Fists in the Air: Living in the Shadow of The Walk Outs

I cannot remember a picture that has inspired so much pride and shame in me at the same time.

There is what you see:
a student photographed during a protest against police brutality

and then

There is what I see:
a student who has stepped out of a march to POSE for a photo, dying to look legitimate, longing to look like the next Bob Moses, pressing his lips into composed fire - the kind of non-smile that Huey wore in that famous wicker chair picture. I see a little boy wondering 'how would malcolm pose for this', ready to run home as fast as he can to check if the picture made it to facebook, if he is quoted in the paper - if his presence has been documented, affirmed, glorified, elevated in this infant of a movement. I was there. Everyone look at me.

Everyone look at me.

As a generation we live in the shadow of 1968. And the decades on either side.
We are called, and often call ourselves the generation of apathetics. The MTV -AIM generation. Children whose parents once took to the streets. They tell us stories of vietnam - of how they protested against it or fought in it. They have artifacts - pictures of them, looking nothing like the parents that we know now - with youth and passion, with afros and fists in the air. In their drawers and attic chests they have old buttons designed with peace signs and interracial handshakes. SNCC. SCLC. March on Washington. Watts. King. SDS. Mississippi. Montgomery. Freedom Rides. Fire Hoses. Fists. In the air.

Since I was in middle school I have looked at the 60's as the golden age - that to which we were always meant to aspire, that which we were born to replicate, to reenact.

I have always seen us as their thankless children - a generation with no cause, no crisis, and no consensus. Sometimes I think that we have been so pampered that we have forgotten how to stand and speak at all.

At Brown the shadow looms just as long. We watch documentaries about the walkouts, about 68 and 85, about the time that Brown University students of color just like us left their classrooms, we watch them occupy school buildings, see them with microphones making demands, fists in the air.

And we wonder, where are our demands? When will we walkout? What is our cause? How do you make a fist?
And the effect of this is staggering: a generation of students whose understanding of change and revolution is limited to the most superficial and visually captivating aspects of past protests - that which we have read about in civil rights class and watched in documentaries and HBO specials. We at Brown, I dare say, are a generation who only understand the options in front of us in so far as they resemble the actions and protests of those who came before us. An imagination imprisoned by our past. So in thinking about protest we are more concerned with mimicking the past than with creating new forms of resistance.

On Tuesday we marched. We wore black clothes and band aids over the left eye to draw attention to an incident in which a Brown student was assaulted by providence police over the weekend (9/9). It was the grandest moment I have experienced at Brown. As we walked around the campus chanting and waving our flyers "stop the abuse. stop it now" there was this energy, this feeling of new life coursing through us - pushing us forward. We cannot stop, we must go down another street. We must make another round of the green. You could see dancing it in our eyes. A breathless excited uncertainty. Our moment was finally here. We had found our cause - something to stand for.

And yet I was aware that my mind was wondering - away from the goal of raising awareness - away from the anger and focus on what we were demanding from the school - and to the image of what a fist, my fist, looks like when raised into the air. My eyes, scanning frantically for cameras. who is getting this down? I see a camera as we head down the slope to the dining hall and I raise my fist again. Maybe the photographer will catch it. Maybe it will be on the cover of the paper. And my mind moved from my focus on the police and administrators to the delicious idea of standing in front of the group and speaking. When will I get the opportunity to stand up and say something? It is pounding in my head. Come on. I have this killer line that I have been sitting on for two weeks "brown we are watching you." It was the closing and most powerful line that a black student, deemed the spokesperson of the group, said during the 1985 walkouts at Brown. And I want to be the first to say it. Wait for it. Wait for it. God I hope no one says it before me.

The protest ends. Our organizing meeting comes and goes. And, before I know it, I am back in my room looking at a photo of myself posing for the camera and I am disgusted with myself. I am disgusted at how easy my dedication to the movement slipped into being my dedication to good activist-looking pictures of myself. A friend writes on my wall "hey cj, cool pic, you should be the poster boy for the equality movement." And I am sick with the realization that, secretly, that is exactly who I wanted to be.

So the picture is at once a testament to the incredible strength and energy we had in making our presence known on campus that day, and yet still an uglier and much subtler testament to how all-consuming power is.

And I wonder if anyone else among the crowd felt that same feeling. We say that this campaign against police brutality is a movement that belongs to all of us, and that leadership is not important. Yet I feel that deep down, the feelings in some of us belie that conviction. Deep down there is the hunger for power, the desire to posses the mike, to be in the spotlight, to stand in front of a crowd, to be on the cover of the paper. A good friend put it so well tonight by saying "its all about power, everyone that day wanted be the one to say 'brown we are watching you'"

It is almost irresistible. It is like getting to put on a costume - turning ourselves into the black and white pictures of struggle that we have admired for so long. A chance to play Malcolm or Assatta for a day. Here we are trying to stand for something, learning to stand together. And though no one acknowledges it out loud there is an unspoken question that begs an answer: who will stand in front?

Who will get the mike?
Who is in the spot light?
Who runs the meeting?
When the paper asks for a quote, who speaks?

Leadership. Leadership. Leadership.

For those of you friends who are reading this and are currently involved in the movement, I apologize if I am at all projecting my own insecurities and fucked up thoughts on to you.
I mean it only as a word of caution: we are all in danger.

By virtue of being in this struggle we are in danger of having our imaginations cut short. My friend calls it the limit horizon - the limit of our imagination. We are in danger of putting our energy into something that ultimately amounts to nothing more than mimicry, an attempt to reenact the past.

As soon as people found out about the police assault they began demanding "Walkout!!"
I recently spoke with a freshman who put it this way: "just because a walk out was good for them in 68, doesn't mean that it is what we should do now"
Perhaps there is a better way that has yet to be imagined. And isn't that what we owe history, to imagine the unimaginable - to come up with alternatives that our parents never thought of?

Lastly we are in danger of this movement becoming fractured by an internal struggle for power. We need to keep our eyes on our objectives - a community in providence and at Brown free of racist violence and targeting. Find a way where everyone feels like they are a part of it. It is ego that will kill us. It is ego that killed SNCC and countless other student movements. Broke them down the middle, turned grassroots coalitions into cults of warring personalities. That is why history is so easily summerizable in these fucked up dualisms: King versus X, Dubois versus Washington.

And our enemies know this all too well. From the beginning I have believed that the secret to our own oppression has been the strategy of divide and conquer that has been used against us. Up until now I have thought of that division as coming exclusively from our own internal prejudices and from external coercive forces. It is now, looking at this picture, that I realize a major structuring element of our own division is ego.