Even if you can’t protest you can still help
Not everybody can go to protests. Some people have physical disabilities that prevent them, some people have mental illnesses that make it dangerous to go into volatile situations, some people have sensory issues that mean a protest isn’t a good or safe place for them to be, some people are members of vulnerable populations who can’t risk arrest, some people can’t risk the possibility that an injury or arrest is going to cost them a job and end in homelessness.
Not everybody can protest and that is 100% okay.
If you can’t protest right now but you are in a city where protestors are being arrested PLEASE consider helping out with jail support as protestors are released: http://upagainstthelaw.org/jail-support-and-solidarity/
If that is ALSO out of reach for you but you can afford to do so please donate what you can to your local bail funds - search “my city + bail fund” or if you can’t find something local consider donating to The Bail Project. NOTE: please carefully research who you’re donating to - in chaotic times it’s not uncommon to see fraudulent gofundmes set up to attract donations.
And if you can’t do anything else please, PLEASE, fact-check all posts before you share them on social media. I’m seeing people share posts claiming that George Floyd’s murderer hasn’t been arrested but has just been placed in protective custody and that’s incorrect, not only has he been arrested he’s been charged and the thing to get angry about NOW is the fact that the charges are too likely to be dropped.
Also DO NOT SHARE photos or videos of unmasked protestors.
If you DO go to a protest here are some tips:
consider leaving your phone turned on at home and carrying a prepaid phone to the protest.
familiarize yourself with the first aid information in Riot Medicine, particularly in regards to treating tear gas/pepper spray and PARTICULARLY in the recommendation to ONLY treat tear gas/pepper spray with saline and water.
don’t go alone, stay with your group
And other than ALL OF THAT here’s some advice:
YOU are more likely to be the thing that changes your family member or friend or old classmate’s mind about their worldview than anything else. YOU are someone they know and regard well. You are a real human person who they have interacted with and eaten meals with and have a shared history with. Whether they know it or not they value YOUR opinion over nearly anything they’d hear on the news or see on social media because to their monkey brain you, another monkey they are familiar with, are more real than the people on the TV; but that is only true IF you talk to them, and do so in such a way that doesn’t make them shut you out.
If you’re trying to defend the protestors to a friend or family member who is horrified by “how violent and unruly and destructive” the protests are speak to this person kindly. Don’t talk about billionaires and white supremacy and the police state (though these are all VERY important things that we should aim to someday discuss with our loved ones) - talk about compassion, talk about fear. Talk about the fact that some business owners whose buildings were burned aren’t worried about their buildings, they’re worried about justice for their communities and their communities are already helping them to rebuild. Talk about the fact that the protests are nearly uniformly peaceful until police use violence against protestors (and yes, tear gas, pepper spray, and less-lethal rounds are all violence). Talk about the fact that decades of protests against police brutality haven’t seemed to curb police brutality, talk about the fact that what we’ve learned from police wearing body cams is that police turn their body cams off to plant violence and abuse citizens.
There are a lot of impassioned speeches about eradicating the police and restorative justice that I could give but those aren’t going to change my country-music-loving cousin’s mind, those are going to make her think that I’m a crazy extremist. But if I remind my cousin about the time her husband’s friend was charged with a more severe crime than his white companions, or if I point out that as a teacher she works with school resource officers who have contributed to the criminalization of student misbehavior and that doesn’t help kids learn and doesn’t keep them out of jail later, it just puts them in jail now - well, that’s how I can make inroads with that one person.
You have to be tactical about this. You’re not having a knock-down blow-out fight with your uncle for everyone to watch at Thanksgiving so you can make your position clear to the whole family, you’re talking specifically to that ONE friend and tailoring it to their specific interests. Is your buddy a steelworker who’s furious that “the looters just burned down the target for fun”? Does your buddy the steelworker know that Target is a Minnesota company that has aggressively quashed attempts to unionize the workers for decades?
Don’t make this loud, don’t make this public, make this a quiet, one-on-one conversation. Listen to their fears and concerns, counter as calmly as you can, and try to engage their sympathy. Your goal in this conversation is to get them to even SLIGHTLY shift their perspective on police use of force. Your goal is to point out the dozens and dozens examples of peaceful protesters getting pepper sprayed, to bring up clear-cut cases of unarmed people killed by police, to point out that property destruction gets ignored when it’s because a sports team won but gets aggressively condemned when it’s people who *started* a peaceful protest responding to police aggression. Your goal isn’t to change someone’s entire worldview in a single conversation, it is to get them to question ONE thing they’ve staunchly believed.
If you do this well you’ll probably never even know if it worked. Whoever you’re talking to isn’t going to change their mind right then and there, you might both walk away from the conversation frustrated, but maybe the next time they see looters on the news they’ll wonder if it’s actually people looting or if they’re trying to build a barricade because the police attempted to shut down their constitutionally protected protest. Maybe they’ll never bring it up again but maybe they start questioning the validity of all these instances of police violence. Maybe this relative never talks to you again because you pissed them off and called them out (by calling them in) but maybe next year they’re donating to bail funds.
