Isaiah Wagoner, controversial former leader among Eugene’s Black Unity protest group and current co-leader of Minority Freedom Network, condemned protesters on August 7. Wagoner equivicotated those who cover their faces and “burn shit and come out at night” with “modern-day Klansmen.”
To Wagoner, graffiti and broken glass are the equivalents of organized terror that beat, burned and lynched human beings. He believes that successful movements need to practice respectability politics to appear palatable to those who can’t muster the decency to say, “Black lives matter.” BU and MFN, though not guilty of Wagoner’s abhorrent comparison, reflect this ideology: unity, regardless of whom it is with and what they stand for.
I, though am tired of unity, and Wagoner is the perfect example of why. He, among groups like BU, embrace working alongside the Eugene Police Department to reform away police brutality. Eugene anti-racist group BIPOC Liberation Collective, on the other hand, brandishes a “diversity of tactics” campaign dedicated to “no peace policing,” encouraging protesters to express their anger and need for justice however they see fit. They are the protesters in masks, voicing the justified anger channeled from decades of police brutality and centuries of an oppressive racial caste system.
On July 25, the two protest groups dedicated to anti-racism diverged; BU members tried to stop protesters from vandalizing Wells Fargo. One woman cried, “Stop trying to please the White man,” after admonishing, “these banks don’t care about you. They don’t value your life,” exposing the division in the movement. Even among anti-racists, there is disagreement on what justice means.
Their division is emblematic of dominant White culture’s fetishization of unity to curb justice. Media, politicians and ordinary people make a distinction between “good protesters” and “bad protesters,” condemning the expression of anger to the point where spray paint on a storefront window delegitimizes a protest. “We don’t even promise justice or any reform,” they seem to say, “but we guarantee nothing will come out of this if you don’t bend to our will.” Wagoner is the embodiment of this fear. His desire to appease the politicians and White supremacists the movement should oppose, especially considering his need to appeal to the White masses having begun a mayoral campaign, is so entrenched that he denigrates a fellow protest group to better his own in the eyes of a nation that couldn’t care less about him.
This logic carries all the way to the Eugene mayoral office. The night after the protesters vandalized Wells Fargo, Mayor Lucy Vinis released a statement reflecting upon the protests. She supported the group that was peaceful, but condemned other rioters who damaged property, blasting it as “unacceptable” and “unproductive.” Repeating the term “we” for emphasis, she based her critique on the fact that rioters deterred from the path that she and acceptable protesters were charting. In doing so, Vinis grouped herself with peaceful protesters and expelled ‘bad ones.’ She chose unity over liberation.
Liberation and unity, though, are two different goals. Liberation is freedom from oppression. Without force, it relinquishes the burden of having to reason with those without reason to achieve basic human rights. Unity, when pandering to the police community and White supremacists, achieves nothing but a good photo op. A criticism of the notion of unity is not a rebuke of peaceful protests as they are not mutually exclusive; rather, it scrutinizes the intentions of movements by excoriating the outside influences on them.
Being excluded from Vinis’s personal cohort of acceptable justice seekers, then, is nothing to fear. It’s something to embrace. After all, they are overseers of the police departments ─ the very institution anti-racists reject.
I don’t mean any of this as a value judgment of peaceful or violent protests. Either of these groups are valid if they don’t tear down the other. Instead, I challenge us to rethink our protests and insistence on unity. Throughout all successful movements in history, protesters were unafraid to oppose the identity of the nation itself ─ such a challenge required thinking outside the framework of a cemented nation.
This is not reductive to the point of suggesting violent secession or a civil war. ‘Good protesters,’ though, if operating within the rigid framework of America, if choosing to appeal to the White state rather than reject it, sacrifice the soul of all other movements throughout thousands of years that have toppled broken systems. For this movement to really challenge a racist nation, it must question the future of the nation’s existence – not just its past. By protesting and imagining within a circumscribed American identity of acceptability and feasibility, we occlude the nation’s potential for growth and moral realignment.
Without deciding whether or not today’s movement pledges itself to liberation or unity, those like Wagoner will continue to do more harm than good. We should question why Wagoner ─ who has been run over by the car of an anti-BLM protester ─ would choose to defend the groups with corrupt hearts, similar to his attackers, and bombard those who are actually fighting for human rights. Why defend the heartless and soulless at the expense of the oppressed and the beautiful?
The right casts this as anti-American. They’re right.
These protests are un-American. They oppose the America that ripped millions of families and children from their homes and enslaved them, the America that segregated and dehumanized Blacks by denying the use of the same water fountain as Whites, and the America that continues to use the police as a figurative and literal chokehold on Black communities. This America has rejected and scoffed at social progress at every conceivable turn. It has lost the right to tell us how to protest.
Abolishing slavery was polarizing. Ending Jim Crow was polarizing. Ending mass incarceration and police brutality is polarizing ─ it must be. If a protest fails to be polarizing ─ if it fails to force individuals to side with the best of humanity or the worst ─ it fails as a movement.
We do not need unity with White supremacists who believe in the disposition of an entire race. We don’t need to be acceptable to politicians who uphold the system this movement challenges. What we need is liberation from them.
