“RIOTS”
UGLY PROLOGUE:
Washington, D.C., has contempt for its citizens.
Mayor Muriel Bowser's liberal paradise has no place for its laboring masses. This was made patently clear as we watched police beat through their barricades in an attempt to quash any semblance of political solidarity.
Demographics are changing. D.C. has become a haven for technocratic, Capitol Hill ghouls who demand suburban silence from their conquered, rather than adopted community. Now, D.C. caters to the children and grandchildren of the ‘white-flight’ suburbanites who fled the city rather than live alongside their Black neighbors. They want 7th and Florida Ave to shush—to resemble a silent cul-de-sac.
Bowser wants the many soon-to-be-displaced, residents cowed and sullen. Her donors and their servile political apparatus demand activists and organizers quieted. There is no place here for those who speak too loudly or want to exist outside a repressive police state. They don’t like your tone.
Most police in this city don't even live here but seem to belong to a cult whose first principle is protecting CVS from Black youth with as much force as can be mustered. Reactionary politics and unhinged brutality are the trappings of their identity.
The moral rot of an inherently corrupt police force created these fearful cops. Violent predatory monsters who gleefully parade around the district with military-grade weaponry—surplus from the foreign wars on people of color everywhere. Tailing young Black people around the city, hungering to entrap one.
The political crises of these times won’t be solved in individual battles. Pretty words won’t save us. But solidarity will. We will respond to contempt with unity. If Black Lives Matter, as Muriel affirms speaking at the renamed plaza, her policies and her police will have to show it to the people who live in this city today. If Black lives matter, they must matter everywhere. We will face down their contempt with our solidarity—from Georgia Ave to the Gaza Strip.
They police us out of fear because they know our unity will undo them. The past is, indeed, a prologue.
- Ugly
"Those in power can kill one, two, or three roses, but they will never be able to stop the coming of spring.”
- Lula da Silva
____________________________________________________________
Shortly after the murder of George Floyd by law enforcement on May 25th, 2020, protests erupted in DC and all over the world. After marching with the movement in DC for several months, I experienced nothing like how the protests were negatively portrayed in mainstream media. This kind of propaganda makes it easy for the public to dismiss anything activists had to say today, yesterday, or years from now. In Washington, DC, where activism, mutual aid, and community organizing for the better treatment of disenfranchised peoples is viewed as a disturbance, I found it necessary to show what the oh-so-plentiful rioting headlines didn’t.
Surrounded by constant trauma, activists took their discontent to the streets and made it look fearless. Meanwhile, MPD ensured POC were still being murdered in broad daylight, dragged by their hair over the freshly painted Black Lives Matter Plaza, being illegally chased and run over by police vans, along with countless other tragedies. See how activists cried for each other, screamed in agony, lost the luxury of sleep, how they took care of each other in the face of ethnic cleansing and a COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite so much tragedy and continued abuse from law enforcement, the city found a way to dance, love, and recharge. In the true spirit of Chocolate City, GOGO flowed through many of these marches and offered a sort of relief/catharsis. In the name of progress and community support, activists provided thousands of free meals to anyone who was hungry. They connected our homeless community with resources and defended them from being harassed by the city. They raised money to release arrested protestors taken in on phony charges. They protected each other because no one else would.
