I’ve been meditating on the editorial by Portland, OR NAACP President E.D. Mondainé in WaPo entitled “Portland’s protests were supposed to be about black lives. Now, they’re white spectacle.” There’s a lot that I perceive to be true in the piece, and yet there’s something I believe Mondainé is missing.
Images of “Naked Athena,” as the protester has been labeled, have gone viral, her unclothed confrontation with police earning her accolades as a brave ally of the cause. But I see something else: a beneficiary of white privilege dancing vainly on a stage that was originally created to raise up the voices of my oppressed brothers and sisters. In this, she is not alone. As the demonstrations continue every night in Portland, many people with their own agendas are co-opting, and distracting attention from, what should be our central concern: the Black Lives Matter movement.
From Feminist News.
It’s my perception that the original struggle of the BLM movement has, as Mondainé suggests, recently been co-opted, but not by Mondainé’s white allies, but by President Trump through the dispatch of anonymized federal officers.
The character of the response is the key feature that changes the situation out of Mondainé’s reckoning, I think. If the officers were wearing normal uniforms and ID and acting as normal law enforcement, I’d agree with Mondainé.
But they’re not. They’re acting, to put it in a simple phrase, as terror troops.
President Trump has proclaimed this a law and order matter, yet the mayor of Portland as well as the governor of Oregon have rejected the troops. These two factors, taken together, has transformed the struggle in Portland from a black civil rights matter into a Trump campaign maneuver, meant to influence the American public against the BLM movement as well as liberals in general.
Every move an adversary makes is potentially an opportunity, and I’m not sure Mondainé understands this.
If we engage them now, we do so on their terms, where they have created the conditions for a war without rules, without accountability and without the protection of our Constitution. This makes me fearful for the safety of everyone demonstrating in Portland. That’s why we need to remember: What is happening in Portland is the fuse of a great, racist backlash that the Trump administration is baiting us to light.
By engaging in what is essentially an immoral act, Trump has left himself vulnerable to a charge of corrupt morals. But, in order to communicate this to Americans from coast to coast, it must be emphasized. In previous struggles, the black community used non-violent confrontations, in which they sacrificed their bodies and, sometimes, their lives, to make the point that the morals to which they adhered were superior to those who beat them – and thereby shamed them.
If Trump’s barbaric attempt to boost his popularity as the elections near is to be rebutted, Americans of all colors who stand against him must rebut his charge vividly. Protests are communications, and communications benefits from contrast.
Terror troops?
Meet the Wall of Moms.
The latter function as a moral authority in a struggle that Trump transformed, but, because the latter occupy the moral high ground, Trump is engaged on the terms chosen by his opposition. The Wall of Moms shame his troops, through their peaceful protest and their position in society, which exists regardless of community.
Mothers are the sacrosanct source of peace.
Mondainé may wish to withdraw from the streets:
We cannot fall for their deception. We cannot settle for spectacles that endanger us all. This is a moment for serious action — to once again take up the mantle of the civil rights era by summoning the same conviction and determination our forebears did. We welcome our white brothers and sisters in this struggle. In fact, we need them. But I must ask them to remain humbly attuned to the opportunity of this moment — and to reflect on whether any actions they take will truly help establish justice, or whether they are simply for show.
Thursday night, I will lead a rally in downtown Portland to refocus public attention where it belongs: on redeeming a guilty nation. But recent events might be a sign that our work in the streets should be coming to an end.
But how will an American independent perceive that action? As the opposition being run off by the Federal troops, unwilling to put up or shut up? The independents hold political power in their collective hands. It seems to me that communicating that the protesters are willing to peacefully protest even in the teeth of barbarity will be more convincing than evacuating the streets.
Letting Trump’s terror troops prove their own depravity in a nation where votes will decide the future of this country only benefit BLM.
I think.
