You might have heard about it on the news, when several thousand people marched from Union Square to Times Square to protest the police brutality in Ferguson.
Organized by word of mouth and social media, the protest was described as a silent vigil in Union Square. At 7:00 it got of to a confused start: whatever it was, the event wasn't a silent vigil, and the moderately-sized crowd didn't quite seem to know what to do with itself. Most talked and milled around, some stood silently, and a few activists, mostly black, chanted: Hands up, don't shoot and No justice, no peace. I didn't join in; I'm white, and I wasn't sure it was my place. The feeling seemed pretty common among the white attendees; while we definitely wanted to support the activists, we weren't quite sure how to do it.
Then crowd shifted: someone had started moving, and the rest moved to follow. They spread out and sped up, and the activists led their chants like a conductor leads an orchestra, raising them, using their footsteps like a metronome.
For thirty blocks we marched like that, right through traffic down the middle of Broadway all the way to Times Square. We held our arms up until they were sore and shouted until our throats hurt. The white supporters gradually figured out what to do, and started to lead chants when the black activists grew tired.
And people joined.
A lot of people.
Just around dusk, right in the middle of Times Square, next to the bright blue NYPD station, the march ground to a halt.
Turns out the police had blocked us. After about ten few minutes they let us move again, funneling us up to the northern part of Times Square...
...where they blocked us again.
With the march stopped, the chants became quieter. The black activists tried to keep them alive; a few of the white supporters helped out. (I joined in as best I could, but my throat was raw.) But without the movement of marching, the energy wasn't there.
About twenty minutes later, the police let us go, under a few conditions. We had to walk in a narrow line on the sidewalk, head south out of Times Square, then go west. The activists warned that this was a tactic to split us apart; we had to stick together. And we followed them westward, toward Port Authority, the police at our side every step of the way. We walked right down the center of the street, hands up, screaming, then turned a corner...
...right into a wall of police vans.
Once we were bottled up against their blockade, they surrounded us...
...pushed us together, and backed us up against the sidewalk.
Ten minutes later, they hadn't made any indication they intended to let us move. In the crowd, people started passing out a phone number: the National Lawyers' Guild. "Write it on your arm," they said. "If the cops take us in, they'll take everything you have."
I felt exhilarated. I was doing something important! We were making noise, forcing people to pay attention to our outrage with the behavior of the our police. This meant something, and I was proud to be part of it.
Then I looked around.
The black men and women around me were definitely excited, but not exhilarated. They made jokes at the police, they chanted, but they were not exhilarated. You don't feel exhilarated with your life on the line. You feel terrified.
Unlike me, they had something to lose here.
That was the main difference between the white protesters (myself included) and the black ones. For the white protesters, tearing down this vicious and brutal system that supports these racist, overarmed, hyperaggressive police was an important cause, and we were proud to do our part. But what did we have to lose if things went bad? We were white. The police wouldn't really hurt us. We'd get a few bruises, a night in the precinct, a reprimand at most.
For the black protesters, this this was their lives. And to try and raise their head, to stand up and force America to acknowledge them as more than animals, they risked beatings, jail time, and death at the hands of the police. And they still stood up. And more than that, they led others to stand with them.
The police kept us penned in at the side of the street for about half an hour. Toward the end of it, they started making what seemed like random arrests. All were black men. At that point a white protester in the crowd suggested that we provoke the police into arresting us illegally so we could sue.
Nobody said anything to him. The scorn was enough.
It's easy to think of supporting the unprivileged as a game when you have nothing to lose from doing it. White people, straight people, cisgendered men - people like me - who want to do their part have to remember that. Privilege is about not having to worry about things have other people afraid for their lives. When we stand up for those less privileged, we always risk less than they do. Remember that.
Respect that. Respect their wishes. Stand with them when they need you, and support them when they want to stand alone.
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