“People are ready for freedom when they are ready to take it.” (Ralph Bunche)
For years now, I’ve had a visceral negative response to polite daylight protests in NYC, where demonstrators tend to be hemmed in by barriers and cops. Such tame demonstration don’t seem to have much to do with deep democracy. They fail to cultivate the one human capability that’s essential to social change—“the ability to act publicly against sanctioned authority.”
That capability, as Lawrence Goodwyn once observed,
produces a highly visible result, but its activating ingredient is invisible. The elusive component is something people acquire before they gain the capacity to act. It is something that has often been understood vaguely as an “insurgent attitude.” It has also been seen as a function of pure “will,” as in the injunction, “people must act as if they were free to act.” This “something” can also be described as a political stance, as suggested by words like “militant” or “radical.”
My faith in that stance, rather than any worked out political position on how to end police brutality or institutional racism, sent me into NYC streets after curfew one night last week.
Please don’t understand me too quickly though. My sense that insurgency and democracy are twins doesn’t mean I’ve got a thing for Molotov women or muy macho lefter-than-thou extremists. I’m just now flashing back to the 60s. When I was 12 or 14, an ex-Chicago 8 defendant at a rally in the center of my town proposed it might be time to march a half mile to the Amherst College campus and torch the place. It’s true I wasn’t ripe for his message. (And not just since I felt proprietorial about the College gym where I snuck in the window to play b-ball after midnight.) As a kid, I wasn’t feeling the kill-or-be-killed dread that Viet Nam represented to young adults in the crowd. Or the anger about choices their elders had given them, and which they had no say in (since eighteen year olds couldn’t even vote until 1972). Young radicals’ need to act up somehow, someway—less mindful the more felt—wasn’t mine. Still, I don’t think I was the only one put off by that rad chic celebrity who seemed out to rev up a crowd that had fallen back into an “Is that all there is?” state of mind. (For you 90s R&B heads, think Keith Sweat trying to oversoul it at the Apollo after an audience has realized: “Homeboy’s voice is small.”) Agitated protestors who try to ignite an audience by getting them to feel the burn tend not to scare anyone (except the sort of rural fantasts who are mustering now to defend the boonies against antifa).
Maybe I haven’t ever heard a really good anger-monger, but in my experience when people are in a rage their impulse to break shit up doesn’t come from outside. (One reason why I was immediately skeptical of our current white instigator myths which keep the comfortable from fathoming black people could be angry enough in their grief to “destroy property.”) Not that tear gas and rubber bullets are all that can reach apocalyptos in the moment. Resisters who walk with them, yet live by canons of cool, may calm those who desperately want to see something burning. Rhythms of any serious social movement tend to be defined by interplay within bands of outsiders between cooler and hotter heads.
There can be no serious social movement minus the heat. Yet protesters on fire can be a danger to themselves and their cause. And not just because powers-that-be have a monopoly on force. Any pursuit of justice requires more than toughness. Right from the start, it requires exemplars—protesters with empathy and subtlety—who can prevent their raging allies from giving authorities an excuse to quash challenges to the Order of things. Lawrence Goodwyn gave a name to the process by which these heroes of demos turn protest movements into extended teachable moments. He called it “fire-fighting.”
When I was out marching with Black Lives Matters protesters last week, the bulk of them repeatedly acted as fire-fighters, cooling out those in their ranks who were too stoked. They would chant “PEACE-FUL PRO-TEST” when the heat seemed to be rising. I’m thinking of how the march stopped and those chants got louder when we passed an un-boarded up Bank of America window around 23rd and Broadway. A contingent of cops, who followed us from behind, even as we bumped into ones in front who pushed us East or West, reacted by putting the squeeze on, pressing marchers forward. I’m not sure if they were intent on protecting that window or underscoring protesters didn’t own the night. It seemed more like a power move than an effort to keep peace. One young black woman with a bullhorn and quick feet helped keep chaos at bay. As she jogged from front to back line (and back), she called out to her people, explaining why she was running and that they should not be stampeded. Her teacherly trip amounted to an ongoing case for defunding the police. (Not that rads should rush to foster policies which might lead to neo-liberal career opportunities for private security firms.)
It probably mattered that young woman was black and cool. But it’s also true you couldn’t guess the temperature of a marcher from his/her color. And everybody out there after curfew—Asians, blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans (“everybody just-a-freaking”)—had already proven they had skin in the game by breaking the rules and coming into the city.
Those unauthoritarian personalities are living MLK’s (and Prince’s) Dream. They’ve made multiculture in the streets as Richard Goldstein pointed out last week. Barack Obama doubled down a day later, citing the protests’ interracial character as a sign the country has made moral progress since the 60s when urban uprisings were all black phenomena. His point seemed lost on MSNBC anchors, though, who repeatedly skipped over that turn in Obama’s talk. They kept running a clip from it where he directly addressed young people of color.
Not that I mean to diminish the blackhand side of the protests. My first brush with the march I’d end up joining came when I walked up on a dozen or so black kids on Citi Bikes who were serving as a kind of advance guard for their comrades. I bumped into them on 8th Ave. as I was going around the police perimeter that kept protesters out of Times Square. The kids came riding in from the West Side. They hung a right on 50th and circled back, eyed by cops holding the line and a few beefy white fireman—one standing with cigar and glare outside a station on 8th Ave. It felt like I might be on the verge of viewing a real urban spin on the all-white chase scene in ET. Those youngbloods on bikes fulfilled a promise I’d glimpsed last year on a balmy day in Harlem when I saw a couple African-American teens trying on Citi Bikes for the first time. It was apparent that they hadn’t grown up with wheels. (And it’s possible these rides had been, ah, liberated.) One of the girls couldn’t get started, but her friend was more daring. She careened ahead, but quickly got her balance and was off like a shot. It gave me a lift to think of her in motion, realizing every kid’s right to bike. I had no clue, though, she was giving me a preview of Black Lives Matter’s future.
Those young buffalo soldiers on bikes served as scouts for BLM’s army of protesters, checking out the cops’ perimeter around Times Square. But I didn’t know what was coming behind them until marchers announced themselves with rebel roars—louder than choppers—crescendo-ing out a thousand gutsy throats.
That was the most thrilling sound I heard during my post-curfew night. But there was other good music in the city. Early in the evening, as I protested by wandering around, songs sound-tracked my search for solidarity. In emptied out streets, where Hopper twilight faded out on facades and high windows, music was enhanced by the relative quiet and echo-y surround. God seemed to be the DJ when Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” poured out of car on 23rd St. (Couldn’t help but note it was heading toward Armond White’s neighborhood. I wondered if White—author of The Resistance turned Trumpist—was at home on that Chelsea evening. Maybe he heard his old faves PE floating by on the street, untired, truer to the game.) Down in Washington Square Park, reggae by Rebelution skanked around the dry fountainhead, which had been converted into a memorial for lost black lives. While their honky reggae didn’t cut deep enough when I tried it at home, there was some balm in the band out in the open air. But it was Kendrick Lamar, with a little help from black skateboarders, who got everyone in the Square grooving outside the box Americans have been in for 400 years. Those skaters pulled up at the circle in the Square, gathering together to shout along with Kendrick: “We gonna be aiiiight!…We gonna be aiiiight!…We gonna be aiiiight!”
I’m with them in spirit, though I’m not beamish. And I should allow there was at least one tag on a midtown storefront that gave me pause when I was marching: “Black Power…Brown Power…Arab Power.” WTF? Arab supremacists don’t belong at Black Lives Matters protests. (They shouldn’t be any more welcome than the gun-toting white power guy who got arrested last week when he hovered around a demonstration in Union Square.)
No doubt there are reasons to be wary as well as cheerful about this mass uprising. Will Stenberg’s caution is well-taken: “I am uncomfortable saying, as some of my fellow leftists do, that a situation this complicated is GOOD.” But those protesters who’ve chosen to “act publicly against sanctioned authority” seem to be on the undeniable side of history. Their invisible imperative has surely produced visible results in the past week. Protesters’ refusal to abide by curfews have sparked interactions that have helped expose what’s rotten about our We-Must-Have Order. Thanks to demonstrators who dared to stress cops, everyone who ain’t trying to look away has seen proof police departments are full of psychos and enablers.
To make the case stick, though, protesters must ensure they’re serving as witnesses against the shitstym, not bogeymen who can be used to gin-up mass fear of Anarchy in the City. I don’t know if protesters need to keep defying curfews, but if they so choose, I hope they keep cool. All honor to Black Lives Matters’ fire-fighters.