Pride Month x Black Lives Matter: The Power of Riot
If the stories of the Black Lives Matter riots sweeping across the USA and the UK in the midst of a pandemic are making you uncomfortable: that’s the point.
Lockdown rules have been ignored. Statues have been defaced and even toppled. And yes, on top of that there have been fires, looting, and violence - devastating events which shouldn’t be celebrated. But how can there be peace when there is no justice?
Black people are being murdered under a system in denial of its own prejudice. And this is nothing new. This is the world at a grief-stricken boiling point. This is a response to an age-old, deeply insidious and utterly shameless system of racism that thrives in the USA, but was born in the British empire.
Even now, in the UK, the proportion of BAME deaths in police custody is more than two times greater than other deaths in custody. Meanwhile the coronavirus pandemic is disproportionately killing members of the BAME community, and there is still no justice for those killed in the Grenfell Fire.
Protests shape history. They demand rights for those who have been rendered voiceless. The dangerous and controversial suffragette ideology of “Deeds not Words” is the reason British women have the privileges we do today. The bottles and bricks thrown at the Stonewall Riots are the history behind Pride Month, which is widely celebrated in June.
In fact, this Pride Month, while Black people are protesting for their lives (and J K Rowling is busy exercising her White Feminism by making harmful comments about trans women)there could be no better time to remember Marsha P. Johnson.
Marsha was a Black trans woman and a figurehead of the Stonewall Riots. She was rumoured to have been among the first to resist arrest in June 1969, when the NYPD raided a New York City gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. She and Sylvia Rivera, a Latina trans woman, were perhaps among the first to throw objects at the police that night, inciting the retaliatory violence that led to three days of rioting. Without the resistance of these women of colour, the gay liberation movement may never have been heard.
At the time, the Stonewall Inn was one of the few places that members of the LGBT community felt safe. With little to no rights to protect them, LGBT people had suffered abuse at the hands of the police for years, and bars like the Stonewall Inn offered some refuge. The NYPD raid was the first step in a two-part plan to shut the Stonewall Inn down for good. But that night, just like now, the suffering had been endured too long, and the police were faced with an uprising.
Social change was in the air, but it needed a spark to really ignite. American gay rights activist Craig Rodwell has said of that historic night, “it was just everything coming together, one of those moments in history that if you were there, you knew, this is it, this is what we’ve been waiting for.”
51 years after the Stonewall Riots, it feels like one of those moments again. The riots in Minneapolis, and even the toppling of statues in the UK, may have caused much condemnation of Black Lives Matter protesters - but they were a catalyst for something vital.
The public shaming of racist institutions that we’re experiencing now is louder than it has been in decades. The outcry is putting pressure on authorities and organisations to confront systemic racism; to vow to do better. And we’re already seeing change.
The Minneapolis City Council have unanimously voted to disband their police department in favour of community-based public safety programs. Amazon have withdrawn Rekognition from police use after revelations that the facial recognition technology has been used to support the malpractice of racial profiling.
Meanwhile, slave trader Edward Colston’s statue may have been retrieved from the Bristol harbour, but he certainly won’t be going back on his plinth. And since his statue fell, councils all over the UK are preparing to review their city’s monuments and potentially remove those that glorify Britain’s violent colonial history. It’s not enough, but if we persist, it could be a turning point.
Marsha P. Johnson was a galvanising force within the gay rights movement, and her legacy is an important one. She taught us that change happens when we speak up. Riots can be frightening and contentious. They can cause all kinds of damage, especially when co-opted by opportunists and hooligans. But revolt is the natural response to injustice.
So, if you’re feeling uncomfortable: keep at it. It’s time to use that feeling to take action. Because the fight is nowhere near won, and silence is no longer enough.
Donate to the Marsha P. Johnson Institute (MPJI), which protects and defends the human rights of Black transgender people.
The Government has plans that could make it more difficult for trans people to make informed decisions about how they live in their own bodies. Read more on Mermaids, and write a letter to your MP.
Here are more ways to help the Black Lives Matter movement.
Title image by Ayumi Toyama.
