The Quiet Before, page 28
Foege never meant to raise his voice above a whisper—the only person who knew about the letter was his wife—but somehow it leaked and began circulating among the CDC scientists as a manifesto that gave voice to their collective frustration. “I was so surprised when it became public,” he said. “That’s just how naïve I am.” But he felt no shame in his accusation, because as far as he was concerned, he was simply channeling the sentiment of the email chains. “I was able to say in my letter to him that his own people were questioning his leadership,” Foege said. “And that he should apologize, but let them know the pressures he was under. The private email conversations allowed me to know that that was true, that that’s the way the CDC employees were feeling, that they were not trusting their leadership.” Those messages meant a lot to Foege. He saw in them the glue for putting the CDC’s shattered credibility back together again in the future. “We’d always prided ourselves on this idea of truth and science, and resistance to politics,” he said about his beloved agency. The fact that its workers, even as dissidents, had stayed true to that mission, if only among themselves, gave him hope.
Chapter 10
THE NAMES
Minneapolis, 2020
MISKI NOOR DIDN’T NEED to watch all nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds of torture. Just a glimpse at the video of George Floyd’s murder—the man lying prone and handcuffed and being slowly asphyxiated by a police officer’s knee pressing down on his neck—persuaded Miski to leave her friends at the local Dairy Queen and join the gathering protest. The life of a Black Lives Matter activist was conditioned by these moments of recorded brutality and death. They served to reignite a movement built on a terrible accumulation of names—Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott. Each was an added page in a brief against America and its system of policing. George Floyd was yet another, the sequence of events that led from being stopped for buying cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill to lying dead in the street, sadly, no surprise to Miski.
But this time was different. It had been a few years since the movement, born of a hashtag, had grabbed any wider attention. Since 2016, it seemed to be overtaken, along with the rest of social media, by the ceaseless spectacle of Donald Trump’s presidency. By early 2020, Black Lives Matter was talked about in the past tense, when it was talked about at all.
This new video, its unambiguous cruelty, an injustice evident to even a stone-cold skeptic, got the pendulum swinging again. And it did so during the restless, cooped-up summer of 2020—the coronavirus had by then shut down most of the country—when people were sufficiently free from work and school routines to take action and already agitated by a public health disaster that was disproportionately tearing through the lives of the poor, who bore the brunt of both sickness and joblessness.
Something was shaken loose. The protest began, with its greatest fury, in Minneapolis, a few blocks from Miski’s home, on May 26, the day after Floyd’s death, and led to a police precinct being set ablaze and the National Guard’s intervention two days later. But it was the breadth of indignation and mourning that was really shocking. There was a demonstration in every major American city, from Los Angeles to Nashville to Louisville, Kentucky, where the name of Breonna Taylor, a twenty-six-year-old EMT who had been shot in her bedroom during a police raid a few months earlier, was added to the incantation. On June 6 alone—just one day—half a million people turned out in nearly 550 cities and towns across the United States. Within a month, it was estimated that as many as twenty-six million people had taken part in a protest. An analysis by The New York Times counted 4,700 demonstrations, or an average of 140 per day, and, shockingly, nearly 95 percent of the counties where people put on masks and carried signs and chanted the names were majority white. You could drive through rural parts of America or wealthy all-white suburbs and see signs with #BlackLivesMatter staked in lawns and plastered on people’s windows, sometimes written with crayon in a child’s hand. By July 3, The New York Times was declaring, with little equivocation, that this was “the largest movement in U.S. history.”
Standing at the epicenter, Miski saw it all rippling further and further out. And rather than exhilaration—though there was that as well—there was an anxiety: How to grab hold of this moment, this great burst of visibility, and direct it in a way that would bring about something more than the sugar rush of symbolic wins? Every day that June and July gave reason to feel this strange blend of pride and wariness. What to make of a company like Lululemon, which sold $168 leggings, trumpeting that it was supporting an effort to “unveil historical erasure and resist capitalism”? Or the decision to take Aunt Jemima off a syrup bottle, remove the Confederate bars and cross from the Mississippi flag, or cancel the show Cops after thirty-two seasons? Or the vision of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, solemnly taking a knee in front of a giant bank vault at a local Chase branch? How to see past the performance, the yard signs and kente cloth, and focus on what was actually going to change people’s lives, and maybe even stop the killing?
Miski, who uses they/them pronouns, was not a newcomer to the feeling of being lifted up and then dropped. And they were determined to create leverage out of this national catharsis—a Pew Research Center survey in early June found that two-thirds of Americans said they supported the movement, including 60 percent of white people. But the work would have to happen locally and, most critically, Miski knew, in a way that avoided the sort of oscillations that had become a distraction in the past. There was nothing symbolic about what Miski and many of the other activists wanted. They believed that American policing, born as an institution in the nineteenth century in part—at least in the South—to catch runaway slaves, could never overcome this original sin simply through reform. Policing, in their eyes, was a tool of social control meant to route Black people into prison. Full stop. And yet in city after city, the police received the biggest share of the budget, without question and with disregard for the disproportionate harm they inflicted on Black and brown people. The maximal position on the question of what to do about this reality was called abolition, eliminating police departments completely and replacing them with a new model for public safety guided by the community’s needs. A tactic on the way to abolition was defund, which meant moving money away from the police and toward other social services. These were real demands. Activists wanted to shift the thoughtless and automatic way that funds were doled out to the eighteen thousand police departments in the country. But first, they needed power, and as the democracy seekers in Tahrir Square learned all too well a decade before, attaining it was harder than protest.
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MISKI NOOR WAS originally from Somalia but had lived in Minneapolis from the age of fourteen. They had moved through life with that immigrant’s capacity to inhabit different worlds at once. “I’m Muslim. I’m queer, I identify as a gender-nonconforming person. I’m just somebody who lives at the intersection of a lot of marginalized identities,” Miski told me. Their appearance was always self-confident and always tinged with some flair. Enormous green circular earrings would dangle off Miski’s ears, or aviator glasses would take up half their face. And they had an easy laugh, which proved useful once they became the spokesperson for the city’s Black Lives Matter chapter.
After majoring in political science and African American studies at the University of Minnesota, Miski had worked with a nonprofit to help resettle immigrants before ending up in the offices of Keith Ellison, the progressive representative who was also the first congressman to be sworn in with his hand on a Koran. Miski dealt with constituents, handling casework, and pretty quickly began to feel the limits of what was possible in their role as the proxy for a legislator. So in 2012, Miski quit the political realm altogether and became a pharmacy technician, happy to have a day job while they thought about a better way to make an impact—including by running for their neighborhood association. It was an election, Miski proudly told me, that they won. It was then, in the summer of 2014, that the news erupted about Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson who was killed by the police, his barely covered body left in the street for hours. And as Miski put it, it was “like somebody had pressed the go button on Black liberation.”
Miski’s roommate turned their kitchen into the headquarters of the Black Lives Matter Minneapolis chapter, and for the next two years it was a hub of frenetic activity. Each new death pushed them out into the streets, a rhythm that mirrored the frequency of the hashtag that shot up out of the tear gas of Ferguson. In fact the dynamic of the movement in those years can best be understood by looking at the quantitative traces left by that slogan.
Patrisse Cullors, a Los Angeles–based activist, first used #BlackLivesMatter on July 13, 2013. She had seen a Facebook post written by Alicia Garza, a friend and fellow community organizer from San Francisco, that ended with the words “Black people. I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives matter.” The idea was to promote it as a rallying cry, and they pulled in a third activist friend, Opal Tometi, who helped them set up Facebook and Twitter accounts encouraging people to share stories of why #BlackLivesMatter. It didn’t work. No one paid much attention to the hashtag for at least another year—despite some high-profile killings, like that of Eric Garner, who was put in a choke hold by a police officer on Staten Island, repeating the words “I can’t breathe” eleven times until he lost consciousness. That month, July 2014, #BlackLivesMatter appeared in only 398 tweets. Less than a month later, Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson. Still, the hashtag barely registered, even as #Ferguson and #MikeBrown helped draw attention to the clashes and helped protesters, who were in the streets facing down police in armored tanks, shape a narrative through videos and images and minute-by-minute tweets. (Egyptian revolutionaries, following along on Twitter, offered advice about how to handle tear gas: wash your eyes with milk or Coca-Cola, not water.)
It was only on November 25, 2014, as the tension in Ferguson subsided, and a full sixteen months after its coinage, that #BlackLivesMatter became the unifying cry, online and off. That was the day after a grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot Michael Brown, and it was also three days after a Cleveland police officer killed Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old who was playing with a toy gun. There were 172,772 mentions of the hashtag. And from there it took off. In the three previous months, the hashtag averaged fewer than 1,500 daily mentions; in the three months after, it averaged more than 30,000 a day. But the spikes were even more revealing. When a few days later the police officer whose choke hold led to Eric Garner’s death went free, #BlackLivesMatter appeared 189,210 times on Twitter. It was mentioned 160,810 times the following day, too. Then the hashtag began showing up all over the country, on signs carried by over a hundred Black congressional aides who walked off the job in protest and in sports arenas where NBA players wore shirts underneath their jerseys that were printed with the words, “I can’t breathe.”
Looking at a graph of hashtag mentions over the next year and a half, you can see that the spikes were each correlated to a death—on April 19, 2015, Freddie Gray dies in Baltimore from injuries sustained in the back of a police van, more than 40,000 tweets; on June 17, a shooting in a Charleston, South Carolina, church by a white supremacist kills nine people, nearly 100,000; on July 13, Sandra Bland is found hanged in her prison cell three days after being stopped for a minor traffic violation, 125,000. On the day Philando Castile was killed in his car in a suburb of St. Paul, July 6, 2016, the hashtag was used 250,000 times and would soon reach a daily peak of 1.1 million.
Every movement needs such moments. They provoke and then produce action. We don’t live our lives with constant awareness of these issues—even those most potentially affected by them avert their gaze. It’s the moments that force a visceral reckoning with the violence. It was the shattered face of Emmett Till that helped launch the struggle for civil rights in 1955. But there was a danger, which the activists began to feel, in their dependence on these instances of sadness and rage to keep the movement aloft. “I think what people were witnessing was a community grieving,” Patrisse Cullors told me. “And the response to the killing was like, at any moment, we could be next and it literally felt like we were trying to save our lives and we were the only ones trying to save our lives.” But she also told me that her biggest regret in those years was not having “copyrighted” the hashtag that she had first used, by which I think she meant that it took on an unpredictable life of its own, driven by the desire for emotional release that had become social media’s single and overwhelming mode.
An analysis of the #BlackLivesMatter tweets conducted in early 2016 by the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University confirmed this fear about the potential downside of the movement’s virality. As an issue, police brutality—unlike, say, income inequality—was “extremely well-suited to internet-based activism,” being “concrete, discrete in its manifestations, and above all, visual.” The same dynamic worked to the benefit of the We Are All Khaled Said page. The report’s conclusion, however, made the downside clear: “Activists may be somewhat limited in the extent to which they can generate large-scale online debate by themselves.” One of the study’s authors, Charlton McIlwain, an NYU professor, elaborated on this when I spoke to him. “If there was not a death, if there was not a catalyzing event, there was relatively little conversation on social media,” McIlwain said. “And I think that for me that was a sign of the limitation.”
In Minneapolis, Miski and the local Black Lives Matter chapter saw just how debilitating the need to ride these waves could be. In November 2015, the police killing of Jamar Clark, who some onlookers said was handcuffed and facedown when he was shot, led to Miski’s group occupying the city’s fourth police precinct for eighteen days. They camped out in freezing weather, attempting to sustain attention with their bodies. They demanded that the police release the dashcam and bodycam tapes of the incident, that the Department of Justice investigate, and that the police officers be charged with a crime. In the end they did manage to achieve two out of their three goals, Miski said: the tapes were made public, and an investigation was launched. But there were no wider repercussions, and the whole process had been depleting. It was obvious the conditions that had led to Clark’s death hadn’t changed. A lot of activists came to feel this way. Even Obama, at the end of his presidency, expressed his exasperation with the movement’s limited tool kit, at one point telling protesters, “You can’t just keep on yelling.” By the fifth anniversary of Ferguson, though it was true that almost $100 million had been spent by police departments all over the country on body cameras, a report found that in Missouri, where it all began, Black people were being stopped by the police 5 percent more and white people were being stopped 11 percent less than they had been in 2013.
“We were tired of mobilizing over and over again in the face of Black death, and making either instrumental or symbolic demands that never got us the wind that would keep a mass of people engaged,” Miski told me. And it all took a serious toll. Not long after the occupation, Miski was admitted to the hospital and ended up needing four blood transfusions. “A lot of us were suicidal or depressed,” Miski said. “And we were like, okay, if we’re actually doing work for Black liberation, we have to do this in ways that are sustainable. And that are not just responsive or reactive.”
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THERE WEREN’T MANY MODELS for stepping away from this reactiveness. But one group in Miami, the Dream Defenders, had tried, and Miski looked to them as an example of activism that wasn’t strapped to the erratic ups and downs. The Dream Defenders, made up mostly of college students, gained national attention in 2013 when they staged an occupation, similar to the one Miski was involved in years later. They spent thirty-one days chanting outside the polished wood doors of the governor’s office in Tallahassee, Florida, so that he might reconsider the state’s Stand Your Ground law. This was the permissive set of gun regulations that allowed the courts to acquit the killer of Trayvon Martin, the teenager shot while walking home from a 7-Eleven holding nothing but a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. For all the publicity, the Dream Defenders weren’t particularly successful, and by the summer of 2015, when Rachel Gilmer, a longtime organizer, became their chief of strategy, she found a group stripped of its vitality, tired of having to keep pace with the demands of social media and attempting to attract the bright lights that had, for a brief, exhilarating moment, shined on them. The activists felt as if their priorities, their very self-conception, had been molded by this chase, and they needed to just stop for a minute. So that fall, the Dream Defenders, led then by Phillip Agnew, who had co-founded the group as a recent graduate of Florida A&M University, agreed to stage what they called a Blackout.
In a post-Ferguson moment, when national magazines used follower counts on Twitter to create top ten lists of the most effective activists in the country, Rachel and Phillip chose to log off. It had been too easy “to mistake popularity for power,” Rachel said. Anyone who worked for the organization would have to delete social media apps from their phone and stay off the platforms for what they decided would be a total of ten weeks, starting on September 21 and ending December 1. This would be a chance to see who they were off-line, to figure out what they called their “DNA.” Avoiding the apps was essential to this process, Rachel wrote in a note to the group. “Social media is constantly fueling and draining our egos—making us feel hyper belittled and narcissistic at the same damn time.” The damage was not just psychological. Social media was hurting their ability to connect in productive ways. “Movement relationships have eroded online, because we are competing for airtime,” all because airtime itself had been made scarce, a commodity they were all vying for. “And I think the scariest part about all of this, is that we don’t realize this dynamic exists or at the very least, believe that we are in control of it.”
