Chalk art inspires more than talk in the suburbs
Sidewalk chalk is, by design, temporary. Pressure causes pastel colors to crumble onto pavement where it sticks until weather, and walkers, fade it into forgotten hopscotch patterns and birthday greetings. Sidewalk chalk is, by design, harmless. But following the death of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers, this medium has prompted some of our neighbors to show their true colors.
Last week, a small collection of parents and children brought their chalk to an intersection in San Rafael’s Marinwood neighborhood. There, the group wrote slogans and encouragement in support of Black Lives Matter and called for an end to police brutality and systemic racism.
This small, gentle act somehow prompted a local man to label the group lawless graffiti artists while he spewed a vile rant. Much of the event was captured on video, shared on social media, and was eventually covered by the local news.
In the video, the man is seen barreling across Marinwood Avenue towards the parents and children while extending both middle fingers and using homophobic slurs. At one point, the man screamed, “This is f—ing Marinwood!”
Indeed, it was (ahem) Marinwood, an area that has embraced the Black Lives Matter movement like nearly every other suburban neighborhood around the Bay Area. In the past two weeks, protests have taken place in neighborhoods and towns that had previously hesitated to join in the demonstrations of nearby big cities. From Pleasanton to Pescadero, the people have taken to the streets to demand change.
On our street in Novato, a city that has hosted at least two peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in the past few days, a group of teenage girls took chalk to the sidewalk. In careful block letters, they wrote the names of people of color killed by police violence. Their message was bookended by the phrase, “All Lives Can’t Matter Until Black Lives Matter.”
“Oh, I thought it was wonderful,” said neighbor Susan Schilling. “It made me feel like people are doing what they can where they can to show support for change that needs to happen.”
Schilling regretfully noted that not every neighbor was on board with the block’s Black Lives Matter chalk statement. “One house,” she noted, “very quickly washed the front of their sidewalk, but everyone else left theirs.”
Like Marinwood, our neighborhood is mostly white. It’s filled with people, like me, who must do the long and uncomfortable work of educating and challenging ourselves to continually confront the complex and endless ways we allow racism to work its way into our lives.
“Having lived as long as I’ve lived, I’ve seen these (movements) happen before,” said Noah Griffin, a social justice writer and activist who lives in Tiburon. “But I really think change is in the wind and something really will happen.”
Griffin, a San Francisco native and 40year resident of Marin, has a “sixth sense” that a real shift is upon us. “There is hope,” Griffin said. “There is truly hope.”
Meanwhile, the Marinwood man featured in the viral video has since been identified. He used the Nextdoor neighborhood app to issue a series of apologies, each more sincere and humble than the last. I can’t find them anymore. Maybe he deleted them and is doing some serious soulsearching.
The evening following his rant, a much larger group gathered at the same Marinwood intersection, this time with more signs and more chalk. What began 24 hours earlier as a small group of adults and kids pressing pastel chalk onto welltrodden concrete in their personal call to justice turned into an extension of demonstrations taking place around the world. If the group wasn’t filled with devoted activists before the yelling match, it had since become so.
“Hundreds of parents and kids on bicycles came and joined us,” said rally participant Theresa Odisio of Novato. “It was so powerful, I cannot even tell you.”
Odisio plans to continue her activism, specifically by challenging Marin public school administrators to adopt an antiracist and social justice curriculum, and by ensuring that local police are aware that racism isn’t just happening in big cities. “It’s happening right here in the suburbs, like we saw in the video,” she said.
Fists raised in the air, the protest arrived at the residence of the man in the viral video, where they stood in silence for 10 minutes and used chalk to cover the street with messages of justice and equity. The chalk, as it’s designed to be, is temporary. But the change that’s arrived won’t easily be washed away.