NEWS
ANALYSIS
A ‘Glorious Poetic Rage’
This time is different. Here’s why.
By Jenna
Wortham
Ms. Wortham
is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.
June 5,
2020
In the wake
of a perverse constellation of deaths of black Americans at the hands of the
police and vigilantes, America’s current incarnation of a civil rights movement
— organized under the rallying cry of
“Black Lives Matter” — is more powerful than ever.
“Seven
years ago, we were treated like we were too radical, too out of the bounds of
what is possible,” said Alicia Garza, the civil rights organizer based in
Oakland, Calif., who coined the phrase in a 2013 Facebook post after George
Zimmerman was acquitted of killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. “And now,
countless lives later, it’s finally seen as relevant.”
The urgency
and validity of the movement have finally been recognized, she told me, as the
country has reached “its boiling point.”
For nearly
10 days straight, Americans have been gathering and marching to protest
unchecked state violence against black people. Protests have erupted in
virtually every American state, in small towns and major cities alike, and in
Europe and New Zealand. Dozens of brands published social media posts
vocalizing their support for the Black Lives Matter movement or against racism.
Some, including those from Ben & Jerry’s, “Sesame Street” and Nickelodeon,
felt more explicit and powerful than others. Taylor Swift responded to
President Trump’s “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” tweet by
accusing him of threatening violence after years of “stoking the fires of white
supremacy and racism.” The “Star Wars” actor John Boyega gave an emotional
speech at a protest in London.
This is the
biggest collective demonstration of civil unrest around state violence in our
generation’s memory. The unifying theme, for the first time in America’s
history, is at last: Black Lives Matter.
Rashad
Robinson, the president of the civil rights organization Color of Change,
speculated that it was the stark cruelty of the video of George Floyd’s death
that captivated the country. The pain was palpable, the nonchalance in Derek
Chauvin’s face, chilling. “The police officer is looking into the camera as
he’s pushing the life out of him,” Mr. Robinson said.
In
Minnesota, black people are four times as likely to be killed by law
enforcement as white people. Mr. Floyd’s death shares a grim geographical
lineage with other black deaths that rocked the nation: The place where he died
is roughly a 15-minute drive from Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul, Minn.,
where Philando Castile was shot by a police officer in 2016 while his fiancée
streamed the encounter live on Facebook. The year before that, Jamar Clark was
shot by the police as they tried to handcuff him as he lay on the ground, in
the same vicinity as where Mr. Floyd gasped for his final breaths beneath a
white police officer’s knee.
“The reason
this got so big is because it has been happening,” Junauda Petrus-Nasah, an
author and organizer from Minneapolis, where Mr. Floyd lived and was killed,
told me. On the third day of protests, when a police station house was lit on
fire, “it felt like a glorious poetic rage,” she said.
The
pandemic added its own accelerant to the mix. For roughly three months before
Mr. Floyd’s death, Americans were living in a state of hypervigilance and
anxiety, coping with feelings of uncertainty, fear and vulnerability — things
many black Americans experience on a regular basis. Information about how to
avoid the virus was distressingly sparse and confusing as local and federal
officials sparred about the severity of the pandemic and how best to contain
it.
Meanwhile,
a clearer — and bleaker — picture of the country began to emerge. The spoils of
privilege among some was in stark contrast to the lack of it among others.
While some Americans fled cities to second homes, millions of others filed for
unemployment and formed lines at food banks. Empathy for the plight of
essential workers, a category in which black people are overrepresented,
swelled tremendously. Data revealed that black and Latinx communities were
being disproportionately ravaged by the pandemic.
At the same
time, social distancing meant much of daily life — school, work, meetings,
parties, weddings, birthday celebrations — was migrating to screens. It seems
we’d just created newfound trust and intimacy with our phones and computers
when the gruesome parade of deaths began a procession across them. Ahmaud
Arbery was chased down and killed in Glynn County, Ga., on Feb. 23. Breonna
Taylor was in bed when the police entered her apartment and sprayed her with
bullets in Louisville, Ky., on March 13. Nina Pop was found stabbed to death in
Sikeston, Mo., on May 3. Tony McDade was gunned down by the police in
Tallahassee, Fla., on May 27.
By the time
outrage and despair over Mr. Floyd’s death filled our feeds, the tinderbox was
ready to explode.
If the
country had been open per usual, some organizers told me, the distractions of
pre-pandemic life might have kept people from tuning into the dialogues online.
Several said this is the most diverse demonstration of support for Black Lives
Matters that they can recall in the movement’s seven-year history. On May 28,
Twitter told me, more than eight million tweets tagged with #BlackLivesMatter
were posted on the platform. By comparison, on Dec. 4, 2014, nearly five months
after Eric Garner died at the hands of a police officer on Staten Island, the
number of tweets tagged with #BlackLivesMatter peaked at 146,000.
Finally,
there’s the sheer volume of video documentation of the police atrocities at the
protests themselves, which has only served to reaffirm critiques of unbridled
uses of force and underscore the cognitive dissonances.
Our social
feeds have become like security camera grids, each with images of a dystopia:
in a park in the nation’s capital, peaceful protesters dispersed with chemical
irritants and smoke canisters, clearing a path for the president, who then
posed for a photograph nearby. In Philadelphia, police officers pelting
demonstrators trapped on the side of a highway with canisters of tear gas. In
New York, two police vehicles accelerating into a crowd. In Atlanta, police
officers breaking into a car and tasering two black college students. Every
day, people with cameras have offered a raw and terrifying supplement to
television and newspaper coverage.
Thenjiwe
McHarris, a strategist for the Movement for Black Lives, said this kind of
documentation and distribution is unveiling the sadism that black Americans
regularly face. “We used to do cop watch patrols, and we would go around in
teams and document it and show the country what was happening to our people,”
she told me. “Obviously, by now, we know that cameras don’t deter the police,
but what they do show is extremely important for the rest of America to see.”
The
movement drew an additional boost from the digital interactions of racially
diverse communities. Melissa Brown, a postdoctoral fellow at the Clayman
Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, observed that as black
Twitter users have become increasingly interested in Korean pop music, there
has been more of an exchange between black and Korean communities online. This
month, after the Dallas Police Department used a tweet to encourage people to
report “illegal activity” to its application, K-pop fans flooded the app with
videos of their favorite singers (known as fancams). Though the department
wouldn’t confirm why, the service was temporarily taken offline.
Last, while
much of the nation’s attention drifted away from Black Lives Matter, organizers
and activists weren’t dormant. Ms. Garza told me that the movement’s first
generation of organizers has been working steadily to become savvier and even
more strategic over the past seven years, and have been joined by motivated
younger leaders.
Ms. Garza
said she hopes the current momentum carries the movement forward without
tempering it. “We can go one of two ways,” she said. “The ‘law and order’ route
or the route where we make black lives matter because we all want them to
matter. And have access to the things we deserve, and peace and justice in our
communities.”
Jenna
Wortham (@jennydeluxe) is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and a
co-host of the “Still Processing” podcast.
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