a little bit of everything
No one needs my opinion. I don't need my opinion. I have recently asked my wife to lock me out of my Twitter account to ensure fewer reactive opinions. Twitter can be good. Twitter has given me resources I would have never found on my own. But Twitter, for some of us, invites you to think like an algorithm, to imitate an all-seeing eye and gaze upon the surface of every fraught issue in history but with no invitation--no recourse, even, because you're spending your time on Twitter--to deeper understanding. It's a way to go a little insane, I really believe that. A way to drown a healthy thirst for information with a thousand small streams of uncontrolled flow.
Twitter, though, has also become a record of police brutality in a way unparalleled by any traditional media. Some Twitter accounts were alerting me to COVID concerns back in early February. Before anyone at my work or even my wife's pediatric clinic were talking seriously about how life might change, folks on Twitter were chatting. For all its QAnon possibilities, Twitter is the platform almost every serious thinker I follow uses; if they use any, that is. (Join Twitter, Zadie!)
Interestingly, the last few weeks have seen Twitter and Instagram swapping strengths, or attempting to. My feed on Instagram is more and more filled with people's opinions, their screenshots of other people's opinions, and a constant declaring or implying that everyone else also give their opinion, especially white people (White Silence!) who are also supposed to shut up (Listen first!).
Needless to say, these people who cannot decide if my Instagram post in favor of Black Lives Matter is essential support or essential erasure are almost all white. I don't begrudge them, either. Those posting in such a vein are usually posting in a way I never will already. They live through social media in a way I understand, but that I fundamentally avoid. My Instagram is for pictures of family and sentimental scenery. I don't post about my religion or my politics and probably never will in any regular way (Jesus saves, Bernie was good, Black Lives Matter.) I might post about this newsletter, of course, even though this newsletter might accomplish even less than posting! It's the medium I use for expressing opinions because it requires hours or even days of reflection before writing, which for me usually entails more permanent change.
(Hang with me!)
My fundamental concern about solidarity posts is related to the premise of this NY Mag article: to what extent will posting always relieve (most of) us of further action? I found an incredible paper on disaggregating the police through a Twitter follow, but it's a seventy-page paper by someone at NYU Law. It's very readable! But will anyone read it if I post a salient quotation? If I screenshot it, will that actually disincentivize others to do more than gloss it? I have no influence on social media so it doesn't really matter for me. But because social media has been so useful in *igniting* a lot of conversation, I think we're all being a little credulous at its ability to support *ongoing* engagement. Radical change means radical commitment, a quality that, for me, is generally eroded rather than nurtured by Twitter over the long-term.
As for the protests themselves, I've never been more impressed with how swiftly folks have inspired officials to take notice and--at least in Denver--start to take action. It's genuinely exciting! As recently as last fall I was arguing with family members about police, about patrolling versus investigating and other complaints that (within a few weeks!!) are now lingo de rigueur for the entire country. Absolutely did not see that coming.
I also think that people are wrong in their assessment of the protests as being fundamentally about COVID. Not that COVID isn't a factor, even a primary factor, but I think people misunderstand the salient reason it's fed the Black Lives Matter movement. I haven't followed this discussion closely at large, but in my own world (including online) there's a persistent suggestion that all the activity is in response to, I dunno, boredom or transferred anger. The latter might have some legs as a theory, given how destructive COVID has been to some people's lives.
But, fundamentally, the COVID lockdowns have been about trust. They're about public safety, the communal good, the lives of our neighbors. They require trust in authority, in scientific authority of course, but also in the actual laws of the land. In March of this year, mayors were suddenly upending the right to assemble and more. We were at the mercy of the state, which claimed our good as its end. We mostly obeyed the state, which promised to act for our well-being. Then we saw George Floyd murdered on film. An agent of the state with his knee on George Floyd's neck and George Floyd calling, "Mama!" His mother was dead, but that's who he saw, who he wanted. "Mama!"
The protests, *especially* to the extent that they have been ignited by COVID, are unequivocally about accountability. Policing in America is broken, and even the police recognize this truth. Anyone who thinks COVID's part in the protests undermines the protests has misread the correlation. COVID, if anything, underlines the protests' meaning. The protests which I've seen are about the people checking the state's power, the state's priorities; they're a reminder that the state is us, that Colorado and Denver are the millions of people living here, and that trust must be deserved if obedience (lawfulness) is to be expected. The protests are fluid and probably different from city to city, but the core protesters themselves are clear: Black Lives Matter. Remove the boot of the state, or the state's people will rise.
Of course, this isn't an encyclopedic account. Seeing a police station burn was jaw-dropping, and is not the same thing as throwing bricks through local shops. I'll fight anyone about this. There are stories coming out of Chicago which are distressing and bad. If you look away or shrug when someone confronts you with these facts, or even the possibility of these facts, you're weakening your own love for justice. Your integrity is shift-thin, a costume of retweets and hashtags. I'm being harsh, but it's because the world is being rebuilt, and integrity will matter more in the coming days, not less. That anyone descrying property violence and not police violence is making the same mistake to an even worse degree is so obvious even my white homeschooling family keeps posting about it. Lack of integrity, as no one will deny when looking at their enemy, tells on itself.
Which brings me to something like an ending thought, I guess: the gloves are off. Whatever was unfolding from our years of online behavior is now accelerating. If there was a trend towards censorship from wokescolds before the protests, there's now a trend towards my fellow Instagram moms becoming wokescolds. If there was some hope for solidarity from Millenials' anger--even white Millenial Evangelicals, whose primary experience the last four to six years has been watching the people who taught us to be moral defend immorality incarnate--that solidarity has only grown. There's genuine problems with freedom of speech and weird thought policing on the Left, and also genuine hope for welcoming initiates to the Left's best causes. I feel like my own gloves have been shucked as well. Our posts matter for all the wrong reasons by default, and only for the reasons we hope by luck or grace.
Black Lives Matter.
March, donate, wear your mask, pray, post!, listen, talk, read, pray even more, resist totalitarianism at every level, vote locally, and disaggregate the police.
Black Lives Matter.
Love y'all,
Joel