Making Protests Work
By 
Running an effective protest is hard. These are organisms with lives of their own. No one can really full plan an action. As we have seen this wave of protests though, people have done the grunt work to make them work. Sarah Jaffe profiles these heroes.
There are protest medics with red-taped crosses on backpacks full of eyewash and bandages—anything that could treat minor wounds or help neutralize tear gas and pepper spray. But while medics are intentionally visible, there are care workers at the protests who go unnamed, and often, unseen.
They seem to be more common now, in this post-pandemic wave of the Black freedom struggle.
In Philadelphia, I walked behind a group of women pulling a wagon of pre-prepared plastic bags of goodies while holding a sign declaring “FREE SUPPLY PACKS 4 PROTESTERS.” The packs held a mask, gloves, a bottle of water, a snack, and some first aid supplies. The wagon was big, and by the time I saw it, about half full.
One group of marchers strode behind a banner reading “CARE NOT COPS” in big black block letters, and that is as good a description for the entire movement as I can think of (not that I would presume to tell protesters what to call the thing that they have built). They are not simply saying that Black Lives Matter. They are putting it into practice, making sure that protesters are as safe as can be from police or the coronavirus, from a slow death or quick one.
The reproductive labor of the movement takes place outside of the streets, too. It is in the donations that have overflowed the coffers of half a dozen bail funds and Black-led community organizations doing work around policing—the donations to Ramsey Orta, who filmed the death of Eric Garner six years ago and was hounded into prison for it, as well as to the families of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Darnella Frazier, the seventeen-year-old who filmed Floyd’s killing.
These donations are coming at a time of historic unemployment. They are small concrete acts of solidarity coming in $5 and $10 and $20 at a time, remembering the dead as they fight like hell for the living. Such solidarity is also in the food and supplies that overflow the buildings of organizations like Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) in Minneapolis, where staffers and members of the worker center pass out food to the neighborhood. And it is in places like Malcolm X Park in West Philadelphia, where activists made sure that the curfew and police crackdown—which shuttered more businesses than the pandemic—didn’t mean that anyone went hungry.
That it is mostly women who are doing this reproductive labor should surprise no one.