I attended one of Sunday’s peaceful protests in Boston. I went with my daughter and a friend of hers who is studying to become a police officer. We wore the requested uniform of the day, clad all in black and properly masked, since social distancing wasn’t possible in this scenario.
We marched from Nubian Square, toward the State House. We walked, we chanted, many people held signs, we clapped for the healthcare workers who stood outside Tufts Medical Center, we nodded at each other, we felt solidarity amid our outrage. There were tens of thousands of black-clad demonstrators, the majority of them white. This is Boston, after all.
Was there anything accomplished?
Yes, there was hope — a feeling that had been long abandoned by many as the weeks of the pandemic stretched into months, and the death toll continued to rise, along with the millions of people filing for unemployment.
But the catastrophic death of George Floyd brought enough people out of their complicity to take to the streets and strongly assert that yes, Black Lives Matter. The videotaped evidence of a police officer kneeling on a man’s neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds, even though he knew full well he was being recorded, showed just how confident he was that this black life was expendable, and he could become an executioner without any repercussions.
After all, this has been happening for centuries. The only difference is now there is video evidence of the kind of heinous actions taken by those sworn to uphold the law — it’s no longer a “he said, he said,” “let’s not rush to judgment,” “there are two sides” dialogue going on.
So yes, faced with the incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing, there were thousands taking to the streets to demand justice, not only for George Floyd, but all the other people who are slaughtered for no other reason than being black or brown.
This movement may have started in Minneapolis, where Derek Chauvin committed his crime, but the mantle has been taken up by people all over the country — and all over the world.
And yet, we have those who have chosen to usurp the message of calls for reform with selfish, evil, and greedy intentions.
My daughter, her friend, and I met up with my husband at the Common and we watched and marveled as the hordes of people, still peaceful, moved toward the State House in what seemed to be an never-ending stream of humanity. It was beautiful in its commonality of purpose.
When it started to get dark, we headed home.
But by the time we got back home and settled in and turned on the news, the night had turned ugly and violent.
The looters had come out to turn our protest — our multiracial coalition of hope for a better world — into an opportunity to smash and grab from stores that had already been hobbled by the pandemic that has shuttered so much of our economy for the last three months.
We watched the live broadcast in absolute disgust as people drove up in cars (most of them really nice cars), rushed in through the broken windows on Boylston Street and in other parts of the city, greedily grabbing what they could and taking off. Most weren’t wearing the black clothes from the demonstrators, so I’m hoping they will be identifiable by their clothing and their license plates, easily seen as they sped away.
I heard myself quoting my Southern-born-and-bred mother, saying, “If I saw my kids doing that, I’d skin them alive.”
My own kid was so sickened by these actions that she had to stop watching. She had been so inspired after participating in two days of protests, feeling like people, white people of Boston, finally heard the anguish of their black and brown neighbors and friends.
But then, the unspeakable happened.
These criminals came into Boston as purveyors of hate and disharmony.
Several reports have surfaced that some of these groups are white supremacists, coming in to disrupt the message being sent all around the world, that police brutality will no longer be tolerated. They want to maintain the status quo, so turning a peaceful protest into a riot changes the narrative.
They weren’t expressing any sort of anger, or outrage at the systemic racism that this country was founded on. They weren’t demonstrating any hatred toward capitalism that makes sure that the 1 percent is taken care of while the 99 percent fight among themselves for the crumbs.
These weren’t the people starving and homeless after the levies gave way during Hurricane Katrina who broke into stores to get what they needed for food and supplies (some of them left money behind, because they weren’t thieves and didn’t want to be perceived as such).
This wasn’t even the frustration borne out of a Target store that refused to sell milk to protesters after they were tear-gassed in Minneapolis. That frustration was somewhat understandable, but tell me, you poor excuses for human beings — what the hell did Neiman-Marcus or Men’s Wearhouse ever do to you?
But the worst theft was the hijacking of our message of hope. Instead of the story being about the tens of thousands of people of all colors and cultures coming together to effect positive change, it became about the criminals who tore up the city. They raped and pillaged our purpose.
They took what they didn’t need and destroyed what they didn’t own. They were stealing the spotlight from people of all hues coming together to work toward a better world for all. They gave ammunition to racists to justify their hatred. They may have tried to steal our story. But we can’t let them steal our movement and our purpose. We have to keep our eyes on the prize — and we will prevail.
