Spots of joy are necessary and needed in the seemingly endless fight for justice. In Baltimore on Tuesday night, as the city reeled from how the death of Freddie Gray exposed the violence of a decades-long police occupation of the black population, I didn’t experience many moments of sweetness. But one came in the form of a parade of young girls and sashaying boys shortly before nightfall, who made it their business to fill the intersection outside the now infamous burned CVS in West Baltimore with dancing.
The dancers fearlessly responded to the acute violence of the previous night’s events by prancing and voguing. These flamboyant young men and women used energetic dance and music to turn the void of black death into a space filled with black life – their spines were straight in defiance of a broken spine the police had severed.
In Ferguson last summer, there wasn’t much levity in the days after Mike Brown was killed, either. But there was something sweet happening outside the infamous burned down Kwik Trip gas station on West Florissant, where families gathered to take a stand. Children drew with chalk on the ground, sometimes drawing Superman, other times making chalk outlines of their own bodies to articulate their fears they couldn’t express with words. It was tender, touching, even, to see black families responding to the black trauma of white supremacy with black community.
In New York last December, after the lack of an indictment in the death of Eric Garner, there wasn’t much holiday cheer in the air. It was cold and people were angry, as protesters took to the streets about a lack of justice even in the case of a homicide recorded on video. But there was a lightness to the marching, at times. “The whole damn system is guilty as hell” and other chants were not sung in a cowering position, but with emboldened spirits of people who knew the joy of standing up for themselves.
There is a huge vacuum in Baltimore right now. Allowing it to be filled with riot police or the National Guard is dangerous, as that simply means threatened and executed violence will be used to bring back the status quo as quickly as possible.
That is not to suggest that if protesters were nicer, the plight of black oppression would diminish. Quite the contrary. Without a diverse array of sustained protests around the nation since last August, we wouldn’t have national media attention on white supremacy, nor leading contenders for president like Hillary Clintonresponding in any way to police violence.
All of us in America owe a debt to those brave souls who protest with their bodies, day in and day out, when the state tells them not to. Martin Luther King said: “a riot is the language of the unheard” and we salute those who have used any means necessary to attract attention to the suffocation of black America.
But we owe an even bigger debt to those who remind us for a moment of black beauty in the face of black death, like those children with their chalk and those prancing boys and girls. The problem of white supremacy in America can’t be fixed with more cops or a techie band-aid like body cams on cops; it is, at its root, a problem with spiritual and societal causes. Protest can help us identify those roots and moments of light can help us not to get lost in the darkness along the way.