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TAKE BACK THE STREETS
Public space is the arena of democracy. When crisis strikes, you look out the window to see what’s happening outside. That’s because whoever controls the streets often controls the narrative. When you see armored vehicles and riot squads equipped with militarygrade armor that is designed for the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan roaming Los Angeles, Kenosha, Minneapolis, or Chicago on a summer night in 2020, you know the state is flexing its muscle.
That’s also why Trump unleashed the force of the DC police, who pushed out nonviolent anti-racist protesters denouncing the murder of George Floyd with suffocating tear gas on Lafayette Square. Why did Trump stroll down from his residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at 7 p.m. on June 1, 2020, and pose for a five-minute photo-op with a Bible in his right hand at St. John’s Episcopal Church? He wanted to say: “I represent the people.” But when protesters—chanting, shouting, singing, dancing—showed up with signs, they contested his dubious assertion.
Look closely at Trump as he’s posing before the cameras at St. John’s Church. Notice his palpable unease. The strain in his face, distorted with apprehension. The discomfort in his movements, as he fidgets with the Bible and then mechanically raises it skyward in his right hand. He betrays the image of strength he so desperately wants to project.
The aspiring authoritarian is afraid of something he goes to great lengths to hide from you: whoever is more convincing in representing the will of people is likely to persuade them that they, are, in fact, their representative. As a citizen, you don’t have tanks. You can’t call the military. But when it comes to gaining popular support for your cause, you have an advantage: you’re not paid; this isn’t your job. You might lose your job when you show up, but you’re doing it because you can’t stay home. You’ll make your voice known. Occupy the streets and make them yours. It will go viral.
Pre-Revolutionary America is filled with examples of people seizing the streets to protest the crisis of economic inequality. During November 1747, a three-day uprising in Boston, known as the Knowles Riot, saw ordinary people capture several British naval officers and a deputy in response to the mandatory conscription, known as impressment, of forty-six men into naval service by British admiral Charles Knowles. Twelve years later, there was the revolt against the Stamp Act of 1765, when a group of sailors raided the home of Charleston trader Henry Laurens, who was believed to hold the stamped paper everyone was forced to buy to raise revenue for the British Crown. In 1772, sixty men—farmers, sailors, and merchants—came out of eight boats and burned to the ground the British merchant ship, the Gaspee, after it ran aground in Warwick Bay in Rhode Island, where it had been in hot pursuit of a colonial ship that was suspected of illicit trade.1
Public scenes leave a lasting imprint. The Knowles Riot made quite the impression upon a young man named Samuel Adams Jr. of Massachusetts, a privileged scion of a well-to-do businessman and politician, who had just finished his master’s degree at Harvard University. So deeply affected was Adams by these rebels that it inspired his faith in the idea that liberty is an unquestioned right and that human rights must be defended without qualification. But it’s hard to police something that doesn’t recognize the authority of the police, that marches to the beat of its own drum. The Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays descended upon Western Massachusetts in 1787 with a band of four thousand men because they couldn’t survive crippling debt. Upon hearing the news of Shays’s insurrection, Sam Adams was aghast. What had become of Adams’s earlier enthusiasm for democratic insurrection? Now, reaping benefits as a member of the ruling class, Adams wrote the Massachusetts Riot Act of 1786, which gave license to armed militias to stamp out popular revolt. Several years later, Adams endorsed the suppression of what came to be known as the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, started by poor farmers who resisted efforts at federal tax collection.2
Privately, Thomas Jefferson, unlike Adams, knew better than to disparage radical dissent with an egalitarian purpose. Democracy can’t survive without it. In a letter to Abigail Adams—wife of John Adams, Sam’s second cousin—Jefferson, away in France as the US ambassador, quipped, “I like a little rebellion now and again. . . . It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”3 Jefferson’s magnum opus, the Declaration of Independence, justifies the very nature of democratic populism—of enslaved revolt, Indigenous rebellion, poor people’s movements, feminist uprisings—of making your aspirations known. The Declaration steals the right of creating government from kings and God. It places it in your hands to reason whether democratic revolution, which is a right, is advisable or not. It inaugurates the push and pull of debate and disagreement that characterizes living together. It brings you into the fold with others, even if your voice isn’t heard.
Unfortunately, Jefferson betrayed the Declaration of Independence. As a gentleman of aristocratic birth from Virginia—a planter’s son, the third of ten children—he owned over one hundred slaves, and after his death, only two were freed from his plantation, Monticello, “little mountain.” As the third US president, Jefferson extended US imperialism through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, when his administration bought 827,000 acres west of the Mississippi River for $15 million, wreaking havoc on Indigenous people. He had a long relationship and fathered children with one of the enslaved women at Monticello, Sally Hemings, who legally couldn’t say no to any of his advances.
But Jefferson’s reactionary behavior can’t repress the revolutionary spirit of the Declaration. You see it being reborn every time citizens take back the streets. When graffiti artists paint gorgeous murals on sidewalks declaring in large block letters “Black Lives Matter” after the murder of Breonna Taylor in 2020. It’s present when interracial youth defiantly sing “You About to Lose Yo Job”—a rap anthem that became a sensation during the Black Lives Matter summer 2020 protests after a Black woman, Johnniqua Charles, issued a stern warning to a security officer in South Carolina arresting her as she tried to reenter a strip club to reclaim her purse. “Why are you detaining me?” Charles asks him. When he doesn’t respond, she declares, “You about to lose your job.”4 You also see the Declaration’s revolutionary spirit when DACA recipients—undocumented citizens who were brought to the US as children—come out of the shadows in Arizona and Texas, agitating for full rights given to birthright citizens.
The street is seized and so, too, is the meaning of who belongs in America and what America is. Make politicians respond to public spectacles. Otherwise, they’ll continue to read the public opinion polls, which only prop up the million-dollar political consulting industry. Opinion polls offer a tiny snapshot of what the majority wants. “The people” is what you say it is. Keep up the pressure. Imagine how different things would be if protests became parades of resistance on a daily basis, lasting not for days but for months or years? Imagine what would happen if the city square became a stage for forging a new national identity and a new language of belonging? It would be stunning.