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Hello! And thank you for spending a moment—in this moment—with my words.
The first thing to say is that I hope that you and your people are safe.
This morning in L.A. was the first since 1992 that the National Guard has walked these streets. The last time before that was in 1968. Each time it has been for the same reason: to suppress widespread, violent protests that began after policemen brutally attacked a black man.
I don’t have the answer. But I know that today I can’t write about a cheese board, which had been my plan. It’s not that food isn’t important, but there’s a man named George Floyd who will never eat another meal. My heart hurts.
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There are thousands and thousands of protestors across the country who have had rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper spray fired at them, harming their bodies and particularly their lungs.
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Right now, in the middle of a respiratory pandemic, a pandemic that is disproportionately harming black communities.
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As they protested the death of yet another black man whose last words were, ‘I can’t breathe.’
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Yesterday, when I meant to work on this newsletter, I instead compulsively watched live TV of the protests here in Los Angeles. It consisted mostly of aerial shots of the crowds. Helicopter’s-eye-view: the native medium of L.A. television.
From so far up in the sky, you couldn’t make out people’s faces, their humanity. You just saw a mass of people roiling in front of the police lines. An SUV was burning and others had been covered in graffiti. You could see police aiming their big guns at the ground. At the bottom of the screen a chyron read, “POLICE VEHICLES BURN.” Above this, in tiny type, it said, “George Floyd Death Protests.”
The main Saturday protest was not far from where we live, and I thought about joining. But I found out about it late, and I’m scared of violence and don’t want to march with people who are breaking things. Excuses were made. Instead, I made a sign saying “Black Lives Matter” and put it in my office window. It felt like a half-measure, but at least it gave me something to do.
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Around six o’clock, my phone honked with a Public Safety Alert: the mayor was imposing an 8pm curfew. Lisa and I decided to go for a walk before then, to ‘take the temperature on the streets,’ as I put it. At first things seemed quiet, if on edge. The main sound was the buzzing of helicopters. I counted seven, up there near the first-quarter moon.
Dazed-looking protesters sat on the curbs of Fairfax, a few still holding cardboard signs from earlier in the day. Some were trying to summon Ubers and Lyfts to take them home before the curfew, but the people running the rideshare apps had decided to cut off services in the area of the protest.
A giant pickup truck waited on the side street across Fairfax. It had a menacing look, with a half-sheet of spray-painted plywood strapped to the outside of the driver’s side door. I worried it might be some counter-protester, a racist hick looking to pick a fight. But when it pulled out onto Fairfax I could read the spraypainted words, “I CAN’T BREATHE / BLACK LIVES MATTER”.
We walked south. Down a few blocks we saw emergency vehicles, lights flashing, blocking the entire four lanes of Fairfax. We’d seen enough, and we turned down a side street, back towards home. We passed small groups of protesters. Everyone wearing masks.
It was a warm night. The street trees were full of fragrant blossoms.
When we came to the corner of the street we live on, I noticed smoke rising to the south. There was a lot of smoke, billowing into the sky, a police chopper circling low over it. I decided to take a picture with my phone, trying to frame it to include smoke and helicopter, a few protesters down the block, and a flowery hedge in the foreground that made the scene feel incongruous, apocalyptic.
Right as I was snapping my picture, a car gunned its engine and charged into the intersection. We turned and watched as tires squealed, the car drifted. It was a maroon sedan. It turned and kept turning. It was doing a donut, right there in the intersection, not ten feet from us. Time slowed down. I could see the driver: white, maybe thirty or forty, hair cut short. Not a protester. The car’s tires clipped the opposite curb and the driver gunned the engine again, doing another donut, swinging near again, rubber burning. Lisa grabbed me and pulled me away. We hustled behind a parked car.
Finally, he drove off. Doing 40 or 50 mph down our street, barely braking for stop signs. We walked home as fast as we could, wondering if we might have just been menaced by one of the men from the apocalyptic civil war cult we’d both read a long, scary article about.
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Lisa and I shut every window in the apartment and closed every blind—the first time we’d done this since moving in months ago. Our living room was still loud with whining sirens and the terrific din of a half-dozen police choppers hovering over the neighborhood. I stared at the live helicopter feed on my phone with the sound turned off. I wanted to know what the police were doing, whether the protesters were getting closer, as the sound of the police choppers suggested. But the camera operator kept the shot zoomed in on a shoe store that was being ransacked by a crowd of maybe 20 people.
I watched, entranced, as people ducked under the metal grating, which one man was holding up. A minute later, they’d come out with a few shoe boxes. Was this really what you wanted to steal most? What if you got the wrong size? The potential consequence—entering our profoundly punitive criminal justice system—seemed to me to be totally unworthy of a pair of overpriced shoes. Finally I mentioned my confusion to Lisa, who was sitting next to me on the couch, staring with a look of horror at her own phone.
“I don’t think it’s about the shoes,” she said.
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As soon as she said it, it became obvious: of course it’s not about the shoes. This was another type of protest, a more impulsive, opportunistic one. My understanding turned on its head, and now I could hardly believe my earlier confusion. Thinking like that was partly a consequence of the camera’s insistent framing of what was happening as just one thing: looting. It was infuriating—here the TV station had a tool that could be used to give us a real sense of how things stood, whether things were spiraling out of control, what the police were doing. Instead they focused solely on this prurient image of a handful of people stealing a handful of relatively inexpensive goods.
When I finally turned my screen off, I could hear through the window the tell-tale *whumph* of tear gast canisters being fired, sounding so much like the launching of fireworks.
I thought about what a shame it is that when our capitalist overlords destroy and steal, their crimes are so much less telegenic than these ‘looters.’ When billionaires, led by Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, increase their wealth by half a trillion dollars during this pandemic, there’s no camera circling overhead, framing it as a despicable travesty. As the U.S. government made decade after decade of decisions that ensured Native Americans would remain, after half a millenium of colonization, radically more vulnerable to disease than white people, where was the helicopter shot? When vulture capitalists swarmed in during the Great Recession to buy up foreclosed homes in black communities, making “the homeownership gap between blacks and whites … wider than it was during the Jim Crow era,” where the fuck were the news helicopters?
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This morning when I drew back the blinds on my kitchen window the first thing I saw was a woman walking down the street carrying two brooms and a dustpan-on-a-stick. Their cardboard wrappings revealed they were fresh-bought, probably from Tashman Hardware up the block. She was headed towards Fairfax, to help clean up.
After breakfast, Lisa and I walked the three blocks down towards Melrose. As we neared this major shopping thoroughfare, the sidewalks filled protesters carrying signs, curious locals, media. The feeling was less tense than the evening before. Still, I only saw one person out with a kid.
Where our street comes out onto Melrose, there was a broad police line, behind which firemen worked to douse a smoldering storefront. It had held a nail salon called Pearls and part of the Shoe Palace sneaker empire, which stretches across three storefronts. Firefighters had been trying to control the blaze all night. Steam and smoke rose in damp curls.
Across the street, a half-dozen black-clad protestors were hard at work cleaning graffiti off the window of a barber shop. Others were sweeping up broken glass, trying to clean up the mess of the night before. The protesters who try to stop vandalism, who clean up from destruction, all while putting their bodies on the line for the same cause—we hear so much less about them. They are less photogenic. They’re less sensational. Their actions don’t play as obviously into our culture’s stereotypes about struggle.
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I return to the eternal question: what is to be done? Stay safe, first, and take care of your people. Beyond that, I don’t think there are easy answers. However I do know of two things that you really should do, as soon as possible.
- Read this essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabar. Before you judge anyone for stealing a pair of sneakers, read this article. Especially if you are white. Really, it is not to be missed.
- Give money to your local bail fund. Here is the one I’m donating to, in L.A. During a summer when jails are among the worst loci of covid-19 infection, getting protesters out from behind bars has never been more important.
Jasper May 31, 2020