On small towns, protests, and backs turned
“If you see something, say something.”
Simple, right?
Injustice? Call it out. Violence? Don’t stand by silently. Danger? Let people know.
But what if the people you tell refuse to listen or believe you? Worse, what if they erase your warnings and then use the fact that you spoke out against you?
If this seems hypothetical for you, there’s a good chance you’ve got advantages others don’t. If this sounds like an impossibility, I’d call that way of thinking snow blind.
“Words are weapons, sharper than knives. Makes you wonder how the other half died.” Or so the song goes…(1)
*
I live in a town built on the illusion of its smallness. But in ways that matter most, the smallest elements of this place are likely its most dangerous.
Thirty miles from Downtown Los Angeles, it is—at least part of it is—an island of sorts. Trees trimmed like gum drops line an “Uptown” shopping district yearning to exist fully in the 1950’s of its buildings’ façades. Local parades and wine walks and youth sports are the height of social life here. People drop the word “community” like it’s synonymous with the town’s civic temperament.
The city’s marketing tagline, of course, is “The Pride of the Foothills.”
That term pride, though, is not so simple as the Mayberry dreams of the people living in the overpriced homes in the city’s northeast corner. Then again, most people invested in White pride, including the ones who live here, would love nothing more than a return to a past where overt racism was a community value.
“No I cannot forget where it is that I come from. I cannot forget the people who love me. Yeah, I can be myself here in this small town, and people let me be just what I want to be.” Or so the song goes…(2)
*
The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were seismic, splitting open the greatest civil unrest of my lifetime like the fault lines in California’s foundations. Conversations surrounding police brutality and the drastic imbalance of violence directed at Black and brown bodies have become a violent referendum on what it means to value and protect life in America.
It’s also returned us to some familiar—if completely ineffective and bloody—scripts we’ve run so many times before. Violence imposed by the state. Resistance and protest built on anger about that violence and the fear it will only get worse. Power structures frame protests as dangerous to “good Americans” and center property damage at the expense of human loss. That framing is used to justify more violence in service of returning “order” to the streets where people are pleading for peace.
Curfews imposed. Tear gas and rubber bullets fired at people. Batons and fists provide punctuation. Pain and blood and brutality drive home the point.
There are reasons these protests are happening.
The tremors shaking the nation reached our “little” town in the form of a march in protest of police violence and racism, culminating in a brief collective moment of silence and grieving on the lawn in front of City Hall. It was, from beginning to end, completely non-violent and very powerful. None of the looting and damage locals wrung their hands about across fences and on social media in the run up to the event became a reality.
But it did draw out like a magnet several overt White supremacists who live in the city.
Their presence began small. The raised-truck set leaned on their horns as they drove through the intersection where we gathered before the march so we’d definitely notice them. Rolling down their windows, several called us losers before shouting the ever original “Go home ________!” You can fill in that blank with idiots, shitheads, assholes, or Commies because they did.
But there were far more honks and fists raised in support than these drive-by shootings off at the mouth and soon enough we marched east toward Uptown.
Ten minutes later, I noticed a small white Dodge pickup circling around our route to get in more verbal shots at protestors. Over the top of his camper shell, Trump 2020 and Gadsden flags flapped in the breeze, as if we needed the reinforcement regarding his political leanings.
On his fourth pass, he slowed to a crawl near me and my kids, screaming “Fucking, sheep!” hard enough spit flew from his mouth. Our masks and the social distance likely protected us from that, but there’s no PPE designed to defend against the look in his eyes.
“Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid. You step out of line, the man come and take you away.” Or so the song goes…(3)
*
A few years earlier, my daughter’s 13th birthday party ended up at a park just about a block over from City Hall for a water gun fight. We’d intended to get there well before sundown so we’d be done before dark, but one thing led to another and we weren’t able to start until the pink smear in the western sky had faded enough to brighten the yellow sodium streetlights.
Before turning the kids loose to soak each other, I had a very abbreviated but pointed version of The Talk with them all. Most of the kids at the party were white and listened with a confused tilt of the head. None of what I was cautioning them about seemed plausible. Catching the looks they were giving me, I ended with the following summation.
“Look, if you see the police pull into the area, just drop your guns and stop running.”
“But why?” one boy asked. “We’re just playing.”
The video of 12-year-old Tamir Rice being gunned down by a police officer while “just playing” in a park looped in my head as I considered how to answer in a way that was clear but didn’t rob the evening of its fun.
“The reality is that police don’t look at my daughter the way they look at you. So, if you keep playing, it makes it unsafe for her.”
He looked at me for a few seconds then shrugged and ran off to join in the game. And that’s all it amounted to: a group of kids running and screaming and trying to get each other wet until we told them it was time to head home for cake. That’s all it ever should be.
A postscript to this: that same kid’s Instagram account later became an intersection of MAGA and pro-gun rights posts and I really wish he’d just stop playing.
“Sandra Bland, say her name. Sandra Bland, Say her name. Sandra Bland, say her name. Sandra Bland, won’t you say her name?” Or so the song goes…(4)
*
Police officers called in from four different neighboring city’s departments along with the locals lined City Hall’s lawn, all watching us walk by intently. One threw a thumbs-up in our direction, for what I’m not sure. A couple directed traffic at the intersection we needed to pass through.
For scale, there were likely around 100 of us marching that day.
Before the rally on the lawn, we continued straight into the Uptown for a lap in front of the local businesses. There the sidewalks were lined with locals, most with phones out to record the moment. As we passed a group of white guys about my age standing in the plaza, one looked at my younger son’s sign—it read “End Black Discrimination” in his own handwriting—and shook his head.
“Now that’s a damn shame,” he said to my boy before looking me in the eye. I gave him the old North County San Diego up-nod reserved for people who need to check themselves and pulled my son closer to me.
On our return trip down the other side of the street, another man ran his camera over the protestors before turning to the group on the other side who’d just tried to intimidate my son and, in a scene straight out of something I’d never make up in my fiction, threw a Nazi salute to his friends.
In the middle of our “small town.” In the middle of 2020 and all that’s happening in America.
What stood out the most? Only protestors did anything about it. Not a word from the folks in our “community.” I wonder if they understand that their silence is agreement.
I’m afraid they do.
“I go to these places intending to think, and think of nothing, but anticipate. And somehow, expect you'll find me there, that, by some miracle, you'd be aware.” Or so the song goes…(5)
*
The day after the protest, black squares flooded social media as people tried, imperfectly but visibly, to show digital solidarity with the Black Lives Matters movement. Videos of protestors being kicked while kneeling, shot with rubber bullets or tear gas canisters, and driven into by police cruisers continued to flow online as well.
In response, other voices returned.
“Rioters.” “Looters.” “Thugs.” “Dangerous.” “Destructive.” “Enemies.”
And these just from the man who currently puts the white in White House. The same guy just fine with teargassing protestors for a photo op in front of a church he never attends holding a book he has no desire to understand, let alone be impacted by.
This matters because, like clockwork, his words are picked up and amplified by people more concerned with losing property than lives, in many cases because losing the second at the hands of the police does not feel possible but they are sure the first is going to happen to them.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why they can’t imagine this kind of death for themselves or how that lack of imagination is a primary reason people have taken to the streets in the middle of a pandemic to demand they try harder.
But figuring it out and understanding are two very different things.
“You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire. Once the flames begin to catch, the wind will blow it higher.” Or so the song goes…(6)
*
More than two hours after the rally broke up, I drove by and found the intersection near City Hall filled with police officers and the streets shut down in all directions around them. I parked, walked over to see what was happening, and it immediately hit me:
Every single officer was facing a small group of protestors standing on the sidewalk on one corner of the intersection. All. Of. Them.
At the same moment directly across the street, Nazi Salute Guy and a few of his group were chanting “White lives matter” and “Get out of our town.” To drive their salient political points home, several made lewd gestures at protestors.
Yet the police paid them no mind. Not even a token amount.
I’ve thought a lot about the backs of those officers, many of whom came from other communities and wore riot gear even though there had been literally no violence or property damage or any of the other riot straw men people build with the raw material of their fear and prejudice.
Turning their backs to that side of the street means they not only felt no threat from the group of loud white men and their loud white prejudice, but that it was familiar to them. When the same group threatened protestors with “We back up our police,” the word that came across loudest was “our.”
“Our police.” “Our town.” “Our community.” “Our lives matter.”
I expect these sentiments of ownership from people accustomed to seeing the world as inherently theirs, even as I detest the reality of those ideas and the impact they have on the marginalized. This is what the world has taught these men and what they have come to see as an article of faith.
A faith confirmed wholly by the backs those officers offered them.
Consider, then, what articles of faith are confirmed in the hearts of those who saw the eyes of the same police as the men at their backs chanted and threatened and hid behind the façade of free speech those “public servants” have become.
Their servants.
“Number three: You have the right to free speech as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it. Know your rights. These are your rights.” Or so the song goes…(7)
*
The day after the protest, my daughter was actively out celebrating Black excellence. The cognitive dissonance of it all, I can only imagine, must be exhausting.
But she’s the president of the Black Student Union at her high school and had worked determinedly with her leadership team to make sure their group’s graduating seniors didn’t lose one of the traditions they all look forward to: being presented a Kente cloth stole they would normally wear in their graduation ceremony.
It bears taking a moment to remember here that this is a season of loss on top of loss. The end of high school erased by one pandemic. The season to celebrate their accomplishments stolen by another.
Which is why she and her friends made sure they got their stoles, masking up and moving from house to house to present them as the symbol of success they are. It was a joyous event where those seniors were seen and celebrated and shown that their lives matter in the midst of it all.
This is exactly how community should respond to loss and I couldn’t be prouder of her for working so hard to give them that affirmation.
One day later, she spotted a young man standing near the back of the White Guys Matter crew in a video of the scene in the intersection posted on Twitter. A guy she went to middle school with. A guy who lives in our part of town. He was smiling and filming as a single protestor crossed the street to respond to the group’s loud provocations.
A side note on feeling safe: none of those men wore masks. What this means about their self-assuredness regarding viruses or being identified with racism I’ll leave up to you to interpret.
There’s not enough footage of the young man in the video to determine whether he agrees with the guys he’s filming or was just caught up in the moment. It doesn’t matter. He’s now unsafe for my daughter because if she can’t tell where someone stands, she can’t trust them.
Joy and pain and always at once.
“Turned away from it all like a blind man. Sat on a fence but it don't work. Keep coming up with love but it's so slashed and torn. Why, why, why?” Or so the song goes…(8)
*
Some will say what we experienced here, in our town, was a small issue, a mere aberration when compared to the unrest playing out on the streets of communities across the country. I can hear it now.
There really weren’t that many thin blue swastika types out there.
They were inappropriate, but it was just words.
They didn’t actually do anything violent.
They don’t represent the values of our community.
But this is exactly the problem. It is exactly the small thinking of “small” towns that stunts imagination to the point where White anger and fear are assumed as evidence of Truth and Logic while real suffering is dismissed out of hand and pushed out of sight because looking at it would disrupt that “truth” and “logic.” Our silence in the face of the racism perpetuated by people who look like us—more than the violence of those loudest voices—is what prevents the change we need.
One thing is sure. Pride in “our” community comes at a cost and the most vulnerable among us are so often the ones forced to pay that bill.
“Last night I heard the screaming, then a silence that chilled my soul. I prayed that I was dreaming when I saw the ambulance in the road. And the policeman said, ‘I'm here to keep the peace. Will the crowd disperse? I think we all could use some sleep.’” Or so the song goes.(9)
“Devil Inside” INXS
“Small Town” by John Mellencamp
“For What It’s Worth” Buffalo Springfield
“Hell You Talmbout” Janelle Monae and Wondaland Records
“Silence” by PJ Harvey
“Biko” by Peter Gabriel
“Know Your Rights” by The Clash
“Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie
“Behind the Wall” by Tracy Chapman