The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
14 — Wednesday, November 18, 2020
statement
Last Saturday I stood in Chicago, across
the river from Trump International Hotel
& Tower, surrounded by a crowd of strang-
ers. I’d found out the election results half an
hour earlier, by way of a CNN push notifica-
tion, on the 23rd floor of my dad’s apartment
building. Within minutes, the honking and
cheering pouring through the 12-inch glass
window was too loud to ignore. I saw the ca-
maraderie as an undeniable invitation to the
celebration, ditched the homework I’d begun
only minutes before, grabbed my camera and
jumped in the elevator.
I arrived onto the scene at Wacker Drive,
a little out of breath after sprinting down
Michigan Avenue. Small clusters of people
milled around, eyeing each other excitedly. A
woman walked past in front of me; noticing
we had the same mask and smile hidden be-
hind it, I raised my camera to take her photo.
She paused mid-stride and looked directly
at me, framed almost perfectly by the raised
Wabash bridge beyond her. The irony was
too good.
(The Wabash Bridge, the only way to the
base of Trump Tower, has been raised on
and off for weeks “as part of a precautionary
measure to ensure the safety of residents.”
The street remains closed down a block be-
yond the tower, enforced by a multitude of
maskless Chicago police officers.)
The woman passed through the frame,
then, seeing the excitement in my eyes and
body language, turned around to chat.
“I didn’t know where to go or what to do!”
she said, breathlessly. “I just found out the
results and I wanted to be with people, so I
came here.”
She wasn’t alone in that sentiment. I
stayed, watched and photographed for two
hours on Wacker as more people streamed
in, taking note of the growing festivities: Cars
pulled over to take videos, three different
people popped bottles of champagne, some-
one played “The Wicked Witch is Dead” over
their speaker, the crowd sang “We Are the
Champions” not once but twice, a drummer
set up shop, a city worker dedicated his shift
to driving his street cleaner back and forth,
honking relentlessly.
Oh, the joy. It radiated from everyone in
the crowd, almost none of whom knew each
other. Eventually, the police blocked both
sides of the street to traffic, triggering an im-
promptu block party. It seemed as if in that
moment, like the woman I briefly spoke to,
everyone wanted to be with people. But why?
***
In times of high emotion, whether posi-
tive — like joy, excitement or relief — or nega-
tive — like loss, pain or grief — humans have
always come together. We hold protests,
vigils, riots, rallies, and celebrations, among
many other gatherings.
LSA senior Amytess Girgis, a student or-
ganizer who works with the Lecturers’ Em-
ployee Organization and a variety of student
organizations fighting for equity and justice,
has helped organize many different func-
tions for these purposes.
“Our primary focus, when organizing
gatherings is to create pockets of liberation,
where people can envision the world as it
should be,” she said. “And so what that looks
like is creating accessible spaces. Spaces
where folks with any kind of need can have a
presence and not feel like some kind of bur-
den or unwelcome. We create spaces of joy …
and then, of course, it’s bringing speakers in
that can inspire folks and tell stories. But ul-
timately, the types of community gatherings
I want to be a part of are the ones that tell the
story of who we want to be and help people
believe that that’s possible.”
The emotions I felt on Wacker Drive were
exactly that: I was seeing, and participating
in, a future that I hadn’t thought was possi-
ble four years ago. First and foremost, it was
a collective sigh of relief that our democracy
wouldn’t be toppled. Then, at least for me, it
was a reinforcement that love, acceptance,
inclusion, diversity, morality and empathy
were still alive and persevering in our coun-
try.
This wasn’t an organized protest, or even
an organized gathering. It was a completely
spontaneous gathering of people of every
ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity and age.
We’d previously only felt that joy in micro-
cosmic spaces we’d deliberately constructed.
Suddenly, those spaces bled together in the
Chicago streets as a celebration of shared
freedoms.
“To me, fundamentally, humans reach
their most joyous selves with other humans,”
Girgis told me. “And when we gather in spac-
es to celebrate our ties, even if those ties are
from common struggle, we are creating the
hope that, at least at the end of the world, we
can still love each other.”
Yet as endearing of a sentiment that is, our
nation is as divided as we’ve ever been. There
was an entire demographic of the country
not celebrating in America’s streets last Sat-
urday — one that instead had their moment
in November 2016. The concept of celebrat-
ing shared principles and values isn’t limited
to one side, but right now, it seems to be one
side at a time.
The Black Lives Matter movement, found-
ed by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal
Tometi in July 2013, has long used protesting
in the streets to form coherence around the
treatment of Black people in America. This
past year, America exploded into anger after
the killings of George Floyd in May and Bre-
onna Taylor in March, with 74% of Ameri-
cans saying they support the protests and 15
to 26 million people participating in them.
But the movement quickly fell prey to the
“Black is thug” narrative, which evolved into
“Black protest is riot.” By definition, rioting
is a form of gathering. Sometimes it’s a crowd
out of control. Sometimes it’s a deliberate
tactic of deterrence, like at the University of
Mississippi in 1962, when a white crowd ri-
oted to block James Meredith, the first Black
student at Ole Miss, from attending classes.
Rioting’s historical significance and current
narrative have been marred by those who
deem it an illegitimate form of expression.
“The reason why the Black Lives Matter
protests were immediately billed as riots is
because of how we define violence in a coun-
try like America, and in many other places
that lean heavily on capitalist ideologies and
racist ideologies,” Girgis explained. “And by
that I mean that violence on property is the
equivalent to violence on real bodies. Vio-
lence on the stock market is the equivalence
of violence on real bodies.”
It’s true that small riots have spurned from
protests this past year. But it’s also true that
historically, rioting has been perpetrated by
people of all races, not just Black communi-
ties, and as a movement, Black Lives Matter
has largely decided to fight inequity and in-
justice with love and community.
“By combating and countering acts of vio-
lence, creating space for Black imagination
and innovation, and centering Black joy, we
are winning immediate improvements in our
lives,” their mission statement reads.
Its principles are clear, and its materials
readily available for people to utilize in or-
ganizing a community event, rendering the
movement impossible to pin down. It can’t
be eradicated — it’s not just an organization,
but a community of people who believe in
a better future, organizing tangible spaces
where that belief rings true.
Joy has been part of Black resistance for
a long time. “We can actively trace the spa-
tial and temporal control of Black expression
from slavery and colonialism through to to-
day,” wrote Chanté Joseph in Vogue this past
summer. “This is why the act of joy is resis-
tance and as we use our physical bodies to pro-
test, march and demand change, we must also
use them to experience the pleasure of joy.”
For BIPOC in America, and around the
world, just existing is an act of resistance.
Girgis pointed out how central oral traditions
are to these communities — music, dance and
art are embedded in their protest. “‘We Shall
Overcome’ is one of the most famous move-
ment songs of all time that sort of carries the
waves of the civil rights movement,” she said.
On Saturday, the music leaned a little more
toward “FDT” by YG and Nipsey Hussle —
cars drove past with the song blaring, drench-
ing the crowd in an energy and freedom they’d
been missing. That energy couldn’t be con-
tained. And perhaps “FDT” is less traditional
than “We Shall Overcome,” but the sentiment
still remains the same: A community’s art and
culture is woven into the way it decides to
gather together.
In the Candlelight Revolution of 2016 and
2017, millions of South Koreans took to the
streets every Saturday for 20 straight weeks,
demanding President Park Geun-hye’s res-
ignation and the upholding of democracy.
The protests were entirely peaceful, focusing
around art and entertainment. Youngju Ryu,
associate professor of Asian Languages and
Cultures at the University of Michigan, teach-
es a class titled “The Candlelight Revolution:
Democracy and Protest in South Korea,” and
spoke to me about the impact of the incredibly
successful demonstrations.
“Throughout the day, this space became
the destination for anyone who wanted to
express themselves,” she said. “You had a lot
of homespun posters, a lot of performances,
like puppet shows, you had incredibly satiri-
cal examples of what we would call ‘laughtiv-
ism.’ So people could go and just walk around
and enjoy all these examples of creative and
politically engaged voices, and then collec-
tively come together in the evening, listen to
speeches by prominent figures and sing to-
gether.”
She continued to speak about a sort of col-
lective effervescence found in these scenes.
“The spectacularity of a million people,
holding up those candles together ... is some-
thing that became an essential part of show-
ing, first of all, how many people there are,
and how beautiful it is … I think what helped
the protests is, again, kind of understanding
the nature of a large crowd like that, and mak-
ing sure that they remain entertained.”
Almost a third of South Korea’s population
turned out in the cold winter, week after week
— so much so that Ryu noted a sense of loss
after the impeachment was victorious. After
20 weeks of turning out together in pursuit of
a common goal, they suddenly found them-
selves with free Saturdays.
“What’s bringing people together?” Ryu
asked. “A strong sense of mission for pro-
tecting democracy that was hard fought and
hard won ... faith in the power of the masses
to bring about such a change, because they’ve
done it before.” She continued, “They have
this kind of relationship to democracy that I
think is more visceral because they experi-
enced authoritarianism in their own lifetime.
Many of them fought against earlier, authori-
tarian regimes in their youth. And so the de-
mocracy that they have is something that they
have to protect — that they won with their
own hands.”
When thousands
share one emotion
BY ANNIE KLUSENDORF, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com
PHOTO BY ANNIE KLUSENDORF