Role of white protesters stark symbol of privilege

For some of the 1,000 or so protesters, last Sunday’s #WeCantBreathe demonstration in New Haven was their first time marching. They’d watched protests for years, and supported the Black Lives Matter movement, but had never stepped onto the street in solidarity.

But it has come to this. The sidelines are emptying. The recent video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on the neck of George Floyd has moved former bystanders, masks and all, out of their homes and into the streets during a pandemic. Floyd died after nearly nine minutes of being pressed to the ground. Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder, and three other police officers, who appeared to stand by while Floyd pleaded for his life and called out for his mother, have been charged with aiding and abetting murder.

Since Floyd’s death, people have protested around the world, including in Paris, where 15,000 people defied police orders and took to the streets, according to reports.

In New Haven, demands for a change in the way the city is policed, and how police are funded and monitored – along with demands for systemic changes that would level the playing field in general — stretch back decades, from 1997, when an East Haven police officer shot and killed 21-year old Malik Jones, to 2019, when police officers from Yale University and Hamden fired multiple shots into the car of an unarmed couple, to earlier this year, when a state police officer shot and killed Mubarak

Soulemane, 19, a Gateway Community College student.

In the case of two of those shootings, the suspects led police on chases. In the case of the unarmed couple, there was no chase — and if there had been one, while leading the police on a chase is a bad idea, let’s agree it is not an act that is punishable by death.

The protest crowd was mixed — race-wise, genderwise, age-wise. Throughout the day, people like Ala Ochumare, co-founder of Black Lives Matter New Haven, rallied the group and made sure everyone knew what was happening. Though she hadn’t thought about firsttime protesters when she took the megaphone, she and others make a habit to include everyone — people who walk slower, pregnant women, anyone who’s come out. Along the route, neighbors handed out snacks and water. The protest had a community feel to it.

As the crowd moved up onto Interstate 95, where protesters stayed for about 90 minutes, they watched the sun twinkle off the waters of Long Island Sound. Some motorists got out of their cars and trucks and applauded, or honked horns in solidarity. Mackenzie Lasher, of the Westville section of New Haven, was listening when Ochurmare announced that more police might be on the way. She told protesters they could leave if they wanted. She mentioned tear gas, rubber bullets and dogs. Someone passed a marker down the line so people could write emergency phone numbers on their arms. As had happened throughout the day, Ochumare asked white participants to move to the edge of the group. They could serve as human shields should things go awry.

And there it was, the starkest of examples of white privilege. Police might be less likely to harm a white protester, and so white people place themselves out front. White people have, of course, been treated roughly at protests, but serving as a shield puts literal skin in the game.

For protesters who’d been enjoying the community vibe of the protest, the request brought things into sharp focus.

“I had a decision to make,” said Lasher, who has a master’s in criminal justice. “Do I preserve my own safety, or do I put that aside and ensure the safety of others? After all, I had already marched and displayed my ‘End Police Brutality’ sign for over two hours by then, which is more than a lot of people in this country are doing.”

But she stayed. Jennifer Dauphinais was on the southbound side of I-95, facing Milford. All day, Dauphinais had been standing between protesters and police cars all along the route. At one point, hands up, standing between police and the people of color who were marching, Dauphanais leaned over a police car and made eye contact with the officer sitting inside. When Ochumare mentioned dogs, Dauphinais thought she’d misheard. Dogs? That’s when protesters noticed the state police cars lined up on the northbound side of the highway.

Dauphinais, too, stayed. Things stayed calm, and the protesters walked off the highway. Later, at the police station, there were some painful exchanges that included pepper spray, but no reported serious injuries.

This is just the start, you know. More protests are planned, in New Haven and everywhere else. President Donald Trump has vowed to shut them down, but he can’t. It’s beyond him. People who go to the protests then go home. They hang signs. They talk to neighbors. And they vote. As scary as it was on the highway, it was also, said Dauphinais, beautiful and spiritual. It was exactly where the protesters needed to be, doing precisely what they needed to do.