through their cities and suburbs while journalists are arrested and shot with rubber bullets on TV. It's not just folks who are of color and/or poor who have been affected. The lives of middle-class white people have been impacted as well, and it looks like that impact is going to grow.

I'm sure it's not coincidental that have been a lot of white people out there on the streets.

Many white people have been doing their best to be good allies to Black Lives Matter, participating in protests as supporters but following the leadership and requests of African Americans organizing marches and rallies. On the other hand, others . . . have not.

Who are these other white people? Some are figures like the black-clad "Umbrella Man" who methodically broke the windows of the Minneapolis AutoZone on the first day of protests, in some of the first property damage. Protesters on the ground at the time, mostly African American, confronted and tried to stop him. This action and similar incidents elsewhere have fed simplistic narratives on the right and on the left. For the right, white protestors are obviously all “the Antifa;” for the left, there are good white allies, but hiding among them are alt-right accelerationists causing all the trouble.

There is no doubt that accelerationists are in fact out there on the streets right now--they're gloating about it in their social media. These are cis white men, heavily online in the forums that have periodically spat out mass murderers targeting Jews or African Americans or Latines or women. The goal of accelerationists is to speed society toward civil war, now sarcastically termed “the Boogaloo” by many of them. For many of them, a “race war” is the goal: they want to kill off or drive out people of color from the U.S. For others, a civil war is a means to an end of setting up a new society with them in charge, in which they can own an endless array of guns and be free from taxes. And for yet others—nihilist “black pilled” men—it’s some kind of videogame vision of Valhalla. Since they believe the world will never be fair to them as "oppressed white men," they want to destroy it and take out as many "targets" as possible on their way out.

The two competing claims about white people breaking windows and/or throwing rocks at cops and/or stealing stuff—that they are all members of “the Antifa,” or all members of the alt-right—are ridiculously simplistic, and thus wrong.

Now, there are definitely some “manarchists” out there: ostensibly left-wing white dudes who take up way too much space, pay little attention to their own participation in patriarchy and racism, and get off on framing themselves as the manly heroes of the working class. They want to smash stuff and get into it with cops, whether the consensus of the group they are in is that that is an excellent idea, or that it is a terrible idea. They are a problem. But that problem is not that they are opposed to fascism. Their problem is a bad case of fragile white hypermasculinity. In truth, they have a lot in common with the accelerationist white supremacists, even if they exist at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

But while there are both manarchists and accelerationists out there, most of the white people you see out on the streets are probably neither. I doubt many of the white people out there smashing things up or grabbing loot could give you a bullet point manifesto of their political beliefs if asked. There’s simply a lot of young bored white people who have been cooped up at home under pandemic lockdown who just want to get out and do stuff. Some may be interested in showing support for Black Lives Matter, but a lot of them seem to just want to be able to get away with getting high, smashing some windows, and grabbing some stuff. It's entertainment for them.

There is a really big problem when white kids go to black neighborhoods to smash them up for excitement. It’s not quite as bad, but it’s still really not good, when white kids wreck some downtown boutique store—and then the media present the destruction as the result of African Americans rioting and looting, while the white kids return unscathed to their suburbs with the upscale consumer goods they snagged.

All of that said about white people who have been out there rioting, it’s very important that the story of this unrest not become a story that white people turn into a tale about white people, with everyone else playing minor supportive roles in the script.

What do we even call this thing that is going on? The media speak of “the Floyd riots.” Michael Harriot of The Root is calling it the "Fed-Up-rising,” in the context of the long, long history of violent American racism. What Harriot wants us all to recognize is that the protests that were sparked by the murder of George Floyd were not in the least about a single man being killed. Floyd’s murder was just the straw that broke the camel’s back at the time when public gatherings were no longer banned, and black folks could protest. The Fed-Up-rising was started by African Americans protesting racism, not “Antifa” or white supremacists.

The way we talk about the Fed-Up-rising should always maintain its focus on racism, particularly anti-blackness. We need to continue to center redressing the injustices suffered by people of color. (That doesn’t mean other forms of injustice should not also be redressed; let’s not recapitulate decades of failed allyship and forget the lessons we’ve learned about intersectionality.) Those injustices produced wide disparities in how people have been impacted by Covid-19, with people of color being much more likely to become infected, and even more disparities in mortality rates. They also produced deep disparities in the impact of the lockdown, with people of color much more likely to either find themselves working a minimum-wage job deemed essential—often with no protective gear—or jobless, while many white Americans were able to keep their jobs and work from home. People of color encountered unequal medical care. And the policing of social distancing rules was aimed with vast disproportion at people of color—while the disproportionate killing of African Americans by police continued unabated, even during lockdown.

We must not sideline the redress of these injustices and have our media narrative just snap into its default of making everything about white people’s political battles and Donald Trump. It is loathsome to read media stories about the Fed-Up-rising in which African Americans figure only as bit players: helpless sacrificial lambs, or easily-duped criminals irrationally destroying their own communities.

But speaking of violence, we have to pay attention to who else has been out there on the streets, and what they have been doing, besides protesters and those taking advantage of their actions. I’m talking about the police and the military.

My social media feed, and perhaps yours as well, has been full of highly disturbing videos of police brutality and of armed soldiers standing in front of armored tactical vehicles and facing city residents like an occupying army. In fact, the police themselves look a lot like an occupying army, wearing their body armor and armed as they are with flash-bang grenades and multiple guns in addition to batons and shields as they face people holding protest placards.

It’s important to acknowledge that police officers are no more a uniform mass than any other population out on the street. There have been police who have joined in racial justice marches, took a knee in memory of George Floyd, and passed out pizza to protesters. Officers have helped injured people and engaged in ordinary business like giving lost people directions.

But that said, many other officers have seemed to view themselves as violent counterprotesters. People around the country have watched journalists carrying their credentials and identifying themselves as press get arrested, maced, and shot with nonlethal but dangerous ammunition. We’ve seen police smash the windows of a car to tase the two college students sitting inside it. We’ve watched police vans drive through crowds. And over and over, we have seen police shoot clouds of tear gas into groups of protesters and pepper spray protesters directly in the face.

Cincinnati police flew a “thin blue line” flag over their station. This flag represents the “Blue Lives Matter” movement that came into being to counter Black Lives Matter. It posits the police as the victims of African American thugs, and police killings of black people as justified.

In reporting on all this, a lot of local news media have followed the timeworn, sing-song narrative we have often heard before: “Peaceful protests are fine, so long as they don’t interrupt traffic or inconvenience shoppers. But lo! yet again justifiable protests devolve into rioting and looting. Behold the broken glass! Martin Luther King Jr. would never have approved of this. How sad that these people are destroying their own communities! How solemn is the governor as he calls in the National Guard. They will do their job, and soon the clean-up and healing will begin.”

This is a familiar narrative, which we’ve been exposed to about once a decade in the U.S.. I heard ordinary white people voice it over and over on my social media feeds as the Fed-Up-rising began, as it is a social reflex. But this time things are different. We’re in the middle of a pandemic, with a second wave likely to crash down in America. We’re facing an economic crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression a century ago. And we have lived through almost four years of Donald Trump destroying social institutions and generating red-hot levels of rage, fear and anxiety.

In this context, watching the news videos from cities around the U.S., the familiar narrative has sounded more ominous to the marginalized, and less soothing to the usually comfortable white middle class, than it has in prior iterations.

The number of people I’ve heard speculating in stunned or disgusted tones about whether we are seeing the end of the United States is very high. The number of people who are treating this as an abstract story happening “over there” is low. I see people writing despondently about how they have lost hope for social justice, or for leadership that can bring us back together, or for the U.S. to function at all in the future. A lot of people are truly frightened about what will happen to themselves and their loved ones—unless they’ve got nothing left to lose, in which case, they are saying good riddance and just hoping something better can rise from the ashes.

Apparently Trump thinks this will all work out in his favor, as chaos and polarized hate are his element. He loves his war talk, for someone who famously avoided military service, and how he can deploy the troops! Dominate! Smash! Invoke the Insurrection Act! "If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them," said Trump as I was writing this post.

Remember, he’s talking about deploying the troops against American citizens. Sometimes he says it’s just “thugs” and “Antifa” he wants to gun for. At other times, he retweets that the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat. He's called all Democrats traitors in the past. That is a lot more discomfitting to people who have voted Democrat when Trump is now mobilizing the military and the FBI to conquer whomever he declares treasonous.

A lot of people are feeling targeted now. And the accelerationist alt right can barely contain its glee that the Boogaloo may arrive and they can be raptured into militia heaven.

Even those not out on the streets can now watch an array of videos from which, in first-person perspective, they can see a cop shoot them while they are just standing there filming. Even those in affluent segregated white suburbs can watch helicopters overhead and see military vehicles rolling along their manicured avenues.

And that is making a lot of people who have not been out there on the streets feel like some life-altering decision may be ahead of them. Perhaps, whether they want to or not, they will be swept up by unrest. There will be no sidelines on which to stand.

The old union protest song that came out of the Great Depression—“Which Side Are You On”—comes to mind. James Baldwin’s admonitions about The Fire Next Time come to mind. They no longer sound poignantly vintage. They sound galvanic. ___________________________________________________________________________________

[Addendum: In the days after I drafted this post, millions more Americans decided that they were indeed morally impelled to show which side of history they were on, and joined protests and marches in support of the principle that black lives matter, and that police brutality must be stopped. And this did shift the mainstream media narrative (if not that of Fox News) from focusing on looting to focusing on peaceful protests, whether the use of tear gas and rubber bullets on protesters were "really necessary"--and at least a pro forma acknowledgment of racial inequities in the U.S..]

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