The Quiet Before, page 29
Taking a few steps away taught them so much during those weeks, Rachel and Phillip told me. At exactly the same time that Miski’s group was throwing itself against the barricades in Minneapolis, the Dream Defenders were hunkering down in Miami. They saw, for one thing, just how dependent they had become on the violent images and videos that punctuated their activism. “It’s created a landscape where our movement is more about death than about life,” Rachel said. Even Darnell Moore, an activist who had organized Freedom Rides to Ferguson for social media influencers, hoping they might tweet and post widely about the protests, agreed with this assessment, telling me he worried that the movement was tapping into and profiting from a sick and preexisting phenomenon in American culture, a “trauma porn” that “spectacularizes Black death.”
They also came to see more clearly that Twitter was not the democratizing platform it presented itself as. The model of a medium with a million entry points was attractive to the activist Left, which had been moving toward horizontalism long before social media. The trend could even be traced back to the 1930s as a response to the authoritarian tendencies of the Communist Party and Communist-led organizations. The newness of the 1960s New Left was in part a rejection of this top-down approach. And by the time the Occupy Wall Street protests happened, in 2011, activists had practically made a fetish of their leaderlessness; they literally disdained microphones. For Cullors, Garza, and Tometi, any movement had to be as inclusive as possible, and particularly welcoming of the queer and transgender activists who had been marginalized in the past.
But if Twitter was supposed to foreground the collective, it frequently had the opposite effect, elevating certain individuals, and for all the wrong reasons. DeRay Mckesson was a case in point. When Mckesson, a protester turned media star, got to Ferguson, he had eight hundred followers on Twitter, and as I’m writing this, six years later, he has a million. Mckesson intuitively understood what Twitter wanted. He saw that it prized expressions of intimacy, and he offered a play-by-play of his thoughts and feelings as he made his way through the embattled city. He detailed everything he was observing, often with photos and videos. And he wrote in a direct and engaging style. When he wasn’t tweeting out dramatic scenes of resistance, he would write messages meant to uplift (“Love is the Why”) and jolt (“Justice is not an abstract concept. Justice is a living Mike Brown. Justice is Tamir playing outside again. Justice is Darren Wilson in jail”). And after weeks of being on the ground in Ferguson, working out of coffee shops and sleeping on couches, he had cultivated a huge following. He understood that on Twitter he was a character, and he began wearing a blue puffy Patagonia vest wherever he went. The blue vest worked better than the red shoes and red shirt he had initially tried, and it soon became part of his brand.
His celebrity drove the other activists nuts. Mckesson became the face of the movement, profiled in The New York Times Magazine, interviewed on cable television, and eventually invited to the Obama White House so often that he told a reporter it no longer made him nervous to be there. Many veiled and sometimes outwardly open attacks were directed against him. He was seen to be taking undue credit, especially by the three women who claimed to have founded the movement. Alicia Garza wrote a long screed called “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement” lamenting “the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days.”
This was more than mere pettiness. Twitter, which the activists did not own or control, had created a system built on scarcity, and it didn’t seem right that those who knew best how to game it should become the default leaders. What made matters worse is that Mckesson didn’t just succeed at Twitter; he then valorized it as an unprecedented tool for making change. In this way he was a bit like the Wael Ghonim of Black Lives Matter. For Rachel and Phillip social media was draining; for Mckesson it was empowering. “I’ve always thought of Twitter as the friend that’s always awake,” he has written, and Twitter, as he experienced it, “has amplified the voice of the individual, always reminding each individual that she exists within a larger whole.” There was no need for an organization “to begin protest,” he asserted in a 2015 interview. Instead, “you are enough to start a movement. Individual people can come together around things that they know are unjust. And they can spark change. Your body can be part of the protest; you don’t need a VIP pass to protest. And Twitter allowed that to happen.” There would be time later to decide on a set of demands. For him, the platform had enabled “community.” The problem was that the community being built had its own particular rules, and those rules gave him unequal standing, crowned him without any accountability. He might have felt as if it were “organic,” but every utterance was skewed in one direction and with one overriding goal, even if subconscious: to acquire more followers.
Rachel thought the whole movement had a sort of DeRay derangement syndrome—they were all driven mad by his naked self-promotion—when really he was just the most visible symptom of a bigger problem. “We kind of used him as a piñata when other people were on Twitter in exactly the same way.” All of it was a distraction, which she suddenly saw more clearly during the Blackout. “I think social media created a sense of false camaraderie among people,” she told me. “I think we debated, but in a petty way. What is the short quippy thing you can say about somebody else’s politics in 140 characters? But that isn’t strategy. And we didn’t get a space to do that.”
When the Blackout opened up that space, the Dream Defenders began to really connect with their community. They started listening. And what they heard surprised them. For one thing, as Rachel went door-to-door to talk to people in the poorer neighborhoods of Miami, she quickly found that the dream of defunding or abolishing the police was not a shared one.
“People were basically, like, we need more police,” Rachel said. “And it was really jarring for me. I remember one conversation I had with a woman who had bullet holes in her car from when her son was killed, and who was I to convince her on police abolition? It’s not like I have an alternative. So all of that was just very grounding for us as we thought about what the Dream Defenders’ role was, who we were supposed to be in our relationship to communities, and social media definitely obfuscated how we were thinking about those things.”
This upended their accepted wisdom. But, Rachel saw, it also pointed a way forward. If she truly felt abolition was the answer then the work would have to be local and would have to start with showing people there was another way. They had to actively collect and build a constituency, as opposed to waiting for a moment of outrage.
Phillip, the Dream Defenders founder, had a similar insight. For him, the experience of the Blackout had been a lesson in the varieties of power. Borrowing a concept from Joseph Nye, the political scientist, he now came to understand social media as a form of “soft power,” a force that shapes culture through argument and story. But there was also “hard power,” which Nye, in assessing the capacity of different nation-states, characterized as military and economic might. For movements, hard power was the ability to lobby for legislation, elect sympathetic political leaders, get resources allocated toward your cause. Social media, Phillip now saw more clearly, was good at building soft power. But when it came to hard power, it could do very little. And if for Nye every successful state needed a mix of the two, this was doubly true of social movements, which didn’t start with a store of either.
The only way to build hard power was on the ground. As Rachel put it, “You just can’t shortcut organizing.” It made them want to drop the performance, the race for followers, even the reflex to always make their actions public—they would think carefully about if and when to use tactics like occupations and sit-ins. Phillip, once he emerged from the Blackout in early 2016, even saw the advantage of cultivating a more secluded space for conversation and planning. Social media was about “followship and diffusion of responsibility.” Real leadership would come off-line. “We must re-embrace the great strategic value in everyone not knowing everything we do, when we do it, and whom we do it with.”
* * *
—
IN MINNEAPOLIS, MISKI, physically wrecked, came to a similar conclusion. The two years of nonstop protesting had led to very little change. The pattern was the same in their city as elsewhere: activism would swell and then subside, and in spite of all this expended energy, their objectives would come to seem too small in the face of more foundational problems. Pinpointing what those challenges were and how exactly to attack them without ending up needing blood transfusions became the goal of Miski’s group of friends. They were trying to solve a dilemma that Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor at Princeton and close observer of Black Lives Matter, identified for me. It was undeniable, she said, that the movement had a salutary effect when it first appeared in the mid-2010s; concepts like institutional racism were shot into the American bloodstream like never before. But the progress would all be fleeting, empty words unless the activists found a way to “collectively assess, discuss, or ponder what the movement is or should be”—unless they did the work, that is, that couldn’t be done on Twitter.
Miski and six friends decided to start a new sort of organization that would in every way reject the social media metabolism. They called it the Black Visions Collective, and eventually just Black Visions. They spent 2016 and 2017 exploring ideas that were sometimes large and abstract and other times micro-focused on how to pull the levers of power in their city. They began looking into transformative justice, which was also the alternative that Rachel had landed on in Miami, using counseling and mediation methods to defuse minor conflicts before they turned into altercations with the police. They brought in an expert on the subject to train them in how to break cycles of violence, and they started speaking honestly among themselves to determine what their principles should be as a group. “How do you practice punishment in your own personal life? If somebody does you wrong, what is your reaction?” The questions were intimate and intense, unhurried work among friends, but it helped them “get aligned,” Miski said.
The seven core members also became more involved in local Minneapolis politics. Drawing attention at a national level had been the driving impetus of the earlier Black Lives Matter protests, which had relied on getting that hashtag to spike. Now it was clear that if their focal point was police funding, it would need to be a local effort, dependent on a partnership with the city council and the mayor’s office, where these budgetary decisions were made. They would need to learn the mechanics and make some allies.
This was organizing as it had long been done, and they got good at it. It was also, in its way, what separated Minneapolis from Cairo. Whereas the Middle East lacked a democratic or grassroots political tradition—and had no way to even begin imagining how to create one—this wasn’t the case in America. In Egypt the denizens of Tahrir Square were starting from the very beginning and with the wrong tools. But there was a long history of African American organizing that long predated Silicon Valley. Miski and their friends got to know city council members and their aides, inundated them with research material, visited their offices, and, maybe most important, brought people out to hearings when the budget was being discussed, arguing in forum after forum against the belief that all the police needed were a few more bodycams. All this happened without much fanfare and largely off-line.
In one of their earliest wins, in 2018, Black Visions managed to move more than a million dollars from the police budget to the health department to create what would be called the Office of Violence Prevention. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was a chance to build up an alternative and show the police that the stream of money directed at them unquestioningly every year could be siphoned off. The office would look for public health solutions as opposed to punitive ones—sending social workers, for example, when a homeless man started acting erratically, rather than dispatching the cops. This was accompanied by a change in the makeup of the city council itself. In 2017 they helped elect some new members who shared their progressive agenda, like Keith Ellison’s son Jeremiah Ellison, who won one of the thirteen seats on the city council, and Andrea Jenkins, the first openly trans Black woman to be elected to public office in the United States. Black Visions was by no means a single-issue organization, but changing the system of policing was their priority. It was where they wanted to direct their energy the next time people began caring about Black lives. “We were always thinking about the next trigger moment,” Miski said. “And making sure that when it happened, we’d have even more people ready to build towards abolition.”
They also intuited what Rachel and Phillip had learned over the course of their Blackout: that Twitter was not a good place to develop ideas. They tended toward privacy among themselves. Some of them lived together in the same house. And they purposely kept the core group small, only very deliberately and slowly expanding their membership. If they came across a particularly engaged person at one of their events, they would have one-on-one sessions, working with them and building a relationship before bringing them into a wider membership pool that, even by the summer of 2020, numbered no more than a few dozen. They talked in person (or on Zoom once the pandemic hit), and when they couldn’t, they used Signal, the encrypted chat app, to solve problems and plan. “It means sometimes writing whole paragraphs, but we have definitely made decisions, moved work, or come to some sort of consensus via Signal,” Miski told me. If Black Lives Matter found itself contorted by social media’s impulses, Black Visions set its own rhythm.
For this reason, in the days immediately following George Floyd’s murder, Miski and the others spent little time on the large protests. Instead, they tried to build on their last three years of work. To use the terms Phillip Agnew borrowed from Joseph Nye, they were trying to harness the remarkable soft power generated by Floyd’s death and turn it into the hard power needed to move the city council toward committing to something as inconceivable as abolition. This meant discipline. They turned to the city council members, especially the ones with whom they had developed relationships, and lobbied them. They called in the evenings once the protest started, sending over detailed plans to turn off the spigot of funds flowing to the police and instead make the Office of Violence Prevention a more substantial institution, capable of being a first responder and accountable to the community itself. And to reinforce these private actions, and make sure the city council was paying attention, Black Visions also staged a sit-in in front of the house of the young, progressive mayor, Jacob Frey, using shame as a strategic counterbalance.
And when their intentions were made clear—with the incredible blare of protests around the country still very audible—they let these city councillors know that they were planning a rally on June 8 at the city’s Powderhorn Park. They were calling it the Path Forward, and what they hoped was to get local leaders then and there to pledge to end the Minneapolis Police Department. They gathered all the moral weight they could from that moment and lifted it onto the shoulders of those council members.
Soft and hard power came together under the park’s giant ash trees. A thousand people showed up. Miski, wearing high-top sneakers and a jumpsuit in the bright yellow of the Black Lives Matter movement, read from their phone: “We have had citizen review boards, body cameras and a black chief, but we are still here, watching black people get murdered and teargassed in our streets.” And there on a stage fronted by a giant sign that read “DEFUND POLICE” in block letters, less than two weeks after the killing of George Floyd, nine of the thirteen city council members (a veto-proof majority) did what would have been almost impossible for activists to imagine five years earlier: they promised to dismantle their city’s law enforcement. Lisa Bender, the president of the city council, spoke words that startled even Miski: “Our commitment is to end our city’s toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, to end policing as we know it, and to re-create systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.”
* * *
—
THAT SUMMER, words and concepts once considered too radical crackled and burst out into the open all over the country. “Black Lives Matter means something very, very different now than it meant on May 25, 2020,” Colin Wayne Leach, a psychologist and professor at Barnard College who has studied the protests, told me. He was referring, of course, to the date of George Floyd’s killing, the turning point. “It’s a meme now. And the question is whether the activists can use this to their benefit, or whether they’ll suffer from it.” A meme was an idea that could be endlessly replicated and repurposed, tossed from hand to hand. The beauty of it was that it touched everyone, and the danger was how ephemeral it could all be. This was a time when the air was suffused with questions that demanded immediate answers. The #MeToo movement in the fall of 2017 had a similar thrust, stories of sexual harassment shared on social media that set off exposure after exposure of men accused of everything from rape to making suggestive jokes at work. These powerful figures were taken down one by one. But once the fever broke, one could legitimately ask, what had changed? The meme had streaked through trailing fire, and perhaps left an aura of heightened sensitivity in the places it burned, but had it changed the situation for a woman working on a factory floor whose supervisor regularly whispered what he wanted from her in her ear?
The fever was the context for what happened in Miski’s city. And Minneapolis was the clearest proof that perhaps this would be more than a moment, that the changes would last. There were other examples in June and July. The mayor of Atlanta moved forward with plans to close the Atlanta City Detention Center, the city’s despised downtown jail, and turn the building into a “center for justice and equity.” In New York, the state legislature repealed a fifty-year-old law that allowed police officers’ records to be kept secret. Dozens of police departments pledged to ban choke holds. Two weeks after the protests started, Congress unveiled the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which included a number of measures that would make it easier for police to be prosecuted for misconduct—Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and then Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, kente cloth draped over their necks, took a knee and bowed their heads after announcing the bill.
