January 07, 2015
The most dramatic development in the United States in recent
months in my mind was the sustained nationwide protests against two related
events: the deaths of several African-American men and teenagers at the hands
of police, and the decisions by the judicial system not to prosecute anyone for
the deaths. Local protests across the country have gone on in different forms
for several months now, and many ethnicities have participated in the movement
that broadly marches under the banners of “Ferguson Action,” “Don’t Shoot!,”
“Black Lives Matter,” and other coordinating groups.
The names of dead African-Americans like Michael
Brown and Eric Garner resonated across a country that was not witnessing only a
spontaneous expression of anger, vulnerability and self-assertion by
African-Americans who feel that they are unfairly monitored, targeted,
detained, frisked, arrested and occasionally killed by predominantly White
police forces. This situation touches the fears of many more Americans, who see
what appeared to them as a dysfunctional or prejudiced judicial system that
allowed deaths of young Black men at the hands of police to pass without any
judicial proceedings to discover if the police were acting illegally,
unprofessionally or unethically. The status quo seemed to endanger young black
men in the first instance, but many other Americans sense they would be losers
also if they, too, do not enjoy the safeguards of the rule of law and an
equitable justice system.
So during the last weeks of my extended visit to
the United States this autumn, I sought out activists and organizers to learn
more about the causes and consequences of the protests. Two seasoned community
organizers in the Boston area, Terry Marshall and Lizzy Padgett, explained to
me how community-based, locally-organized and largely spontaneous protest
movements used street demonstrations and other non-violent actions to disrupt
normal life in order to bring attention to the issues at hand. Marshall and
Padgett have been involved in community organizing for 15 years, and are
founders of groups such as Deep Abiding Love and Intelligent Mischief.
Based on their years of activism, they saw
qualitative differences in the current protests from previous ones. They had
learned from the short-lived Occupy Wall Street protests of two years ago that
they had to prepare ahead of time in order to be able to maintain longer and
more effective protests. They also felt that the active use of social media
“amplified” local events such as the first major street demonstrations in
Ferguson, Missouri, and spurred nationwide protests by Americans everywhere who
felt that their system of law and justice had failed.
The tactic of peaceful marches that sought to
disrupt normal life — like briefly closing the Brooklyn Bridge in New York or
the metropolitan transport system in San Francisco — seeks to disrupt “business
as usual” for people far away from the deaths of young Blacks, so that they
“feel the pain and trauma,” and grasp that a crisis is happening in the lives
of Black people that cannot continue.
When normal life and the economy are disrupted
briefly, they told me, the American system feels uncomfortable, and America
takes notice. They gave examples of some initial successes such the police in
St. Louis issuing far fewer warrants to people, or the police in Boston now
discussing the use of body cameras, after initially rejecting the idea. The
extra costs of overtime for police personnel due to the protests — which
amounted to some $2 million in Boston and the state of Massachusetts during the
initial weeks of protests — also captures the attention of officialdom.
When I attended a training session for mostly
young Black, Hispanic and White activists in a downtown Boston hall, the
emphasis was on non-violent civil action and street protests, how to act when
confronted by police, what information to gather when arrested, and how to
communicate with others. The training reflected the point that Marshall and
Padgett mentioned, about working hard to make it safe and sustainable for
protestors to make their point in the streets, and then to move beyond street
action for national political, judicial and policing changes. Only such structural
changes can fix the deeper endemic problems of poverty, education, unofficial
segregation, a prison culture and others that allow the state to use violence
against Black bodies, they said. The recent deaths will happen again and again
if nothing is done, they argued.
A poster at the training session spelled out the
national goals that are the ultimate demands of the protests around the
country: “The demilitarization of law enforcement across the country;
comprehensive review of systemic abuses by local police departments;
repurposing of law enforcement funds to support community based alternatives to
incarceration; a congressional hearing to investigate the criminalization of
communities of color, racial profiling, police abuses and torture by law enforcement;
support the passage of the ‘end racial profiling act’; Obama administration
develops, legislates and enacts a national plan of action for racial justice.”
A few days later, I attended a nighttime
candlelight vigil in Watertown, Massachusetts, comprising mostly older,
well-off white people. They heard from their religious and civic leaders about
the need to hear the cries, protests and grievances of those in society who
suffered but were not visible in suburban communities. One of the speakers was
the local police chief, who gave the crowd his phone number as a sign of his
understanding of the need to dialogue and address the grievances that have been
amplified by the protests.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in
the Daily Star. He was
founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for
Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On
Twitter: @ramikhouri.