A call for local leaders, allies to turn protest into policies
Movement seeks help exposing, eliminating systemic racism
There have been protests, marches and rallies. Streets have been shut down, and police chiefs have been confronted. The words “black lives matter” have echoed. But the movement to end systemic racism and police brutality is nowhere near its end, activists say.
“This is a moment for organizing, not for organizers,” said Amy Jones, a local activist. “We’re always looking for a leader, and it’s not one person — this is a movement.”
A protest organized by Citizen Action on Saturday brought at least 1,000 people to Townsend Park for a 2.23-mile walk in memory of Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed by two white men while jogging in Georgia; Breonna Taylor, who was killed in her Kentucky
apartment by police officers; and George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer restrained him with a knee on his neck for more than eight minutes.
Shawn Young, a community organizer with Citizen Action and one of the organizers of Saturday’s protest, said they were expecting perhaps 100 people when they initially scheduled it following Arbery’s death. Then Floyd died.
“The idea was that we wanted to connect the racial injustice, police brutality murders in the Capital District to what we’re seeing across state lines, connecting stories like Ellazar Williams, Edson Thevenin and Andrew Kearse,” Young said, invoking the names of young black men who were either killed or severely injured by local police. “But after the Floyd murder, it accelerated that event and rocketed people’s focus on racial injustice.”
Advocates have a diversity of opinion on the more violent scenes that broke out Saturday night in Albany’s South End and at the tail end of Monday’s protest in Arbor Hill.
“I cannot equate a lynching with the destruction of property,” said Barbara Smith, a renowned scholar on issues of race and gender. “It’s excruciatingly painful to think about the loss of people’s livelihoods and businesses, but it just is not in the same category as someone having their life choked out of them on video with three other officers standing around watching.”
On Sunday, groups in Schenectady had a protest. Monday, community members organized the protest in Albany’s Arbor Hill neighborhood, shutting down part of Henry Johnson Boulevard. And another protest is planned for Sunday in
Troy by Justice for Dahmeek, a grassroots organization that advocates against police brutality. (The group is named for Dahmeek Mcdonald, who was wounded by Troy police in a high-profile 2017 incident.)
While the protests are a space for the community to “voice their grievances, their solace, their pain,” Young said, activists believe there is more to this movement: leading conversations within institutions, families and friend circles to challenge racism, and pushing policies that would help dismantle systemic racism.
“State-sanctioned violence is beyond simply a cop’s bullet, officer brutality, a cop’s knee on a person’s neck,” Young said. “It’s how are you going to invest, where are the opportunities, how do you bring equity? Not investing in communities is a part of the problem. We need to leverage this moment, leverage this time, make sure that those lives count for something.”
Resources for the black community have been brought up at multiple rallies and protests.
“If enough of us could connect we’d be fine — enough of us where we can pool resources together and fund things that back our causes,” said Emerys Young, who organized Monday’s protest. “I feel like we can do that locally before anything: Empower people in your community and give them positions.”
The day after Saturday’s Albany protest, the Capital Region National Association for the Advancement of Colored People organized a rally in the South End. Carolyn Mclaughlin, an Albany County legislator, described the time as a “ripe opportunity to get involved.”
“What you saw here today is the positive side of people here looking for solutions, but everybody came because they felt like a knee had been on their neck,” she said. “The group of us that have been talking, we’re looking for economic justice. We’re looking for environmental justice. We’re looking for educational justice.”
Activists believe the time is ripe to fight for those justices, as well. The state Legislature is planning to act on a series of criminal justice reform measures, including overhauling 50-a, a 44-year-old statute that blocks public access to police disciplinary records.
Smith brought up the “erosion of community policing” as another law enforcement practice to reevaluate during this time. But she also said that systemic racism has deep roots in American institutions, and will be difficult to uproot.
“The project of eradicating racism in policing, police brutality, the prison-industrial complex, mass incarceration — the only way those things change is to make them front-andcenter priorities for every one of your decisions and actions,” she said. “First of all, you’ve got to acknowledge the problem, and then you have to go from there.”
For some community members, the movement also needs to take place in personal spaces, through conversations with close ones and self-education. Not simply posting on social media, which many said is not enough, (“If you’re just here for a picture to post online, then seriously, take your ass home,” Young said at Saturday’s protest), but rather educating oneself about racism.
The push for change needs to involve hard self-ref lection by those who aren’t black, said Aaron Moore, who teaches acting and playwriting.
“Without any fault of their own, white people are grown to be racist, no matter how much of an ally you are, through the subliminal messaging and means of social construct. That I don’t blame you for because you have no control over it,” Moore said. “What I do blame you for is now knowing and being conscious of the world and your surroundings, and not doing anything. That is your fault.”
Being an ally of the movement against racial injustice is about “being in the trenches,” Moore said.
“When you go to your Thanksgiving dinner, engagement parties, meet up with those college friends, when you go to Uncle So-and-so’s house and see your grandparents, and the conversation starts to transition to black topics in a negative light, what are you saying, how are you carrying our voice with you?” Moore said. “How are you going to help a year from now? That’s more important for me to see. How are you going to take our voices into the future?”