Arriving
It’s Tuesday afternoon and National Guard units occupy every intersection in downtown Washington, DC. I ride my bicycle up to a Humvee and ask some of the soldiers where they’re from. They look at me and then at each other. One of them finally speaks up, “South Carolina.” They wear surgical masks and latex gloves and stand apart from one another, signs that they are operating under a protocol for the coronavirus. They look at me askance, like they’re anxious for me to go away. Then I understand they’re not looking at me at all. They’ve only just arrived in the city and they’re trying to take it in. For some of them, this is their first visit to the imperial capital.
I’m heading toward Lafayette Park. It has been the epicenter of protest here because it abuts the White House. It is also where some of the most riotous police are quartered.
As I approach, I see ranks of police from various federal agencies: the Drug Enforcement Agency, Customs and Border Protection, the US Park Police, the Secret Service, and others that hide their identity. Other groups carry plexiglass riot shields that simply say, “Military Police.” Clusters of Homeland Security agents swagger in front of an upscale hotel. A couple wear kuffiyyehs around their necks, nostalgically recreating their days as adventurers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most look at us through the mirrored Oakley glasses favored by soldiers.
I will see thousands of policemen that day. They have all been imported from somewhere else. Our local policemen—DC’s Metropolitan Police Department—have distanced themselves from this action. Some cops in fancy body armor lounge on the grass, like cosplayers at a Marvel comics convention. Others stand shoulder to shoulder in tight battle formations under the hot afternoon sun.
Unlike the soldiers in the street, and unlike the thousands of protesters who are converging on the place, the policemen do not wear face masks. Not one. It’s almost as they had been given an order by commanders who believe that masks are for weaklings. It reminds me of what happened here yesterday, when Trump’s office ordered these same federal police to attack the crowd with tear gas and billy clubs. It was the mildly-named Park Police who viciously cleared the street so that Trump could march over to a local church and stand briefly, upside-down Bible in hand, for a photo opportunity. The point of that exercise was to demonstrate “dominance” over protesters, as Trump put it on a phone call with governors earlier in the day. Gassing peaceful citizens is one way to show dominance. Not wearing a mask is another. The unmasked police appear to be on board every step of the way.
Demonstrating means to show.
It is the middle of a work day but already more than a thousand people have gathered along H Street, which runs parallel to the park. The crowd is Black and White and Brown. It is young and old. It is poor and it is middle class. In a deeply segregated city like this one, this is the most integrated place you can find. Besides the numbers, what you notice is the voices. They are loud and angry, but also full of life and joy. They’ve been singing for a long time already, but they are not tired of it. I lock up my bicycle, find my friends, and join in. We all do:
No Justice, No Peace
No Racist Police
It goes on for a minute, then a young man with a bullhorn calls out:
Show me what democracy looks like!
And we answer:
This is what democracy looks like!
This chant eventually dwindles, at which point the man with the bullhorn pivots:
Say his name!
And we answer:
George Floyd!
He shouts:
Say her name!
And we answer:
Breonna Taylor!
There is power in calling out the names of one’s murdered brothers and sisters. This ritual is one of the most original innovations that organizers from Black Lives Matter have given to American protest culture. It adds a funereal air to the event, and reminds us of the brutal fact that what brings us together is the loss of life.
We declaim the names of victims for minutes on end, but it doesn’t get old. For many of us, this is how the names come to be part of our active consciousness. We say their names and picture them, not as death statistics, but as individuals who lived and were loved. We shout their names and sing them—angry about what has been taken away from us, but also joyfully insistent that their lives are remembered. There is magic in the ritual: to affirm that a life matters even after it has been taken is also an affirmation about our own lives. If we believe Black lives matter, then we can say all lives matter.
Finally, the man with the bull horn calls out, I can’t breathe! We fall in beside him and shout those words over and over, remembering not only that George Floyd said these words as he was being killed, but so did Eric Garner, when he was choked to death by New York Policemen in July 2014. And then, the man calls out again: Say his name!
Saying their names is an occasion to acknowledge what we have lost and to mourn that loss. It is an occasion to reaffirm our love of life as well as an occasion to focus our anger on the system that makes Black life in this country so precarious and expendable. The names are a salve and a weapon. It feels right to say them over and over again. If they remain remembered, maybe we will too.
And then, everyone takes a knee. Heads down, eyes on the ground, we sit in mournful silence for a minute. Then another. The only sounds are helicopters chopping the air in the distance and a far off siren. The silence goes on for a couple more minutes, everyone lost in their own meditative state. The silence is as powerful as any slogan I’ve ever heard, and the imagination fills the void with more words than could ever be said.
Suddenly, we’re putting our hands in the air and chanting again, Hands up, Don’t Shoot! And now we’re walking, east on H Street, then north on 14th Street. By now, our ranks have swelled into the thousands. Everyone is wearing a mask. Everyone is doing their best to maintain a foot or more distance from their neighbors. Lots of people are carrying signs. Most contain direct messages:
Justice for Floyd
Black Lives Matter.
Defund the police.
Abolish the Police.
Silence is Violence.
Some are playful:
Roses are red / Doritos are savory / The US prison system / Is organized slavery.
Many are blunt, but no less effective:
ACAB
Fuck 12
Organizers walk through the crowd, handing out bottles of water, snack bars, and hand sanitizer. People are wearing shirts with logos, faces and names: BLM, Palestine, Tupac, Standing Rock. The leaders of the action are way off in the front, leading songs with their bullhorns. But in the back, groups are launching their own songs. There’s news that the Minnesota Attorney General has finally placed charges against Floyd’s murderer. No word about the other three policemen who abetted the crime. Behind us, a group of boisterous teenage Black girls starts up:
Three more to go!
And some of them answer:
Convict all four!
After a few minutes, there’s hundreds of us singing the new chant. We turn west on U Street, and eventually south on 16th Street.
Every so often, we pause to take a knee. We hold that position for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the amount of time Officer Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck. Sitting there, in silence, we begin to appreciate that amount of time. How much intention it takes to hold it for that long. As we do this, the whole city turns silent with us, as if this march had its fingers on the city’s volume control. An hour and a half later, we’re back where we started at Lafayette Park. Just before the 7PM curfew, older people like me and my friends begin to leave. We say goodbye and plan to meet again in the same spot. Hundreds, mostly teens, will stay for the more violent confrontations that start after sunset. When I leave, the kids are still going strong: painting signs and smoking joints, singing and talking, laughing and dancing. One girl flashes a peace sign at me.
“Stay safe,” I tell her.
“I am safe,” she answers.
Leaving
I am happy to find my bicycle still in one piece. I unlock it and ride home. I’m on my guard—I always am. Leaving a demonstration can be dangerous. It can mean parting from your friends, which makes you more vulnerable. Sometimes, it means crossing through police lines. For Black men and women, this is the most dangerous moment of the day, and when police often launch savage attacks against isolated individuals.
But it’s not just the cops you need to worry about. In 1992, during the so-called Rodney King Riots, two of my ribs were broken while I was on my way home from a protest that had started out peaceful. It hurt and I have never forgotten the experience.
At the backside of the White House, at the place they call the Ellipse, I pass hundreds of policemen in full riot gear. More are massing in the shade of trees along the north side of the National Mall. When I stop to ask a group where they’re from, they stare at me but say nothing, as if I were speaking a foreign tongue. In the reflection of their mirrored wrap-around glasses, I look like a stick figure. For some of them, this place may as well be Anbar or Helmand.
Leaving a demonstration also means looking at things again from another view. From the outside, protests appear to many like odd, pointless ceremonies. Odd, like when you can see people dancing, but cannot hear the music that makes them dance. And they are exactly as pointless as dancing, which is to say — exactly as meaningful and important. But if you don’t like dance, you won’t understand.
I think of all this and am struck by how much conceptual work we were doing in that protest, and how much we’d accomplished. We were restating long-standing demands: end police violence, end White supremacy, end Anti-Blackness. We were articulating brand-new ones—defund the police, put crooked and violent cops on trial, end Trump’s misrule now. These demands go from the local to the global and back again. We were creating a narrative that, until now, has not yet been co-opted or tamed by the many forces of the neoliberal status quo. The media still hasn’t enveloped the events with prefab story. Nor has the Democratic Party leadership. Local officials are still reeling, and waking up to the fact that they’d better start running harder if they want to catch up. There is a movement. At present, it is unled and inchoate, but it is moving and there is so much talent and anger and life here that it won’t disappear today.
So the demonstration was good for crystalizing things. The bulk of our work on Tuesday was connective in nature. In remembering the names of victims, we were connecting far-off moments and places—Ferguson, Minneapolis, North Dakota, Palestine—and people we might not know personally—George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown and others. We were claiming these people as comrades, friends, and family. We were also naming our enemies—Trump, Pence, Barr, McConnell, Chauvin and so many others. We were noticing who was present—Jose Andres, Elizabeth Warren—and who was not. We were connecting all this together into one coherent narrative thread, and a single ongoing struggle. And were connecting all those pasts and presents to us, marching here, now, in Washington, DC. And to think: we did all that merely by dancing in formation.
On the sidewalk in front of my home, my neighbor accosts me. He’s been extremely upset by a rash of nearby store robberies that took place a few days ago, but I’ve never seen him troubled by the killing of Black Americans. When he sees me pulling up on my bike, he asks, “Where’ve you been?”
I tell him. And then, for the next half hour, he tells me stories about the threats to our safety. He’d seen a sign warning people in our neighborhood that we would be targeted. “They’re going to come here next.”
“Who are they?” I finally asked.
“You want me to say it?” He didn’t like the question.
“Not if you don’t want to.”
He squinted and shook his head, like I was a child who understood nothing. Adults had no business going to these things.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d seen his younger son at the protests.