A Tale of Two Protests

It was the worst of times. And then it got worse. 

Holy Crap. I just came back from two different protests in a row. VERY different. I want to share about these, not because I want to dunk on Dallas, Oregon (though some of that would certainly be deserved) but because I think the differences are illustrative of where the Black Lives Matter movement currently stands in White America. 

The first rally was in Monmouth, Oregon. These happen every day, yes, every day of the week, and have since shortly after the murder of George Floyd. They were organized by a woman from my community who is just awesome. Carol is a middle aged white lady. She absolutely has the privilege to choose to stay home and say, “Not my problem. I can ignore racism and go find a manager to shout at.” Instead, she (and her husband) organized a group of people from her immediate neighborhood, then broadened the group of leaders to include people from around her town, then connected with people from my town (Independence), and both groups are collaborating to do all kinds of good work, meeting with their city councils and police departments privately, speaking publicly at city councils meetings, getting commitments of support for the Black Lives Matter movement from public officials (just a start and possibly just words, but a vital first step) and now working with those officials on real, meaningful policy changes in both towns. Carol and her crew are out on the four corners of a single intersection every day (I only make it out there four or five times a week, so they’re my heroes), reminding this community that the dangers to Black lives in America are not going away, so we won’t either. 

I showed up like always, said high to the folks who are there each day, and stood there with my sign. I bring the megaphone I bought just for BLM rallies for two reasons. For one, because I’m wearing a mask, I can’t react to people’s honks of support with my face. I still find myself smiling at people like an idiot. Some of you are generously saying, “Ah, but they see it in your eyes.” Not mine! I bought a mask that includes goggles that go over my glasses. It’s not the best mask in terms of preventing COVID spread, and I wouldn’t wear it indoors, but it does double-duty as sunglasses and a mask, and wearing masks at these events is very important. It takes away one line of attack from the “All Lives Matter” crew who really want to not be reminded that they oppose Black people’s right to exist. They say we should be staying home because of COVID, not that they are wearing masks or staying home, mind you, but because they think it points out our hypocrisy. It’s a gotcha. It’s also wrong. We wear masks because we want to save lives. We stay home because we want to save lives. And we protest because we want to save lives. The three aren’t mutually exclusive; they’re motivated by the same ethos. More on that later. So I bring the megaphone as a prop; when people honk, I hold it up in the air. I don’t feel altogether comfortable holding up my fist. Actually, I feel far too comfortable doing it, and I’m uncomfortable with my comfort. I have read Black writers and activists who feel white people should not colonize this gesture. That’s not a universally held opinion, but it’s enough that it makes me think twice. Also (and I’ve had this happen before), if somebody catches a picture of a white person who is starting to raise their fist but hasn’t yet and hasn’t balled their fist either, there’s a point in the arc upwards where it looks like the white person is making a “Heil Hitler” gesture. Not okay. But if I’m holding a megaphone, that problem is solved.

The other benefit of the megaphone is that it allows me to do one of my new favorite things. When someone drives up and rolls a window down and shouts, “All Lives Matter,” I point it at them, pull that trigger, and smile and say in my friendliest voice, “Yeah, Black Lives Matter! Thank you for your support. Right on !” At first they think I genuinely misheard them, and they’ll yell back, “No, I said, ‘All Lives Matter.’” And I say, “Woohoo. Black Lives Matter! Thank you!” At this point they realize I’m the one with the megaphone, so every time they shout at me everyone stopped in traffic is hearing “Black Lives Matter,” the more they yell at me. They get super-pissed. Makes my day. 

The group today was really small, just six or seven of us. One really smart decision Carol made was to have it very clearly time-limited. 4:30 to 5:30 each day. That’s important because it makes it more sustainable. Folks can give up an hour of their time a lot more than a whole afternoon or evening and be more inclined to come back and do it again. The numbers are dwindling in a concerning way, though. The number of people out there makes a difference in two ways. For one thing, when there are a lot of people, it puts more political pressure on policy makers.For another thing, it changes the experience for the protesters. When there are lots of people on those corners, almost no one yells slurs at us or flips us off. Why? It’s not like anyone in the crowd is a danger to them or would treat them any differently than when they yell at six of us or a hundred of us. It’s because they recognize that their position is not popular, and they’re cowed in silence. Conversely, when there are very few of us, they feel emboldened. And unfortunately for them and for us, emboldened “All Lives Matter” folks show their whole racist asses. 

Today I only had one negative experience like that, and not nearly the worst. (Sidenote: The worst was the man who rolled up very slowly, rolled down his power window, pointed at my Black Lives Matter sign, and said, “Yeah, every family should have one or two,” then slowly smiled like a psychopath. And he just sat there staring at me, waiting for me to get his point. It took me a second to realize what he was saying. He was advocating for a return to slavery. It was one of the creepiest things I’ve ever experienced.) Today the guy who pulled up and shouted at me wanted me to know Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization. I shouldn’t have engaged (or should have megaphoned “Black Lives Matter” at him), but at first he seemed to really want to educate me rather than just scream at me the way most do, so I stepped towards him to talk. 

I said, “I support Black Lives Matter. Do I look like a terrorist to you?” 

“They’re terrorists,” he repeated. Note the “they.”

“I’m here because I care about people. Do you see anything that looks like terrorism going on here?”

“They’re funded by George Soros,” he said. Note the “they” again.

For any of you who don’t know, this conspiracy theory is false, but it’s a lot worse than that. George Soros is a Hungarian-American billionaire who gives money to lots of pro-democracy causes, mostly in Eastern Europe but also here in the U.S. Sometimes his donations are small and sometimes they’re large. So why do we hear about George Soros’ political contributions and philanthropy more than the other billionaires who give money, often more money, to pro-democracy groups? Because George Soros is Jewish. That’s what motivates his concern about promoting democracy. As a child he was put in a concentration camp and even forced to help the Nazis in order to survive. Since then he’s devoted his life to making sure groups like the Nazis can’t rise to power in Europe and the U.S. But a major part of the white supremacist narrative is that Jews are secretly evil and out to get white Christian men. Since white supremacy is built on the lie that people of color are inferior in every way, white supremacists couldn’t rally their base by saying, “and therefore people of color [not the term they would use] are no threat to you.” They have to create the sense that people of color are a danger in order to maintain the fear that feeds white supremacy. So white supremacy is married to anti-Semitism through another lie, that Jewish people are also inferior but exceptionally cunning and evil, and they are using this cunning to secretly organize the people of color who can’t do so for themselves in an effort to create the race war that will eliminate white, Christian people. Now, this jackass might not know this part of the white supremacist narrative, but it really doesn’t matter; he was broadcasting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to justify his opposition to the movement built on the principle that Black people have the right to exist. And, unbeknownst to him, he was saying that to someone of Jewish descent. Awesome. 

Now, I would have loved to explain this to him, but I had a red light’s worth of time. So I stepped back up onto the sidewalk, spread my arms wide, and said, “Do I look like I’m getting paid millions of dollars to be here?” Mind you, I was holding a sign I painted on the lid of a large tupperware container (waterproof and permanent, my friends!) Then I said, “Maybe, if the stuff you’ve been reading doesn’t match what your own eyes are seeing, you should reconsider some of those conspiracy theories.”

To which he responded, “None of you are even Black.”

And I would have loved to explain that white people can, in fact, support Black people, and that this was another thing his eyes were telling him which didn’t fit into the conspiracy theories he was spouting, but the light had turned green and he drove away with his insightful recognition of our whiteness as his parting shot. That missed opportunity wrankled a little bit, but I was over it after the next couple honks of support (which still vastly outmatch the expressions of vitriol against the simple notion that Black people should have the right to exist). So that rally was chill. 

I hopped in my car and took off for Dallas. For those of you who don’t know about our little towns, Dallas is … different. It has a deep history of racism. It was once a significant regional headquarters of the KKK back in the 20s. When the KKK disbanded there [Translation: went underground] in the thirties, the high school chose a dragon for its mascot for, they assure everyone, completely unrelated reasons. There is so much overt interpersonal racism in Dallas that I expect to see at least one Confederate battle flag each time I go. Many of my friends who are people of color have told me they simply will not go there for any reason because they do not feel safe there. That being said, there are Black people, Latinx people, and Native people who live in Dallas (all with horror stories they can tell you about what they’ve experienced there) and there are some great white allies who have really stepped up in support of their neighbors. These folks have started holding rallies. The first one seemed like it might be pretty scary because there was a lot of chatter online about Proud Boys who were planning to show up and cause violence to provoke the police to crack down on the BLM protesters. It turned out not to happen. There were hundreds of supporters for that first rally and only six or seven counter-protesters. Only one of those protesters tried to shoulder his way into the speaking area that day, and he was very effectively blocked by a wall of protesters who jumped in front of him and started chanting “Black Lives Matter” to drown him out. That rally was a huge success and showed a lot of people in Dallas, including the city’s elected officials, that there is a lot more support for Black/Latinx/Indiginous lives than they thought. 

Since then, they’ve held weekly small rallies at the courthouse on Wednesdays. I’ve gone to a couple of those, and there really hasn’t been a significant difference  between Dallas and Monmouth in the amount of vitriol aimed at the protesters. 

Oh boy did that change today! I’d heard rumors online about some counter-protesters coming in from the Proud Boys, and other counter-protesters motivated by the threat of antifa damaging local small businesses. I didn’t take that very seriously because they hadn’t shown up last time. Well they sure did today. Their numbers dwarfed the BLM protesters when I first arrived. They were loud. They were menacing. They were unmasked. They were armed. (In addition to the predictable AR-15s, one dude had a Civil War era sword. Replica or family heirloom? We can guess.) In addition to chanting “All Lives Matter,” they were really free with their racial, homophobic, and sexist slurs. In case there is ever any doubt about what “All Lives Matter” actually means, it is chanted by people who call Native people “Pocahontas,” who call a Black lesbians “boy,” who waggle limp wrists at gay men, who tell women they need to get a man, and who tell a Guatamalan American to go back to his country. Oh, and also they claim to love Jesus. So the next time you say, “All Lives Matter,” thinking you’re expressing some safe truism, please understand why people bristle at this statement you expected to be uncontroversial. You are, perhaps unintentionally, associating yourself with the people who chant, “All Lives Matter.” And their definition of “All Lives” is a very exclusive club.

I’m going to share a clip of one of our speakers. She is a Native woman from the Grand Ronde tribe nearby. She not only spoke, but, you’ll see, she performed a dance … while crying because the people who ostensibly care about “All Lives” were trying to silence her the entire time she spoke, and shouting at her the entire time she danced. 

The first speakers were all very good. Frequently they were interrupted, but only, ONLY the women. Then things kinda went off the rails on our end. A speaker, in an effort to illustrate that we were willing to listen and learn while the other side was not, offered the megaphone (my megaphone) to the “All Lives Matter” folks, and while the first one, a Black man who was a pro-Trumper, was simply nonsensical and shared a bunch of a-historical non-facts (including, bizarrely, that his grandmother had 500 children. Not just a slip of the tongue, either. He really believes this. I’m no expert, but I’m fairly certain the math doesn’t work for him on that claim). Eventually I stepped in and said the next pro-Trumper could say whatever he wanted, but he couldn’t use my megaphone because I wouldn’t allow it to be held by people who don’t wear masks, and that seemed to improve things, but only for a moment. The lead organizer, Rebecca Hunt, has decided to run for mayor (Good for her!), and after she spoke about that decision, out of generosity she allowed another woman to speak who is not a BLM supporter but is running for City Council. That candidate gave a long, rambling speech, mostly about the depressed business climate in Dallas. At that point, without designated speakers lined up to go next, the lead organizer was desperate. So desperate she asked me to speak!

Now, I think it’s really important that the speakers at these events should be people of color, so I never ask to speak or even volunteer. But those of you who know me understand that if you ask me to speak about racial injustice anywhere, anytime, I will always say, “Yes!”

I will try to find a video. I started with a land recognition, made a joke about how I am not running for office to cheers, and another about how I teach at the rival high school to boos. Then I explained that I had a perspective the counter-protesters might find valuable. Since they’d shared the concern of the previous speaker about the woeful economic situation in Dallas, I thought they might like to know that some of the kids from Dallas choose to come to my high school because their city’s racism makes them feel that unsafe. I gave some examples of the horrific treatment my students endured in their town. And then I told them those kids, those Black, Latinx, Native, gay, and trans kids, are some of the best, smartest, most wonderful human beings Dallas could ever ask for, and they’ve lost them to another community because of their racism and bigotry. So the reason their mainstreet is dying is because the racism on display from the counter-protesters, who claim to be there to protect mainstreet from dangerous antifa window breakers, is exactly what is killing their own town.

I think it was recorded by a couple people, and if I can find it, I’ll share it, not so you will hear what I said, but so you can hear the reaction from the counter-protesters. While I, a cishet white guy, spoke, they were almost completely silent. As soon as the next speaker started, they tried to drown her out. They did this to Black women, to Native women, and to gay white women. Later I was asked to speak again. And guess what happened? The counter-protesters went silent and listened. So, among other things, I talked about how the people assuring us they are not racist or sexist or bigoted are demonstrating all three and they don’t even know it. I really do hope I can find the video for you. The difference is amazing and obvious. 

I also got into a couple pretty heated arguments with counter-protesters. One woman tried to push her way in and was loudly proclaiming that we shouldn’t be making things about race. Someone pointed out that Black people are being killed by police at a much higher rate than white people, and that’s why it IS about race. She started going off about how we shouldn’t talk about race and it will go away. I asked her to consider why she, as a white woman, was so uncomfortable talking about race that she found it preferable to avoid the subject rather than discuss the problem. She tried about four different detours to other marginalized groups, and each time I pointed out that she was doing it again, and I kept asking her why she was trying to change the subject to anything other than race. She got super-pissed at the implication that she was a white woman because, she explained, she’s part Portugese. I explained that presenting as white affords us the privileges of whiteness. So she said she was being attacked because of the color of her skin and was now the victim of racism. Turns out she DID want to talk about race, but only as long as she got to be the victim! At that point other people were joining in and she was too defensive to hear any of us, so I walked away…

...only to find myself shouted at by another guy because the speaker at the time was talking about the KKK and he wanted me to know the KKK were Democrats, and I should learn my history. So I turned around and explained that they were Democrats when the Democrtic party was the official party of racism, but when the party was divided on the issue of Civil Rights, the Republicans saw an opening and decided to welcome the most virulent racist politicians who literally switched parties to become Republicans, which is why the KKK officially endorsed the head of the modern Republican Party because it has chosen to be the party of racism. He did not like that, and he accused me of going to college (Yep!) and said I should take that back to Portland (Huh?). And then he said I should get out of HIS town. I said, “Wait, did a white man standing on Kalapuya and Grand Ronde land just declare this town to belong to him? The only thing that would make that even more perfect is if he was planting a flag right here in the grass while making his declaration. Oh, wait! He is!” I kid you not, the dude flinched like he wanted to hide his giant Trump flag behind his back for a second, but of course he couldn’t do that, so he just stood there planting his flag. I hope someone filmed that. It was glorious.

While those exchanges were tense, at least they were just words. What was far more concerning was the violence. Now, people can have a reasonable debate about whether or not certain kinds of speech also constitute violence. In general, as an author and educator, I favor a pretty expansive view of free speech, but I have to step back and recognize that, as a cishet white male, it’s easier for me to endure some kinds of hate speech because I’m less likely to face material consequences, so I’m willing to defer to people from marginalized groups who feel things like racist slurs (when directed at someone and not just being analyzed in some abstract way) are a form of violence since they presage physical and/or material harm. But here’s what cannot be denied: Not only were the “All Lives Matter” people shouting hateful slurs, but they were also the only ones to be physically violent. They would push their way into the circle to try to take over, and the police would have to come over and gently escort them back to their place of safety. Do you think, if one of the BLM protesters who is Black or Latinx or Native had done the same thing, they would have been escorted back rather than being arrested and charged with assault? We’ll never know because none of the BLM protesters did that, but I have my suspicions it might have been treated differently. Regardless, we do know that the “All Lives Matter” counter-protesters claimed they were coming to protect their town from violence and then were the only ones to commit any acts of violence. Will any of them reflect on that and allow it to challenge their assumptions about who is the real threat? They did not strike me as the most reflective crowd. 

In addition to being bad at being decent human beings, the “All Lives Matter” protesters were bad at politics, and when I was asked to speak a second time, I pointed that out. For one thing, they stood around us in a big semi-circle. Yes, that was imposing, but it was also stupid from a political perspective: To anyone driving by, it looked like there was a huge BLM rally with a few Trump fans in the back. Dumb. Also, we had an organized list of speakers (though not enough to fill the time and too much time to fill, in my opinion). They had none. It made it painfully obvious that we were there to learn and grow and discuss further action, while they had no message beyond their opposition to Black lives mattering. Lastly, they had no messaging discipline. They were standing around holding up Trump flags and signs while yelling racial slurs. It makes it very difficult for anyone to claim the Trump campaign isn’t racist when his supporters are on video taunting Native women and Black women while wearing MAGA hats and waving flags with his name on them. So please don’t waste your time trying to convince me there are non-racist Trump supporters. Every single Trump supporter supports a racist candidate who is pushing racist policies while they are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people exhibiting the most obvious and ugly racism.

But here’s the bigger take-away from today which I want supporters of Black Lives Matter to know: Shortly after the murder of George Floyd, support for BLM spiked. It was impossible for people who saw that recorded execution to say Black people do not face injustice or that police brutality is not a problem.  Back in 2014, after the murders of Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Antonio Martin, Jerame Reid, and Renisha McBride, and the expressions of outrage particularly in Baltimore, MD, and Ferguson, MO, support for BLM was still quite low. In fact, even after the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlotesville, NC, where a racist murdered a BLM protester, “net public support for the Black Lives Matter movement was about negative 5%, meaning 5% more Americans disapproved of the movement than supported it” (Christian Science Monitor). Then, after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, “Net support for Black Lives Matter recently reached 28% (with 53% approving of the movement and 25% disapproving)...” (Christian Science Monitor). Even among Republicans, the support grew to 10% supporting and 32% neither supporting or opposed at its peak on May 29th (Civiqs). This was enough for politicians and corporations to come out in favor of Black Lives Matter (motivated by the desire for votes and profits which is really the same motivation to maintain themselves rather than a genuine concern for Black people). But Donald Trump is not swayed by the normal political impulse because he’s a through-and-through racist and stoking racial resentment has been his go-to all his life, so he began applying pressure to his propaganda machine, Fox News, to turn on the Black Lives Matter movement by convincing his base that caring about Black people encourages violence and makes white people unsafe. And since there’s nothing old white people like to hear more than the notion that all their fears are justified by racial stereotypes, they’ve been buying in. The support for Black Lives Matter among Republicans has dropped dramatically recently. The percentage of Republicans who support Black Lives Matter is still slightly above where it was the day before George Floyd’s murder (8%), but the number who neither support nor oppose is back down to where it was at this time last year (16%) and the number opposed is back to where it was in September of last year (74%) and climbing rapidly (Civiqs). Meanwhile, support for Black Lives Matter among Democrats (yeah, that party the Trump fan tried to convince me is the party of the KKK) is at 89%. That’s good (really good for the party that started the KKK, right?), but it climbed up to that point back on the 5th of this month and has plateaued since then. That’s an artificial ceiling created by the reverberating effects of the Fox News echochamber seeping even into Democratic opinion, and I saw that firsthand yesterday.

Of course the people waving the Trump flags were opposed to Black Lives Matter, but when they heckled, some of what I heard coming back from Black Lives Matter supporters speaks to this infection of anti-Black Lives Matter information finding purchase even in the left. Remember, Trump and his allies know they aren’t going to get the majority of Democrats to oppose Black Lives Matter, so they don’t confront it directly to the left. But Democratic support for BLM should be 100%, not 89% and holding. So why is it getting sticky? Because different bits of Republican propaganda are finding purchase. This is where we lacked message discipline yesterday, and it’s a big problem. For one thing, the counter-protesters would shout things to try to create what-about-isms related to the failings of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Neither of those politicians are perfect human beings or always took the right positions on every issue. They’re human, and they screwed up. A lot of the right wing smears are just lies (Pizzagate), others are wild exaggerations (Benghazi, emails), and some are distortions based on what I consider to be very legitimate criticisms. For example, Hillary Clinton’s vocal support for the Crime Bill (and, for that matter, Joe Biden’s vote in favor of it) was a mistake which has caused incredible harm to communities of color. We shouldn’t be afraid to say so. We should also contextualize that by remembering the bill had overwhelming support from the leaders of those same communities of color at the time. Clinton and Biden were standing with the Congressional Black Caucus. But they all made a mistake, a terrible mistake that has had disastrous results. Similarly, Barack Obama’s deportation policy was terrible. Again, we can contextualize it by acknowledging that he was trying to win over Republican support in an effort to create a far more humane comprehensive immigration policy, but he got rolled by Republicans and sacrificed the wellbeing of a lot of people of color in the process, and that’s indefensible. The Trump fans want to find these holes in the records of Dems to try to drive a wedge within the left-leaning half of the electorate. But false equivalences are false! Standing with the Congressional Black Caucus and supporting a bill that turns out to have disastrous consequences is bad, but it’s not anything like actively and intentionally encouraging police to beat up Black people which Trump is doing right now. Obama’s deportation numbers were terrible, but (contrary to what some Republicans believe) he did not split up families and put children in hastily built concentration camps ...in the “care” of sexual predators ...during a global pandemic! Yet I heard people (exclusively white allies) on the BLM side slipping into this “Both parties are the same,” rhetoric when baited. Even worse, they were repeating this false notion that both candidates are rapists and pedophiles. Joe Biden is not my first choice for a bunch of reasons. He used to support segregated bussing, and though he changed his stance on that a long time ago, I find that one hard to forgive. He supported the aformentioned crime bill. Privately, he tried to discourage President Obama for pushing for major healthcare reform. While I’m pleased to see how far he’s come when you look at all his current positions on issues, my confidence in him is diminished by how long it has taken him to come to those positions, and it makes me worried that he’ll abandon them once he’s in office. But that wasn’t what I was hearing from the supposed allies. I was hearing he’s a rapist and a pedophile. I strongly believe we should believe women when they make accusations because the vast majority of the time they are telling the truth and even more of the time they are not speaking out at all because they know they won’t be believed, so believing women until proven otherwise in the court of public opinion (not in the court of law) should be our go-to. But we would be wrong, and dangerously so, to let that initial belief so calcify that we are unwilling to recognize it when an accuser turns out to be lying. False accusations do happen, especially from white women towards Black and Brown men, and when we find out an accuser is a liar, we need to be willing to admit we were wrong. Unlike Trump’s more than 20 accusers, Biden has one, and she’s proven to be a serial liar, a fabulist who makes up stories for money or attention. Now, that alone doesn’t mean her story is false; serial liars can be the victims of rape, too. But her specific story about Biden has fallen apart when scrutinized. Sorry, Trump fans, but Joe Biden is not a rapist. He’s not a pedophile, either. The guy was way to handsy with everybody, especially women and children. I suspect that was something he learned when glad-handing as a young politician back when his impulse to touch everybody was something most people probably liked about him. He’s learned to respect appropriate boundaries way too late. But someone who puts their hands all over everybody during photo-ops is not a pedophile. Donald Trump violently raped girls and boys as young as 10 years old at Jeffrey Epstien’s parties. (Trump has threatened to sue people who report that story, but he never does it because he doesn’t want it to come out in a court of law. Go ahead, Donny. Sue me. Let’s have those charges fully investigated.) Calling Joe Biden a pedophile isn’t just false, it’s a huge insult to the victims of Trump’s violent rapes to repeat that false equivalence. 

And that’s the heart of the problem with white allies going off message and getting baited into these discussions with Trump hecklers: It reveals some of us to be really bad allies. Because white allies tend to be more liberal and more politically engaged, we’re very used to arguing with right-wing low-information voters, so we easily slip into the habit of thinking we have more information upon which to make political judgements. But when it comes to allyship, this can lead to a dangerous kind of white supremacy within the ranks of supposed allies. We identify as leftists, so we’re hesitant to tack to the middle for strategic purposes because we’ve seen movements get co-opted by centrists so many times. But being an ally isn’t about being an extreme leftist or a centrist; it’s about supporting rather than leading. When Black, Brown, Indiginous, Asian, disabled, and LGBTQ people tell me they want me to be more extreme, I don’t say, “Well, I support you but I will turn my back on you when I see images of a Wendy’s on fire because I oppose the destruction of private property and I think it’s bad political strategy and I know better than you.” I say, “If you think it’s time for an expression of pure rage, you know better than I do, and I will stand with you.” And when BIPOC tell me, through polling and overwhelming majority votes in the primaries, that they want to choose the centrist candidate because getting rid of Donald Trump is that vital to their safety, I don’t say, “Well, I support you, but I have these longer term goals to get rid of the two party system and to protect the planet from an extinction level event caused by human-created climate change, and I know what’s better for you in the long run, so I’m turning my back on you and voting for a third party.” I say, “If you think it’s time for a centrist candidate now so we still have the ability to vote and can work on other issues in the next election, you know better than I do, and I will stand with you.” Of course BIPOC are not a monolith, despite the way the acronym makes them seem, and allies have to carefully weigh lots of evidence and not just listen to the anecdotal accounts and personal opinions of individual Black or Latinx or Asian or LGBTQ people when figuring out how to best support all marginalized people. But in this case it’s very clear. The vast majority of all of those groups are telling us Donald Trump has got to go. We are not being good allies if we stand up and undermine BIPOC by undermining the only candidate, Joe Biden, who has a realistic shot of accomplishing that goal of BIPOC. There are plenty of left-leaning BIPOC who are going to be holding their noses when they vote for Joe Biden. If we’re going to be true allies, we have to be willing to pinch our noses just as hard. 

This is why the two rallies are so illustrative to me. Historically, every push for civil rights for every marginalized group produces a backlash. That’s why feminism has waves, y’all; after each wave the culture pushed back and said, “Full equal rights and opportunities for all women? Hold on now!” The most successful civil rights movements can weather these, just as Black Lives Matter has survived the backlash after Ferguson and has come back stronger than ever. What really undermines civil rights movements, particularly for people of color, is not the “All Lives Matter” backlash. It’s white allies deciding they’ve been in the fight long enough that they either give up or try to take over and make the movement about some other concern of their own. Read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Waterdancer. Read Malcolm X. Read James Baldwin. Heck, if you’re pressed for time, just re-read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” The biggest danger to Black progress is always betrayal from white people who think they’re allies and then undermine the movement because they think they know better. 

So please, please, please keep showing up. If you can, go to protests. It continues to apply pressure and helps the folks sitting in the boring meetings. If you can do the harder work of going to the boring meetings, speak up and support the leaders making changes, because that’s where the change happens. If you can do even more than that, be like Rebecca Hunt and run for office so you can make the decisions during those boring meetings. And at every turn, if you’re a white ally, keep asking yourself, “Am I advocating for the changes BIPOC are telling me they want, or just the ones I have decided they should want?” 

Don’t be like Plant-His-Flag Man. This is not your movement. This is not your town. This is not your land. We’re on stolen land working in racist institutions in a fundamentally white supremacist system. We cannot fix all that. But we can commit to the principle that the people directing the repair operation need to be the ones who best understand how the machine is broken.