I am a well-educated, decent-looking white man. The closest I’ve ever come to being societally oppressed was the time a cantankerous Hy-Vee clerk in Missouri refused my Minnesota driver’s license as an acceptable form of ID to buy a six-pack of Leinenkugel’s.
Given my position of privilege, I didn’t think it my place to write much about the death of George Floyd and the resulting unrest until I’d had the opportunity to think things over, and more importantly, the opportunity to actually join the people on the streets for whom racial inequality is a daily, lived experience. I was in Minneapolis last Thursday, the day of the first of several memorials planned for George Floyd. I didn’t really get very near to the actual ceremony. Instead, I chatted with a few people I knew, and some I didn’t. I looked at several once-familiar buildings, now little more than burned-out shells.
My girlfriend was volunteering at a Minneapolis church. She’s not religious (nor am I), but the neighborhood churches didn’t mind, and hands were needed to pass out food, laundry detergent, clothing, and other household supplies to help struggling members of the community through this tough time. My girlfriend told me what people most appreciated were the diapers and baby wipes for those with young children at home. Some gathered supplies not for themselves, but to make deliveries to neighbors without vehicles. A steady flow of donations came in to replenish the stock as items went out.
Later, I had a thrice-delayed flight to New Orleans that was once again scheduled. On the way to the Minneapolis airport, the riotous fallout, visible in only a few brief flashes from I-35, looked distant compared to the immediate mountains of road construction rubble.
The next day, following several hours of awkwardly clean coronavirus-era travel, I marched with my cousin to the seventh night of protests in New Orleans. Thousands gathered in the French Quarter outside of Jackson Square. The gated park that surrounds a statue of President Andrew Jackson, who was a slave holder, had been locked. Jackson Square was declared closed by the authorities earlier in the day amid calls by some protesters for the statue’s removal.
The French Quarter was a sad shadow of its carefree Mardi Gras iteration. Many of the shops and restaurants had boarded-up windows. No one could agree if it was a prophylactic against vandalism during the pandemic shutdown, a measure in anticipation of a riot, or a bulwark against the tropical storm that was slowly blowing in from the Gulf.
People carried signs:
Black Lives Matter
No Justice No Peace
Police Reform NOW
History Has Its Eyes On Us
Proud To Be A Veteran, Ashamed To Be An American
The World Is Watching. Now’s The Time To Speak.
Almost everyone wore a mask, although bare faces dotted the crowd here and there. Some protesters rolled coolers into the street to pass out sandwiches. My cousin tried, with limited success, to give away cookies.
Speakers kept the crowd rapt for minutes, then hours. Some used fiery rhetoric to decry police violence, yet they all urged calm. The demonstration remained entirely peaceful.
There was a point, though, when an object flew past the woman speaking at the front of the crowd. I perked up from my position at the back of the mass of people, where I’d been leaned up against a pillar scribbling furiously in a pocket notebook. “We’re calm,” said the speaker. “We’re calm,” she repeated. “But if you’re not all about what we’re doing here, please leave.”
“If you are about what we’re doing here, clap once,” she said. A wave of sound pulsed back and bounced off the buildings. “Clap twice!” They did. “Clap three times!” I dropped my notebook and pen and clapped.
The speaker urged the crowd to part “like the Red Sea.” A white man near the front turned from the stairs that served as a stage. He was wearing a mask pulled high over his face, tactical pants, and a T-shirt, which had printed on it in bold letters, “Fuck Gun Control.” The man slunk out the back toward the setting sun, and the rally continued.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.