Oh also, I don't know if it was good faith or not, but at one point someone was like "how dare u suggest white protesters can escalate, only cops escalate"

And, no,

1) that's actually a liberal misconception, and also

2) escalation doesn't always mean violent escalation https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1276229588557971458

In any pressure campaign, strategic escalation is how you win.

You figure out who can give you what you want, you demand that target give you what you want, and if they don't, you escalate your tactics over time, so that every time they say no, you make their lives a bit harder.

In contemporary liberatory movement, we *usually* choose nonviolent escalation, because practically speaking liberatory movements actors are almost always a small percentage of the population and we're usually very much outmanned and outgunned by the cops.

There have been times where liberatory movements have successfully used violence as a tactic in the self-defense work of liberation, and discounting the validity of violence as a tactic generally speaking 1) ignores that history and 2) is a form of civility-policing movement.

BLM and the recent uprisings aren't unified, top-down movements with formal strategies, but they are absolutely movements that have a goal (police abolition) and deploy uprising/protest tactics and escalate them using collective, emergent, and largely informal strategy.

In protest space for emergent movements, there's almost never formal leadership.

There's usually an organic sort of collective consensus that emerges around how quickly escalation should progress, as folks watch each other and choose who to follow and who to pull back.

In BLM/Black uprising space, the job of white folks is basically to offer our bodies as 1) numbers, and 2) shields.

In standoffs with cops, we tend to be most valuable as a nonviolent front line facing police that leaves Black protesters with escalatory flexibility.

Basically, cops are less likely to hit us, so our bodies are more effective at slowing their advance and/or de-escalating their willingness to apply violence.

At the same time, the goal is to leave enough room between us and the cops that if Black folks decide to engage cops or form a front line or escalate, they have enough room to pass us and engage verbally with police while keeping what they deem to be an appropriate distance.

Escalating isn't always a bad thing.

The point of protest is to apply pressure to a target or targets, and it's Movement Strategy 101 that when your target fails to meet your demand, you escalate.

What's key here is that while BLM/the uprisings aren't formally organized movements, they are very much Black-owned movements.

If you don't have ownership in a movement, you don't get to go in and make strategic decisions on its behalf.

For example: when I was at POWER after the Starbucks arrests here in Philly, we did the clergy sit-in equivalent of a bar crawl, going to downtown Starbucks locations to sit in and somberly marching from one to another.

It was this very serious Black clergy-led procession.

At the site where the arrests happened, this young white woman who had been protesting there saw us marching and tagged along, proudly holding up her "fuck Starbucks" sign.

It was kind of like showing up to a funeral and screaming "DEATH SUCKS!" in the middle of a eulogy.

I went over to calmly, politely ask her to either separate from the procession or lose the sign, and she got mad at me (a staffer making an ask with permission on behalf of the Black clergy-led org) for trying to censor her.

See, she'd seen we had media attention, numbers, and a plan, and she wanted to be part of that energy.

And the clergy would have been glad to have her, if she respected their strategic/tactical choices.

But she felt entitled to that Black protest space on her terms.

That white woman felt entitled to escalate the language of a Black movement space.

That's white privilege, and that's an example of white privilege leading white people to thinking Black movement spaces are a free-for-all, or worse, a space they should decide strategy for.

BLM and the uprisings aren't formally organized like that Starbucks procession.

But, just like Black folks within POWER owned that procession space they'd created, Black folks in our communities own the BLM/uprising spaces they create.

So when white folks come in and engage in tactics that escalate-- starting a verbal confrontation with cops, being the first person (allegedly) to light cop cars on fire, whatever-- that's white folks presuming that they're entitled to make decisions on behalf of Black movement.

White edgelords often on some level think they're the wise movement people who know how best to foment revolution, and think they're setting an instructive example.

That's.... gross and also incorrect.

Black folks have been resisting their entire lives.

The survival of the oppressed is an act of resistance.

They know better than most what the police are capable of, and they know that if a white escalation provokes cops to violence, Black folks will still be the targets.

Escalation is a necessary part of movement strategy, and attempts to demonize it unhelpfully tar police escalation and movement escalation with the same brush.

Escalation decisions always need to be made by those that own the liberatory issue at hand, and to be informed by the people in movement most vulnerable to likely retaliation.

For those two reasons, escalation in BLM/uprising movement space need to be Black decisions.

In emergent movement space, there's no formal leadership, so one Black person saying "go for it" doesn't necessarily check the Black-led decision box.

What does count as Black consensus/affirmation in emergent movement space is complicated and it's not my place to define it.

There are SOMETIMES moments (usually in smaller crowds, usually shown by a certain amount of cheering on) where white folks are sometimes pretty clearly encouraged to engage in an escalation that would be disproportionately risky for Black people to attempt.

That SOMETIMES is a very big, multiple-asterisk "sometimes," though.

Far more often than not, I've seen white folks take one or two people on the edges goading them on as a sign of crowd consensus on the escalation action they're about to take.

That's... bad.

There are so many white folks coming into Black protest spaces green af with no understanding of what crowd consensus looks like, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

We all have to start somewhere.

The problem is, I've witnessed so, so many of those white folks get into this "oh I'm a badass protester" mindset and assume that getting teargassed or whatever gives them some kind of movement elder status where they get to make escalation decisions in Black spaces unilaterally.

Or, white protesters will find one Black person who reinforce their worldview, and decide that now that they've heard it from a Black person, they get to preach it as a gospel Black movement truth to everyone, or escalate unilaterally thinking they have "permission."

When we as white people show up to Black movement space, we are guests, always.

It doesn't matter how long we've been doing this work.

We are in someone else's house.

When you're a guest in someone's house, you do not get to yell "I DARE U TO COME IN HERE, PIG" through the window at a cop coming by, unless your host has specifically told you to do so.

It isn't your place to dare that cop into that house, because it isn't your house.

You listen to your host, you do your best follow your host's practices.

If your host takes his shoes off at the door, you ask if your host would like you to do the same.

If your host asks you to stay, you stay.

If your host asks you to leave, you leave.

If you don't like the house rules or customs or consensus, no one's twisting your arm telling you to stay.

You can always leave, but it is not your place to demand that the salad course be served first or that your host set fire to a tree in their backyard.

Escalation is a useful & necessary part of movement strategy, but it has to happen on the terms of the people whose home you're in.

If it isn't your home & you can't clearly discern what those terms are, your job is to take your cue from the people that live there.

Police are a hazard to Black life, which means protest space is almost always a space where Black life is at risk.

The stakes here aren't just "will your host mention later to people that you were rude," they're actually, literally Black life and death.

That's why it's so vital that white folks understand that we are always guests in that space, and act accordingly.

No amount of time spent in racial justice circles or Black space, movement or otherwise, makes that home ours.

The class reductionist dirtbags are mad at me for saying that whatever the house rules may be, white people are out of pocket for announcing rules for Black movement space authoritatively, as if it were our home and thus our place to issue orders.

What that says to me is, the dirtbags don't want to cede any ground to the idea that perhaps they do not own or speak for Black movement.

After 5 years of refusing to acknowledge that racism exists, they want to appropriate the energy of this emergent Black movement.

To do that, they need to convince other white people that actually, white class reductionist leftists live in this home too, and always have.

That's bullshit.

They've been working nonstop to burn this place to the ground and/or convince people it doesn't even exist.

The goddamndacity, right?

But however transparent their song and dance may be to those of us who have been in antiracist spaces for a minute, it is still harmful and dangerous because there are movement-green white people listening to their "we all own this house" bullshit.

Those movement-green white people are then entering Black protest space with the assumption that the house belongs to everybody, so they can do what they want and escalate how they want, whenever.

That's a misconception that Black people will end up punished for.

Because when Mr. TrueAnon white bro listener makes the unilateral decision to trigger cop violence by breaking the first window or neing first to say something about a cop's mother, the primary targets of that violence won't look like Mr. TrueAnon bro.

Mr. Bro may get his nose broken, but when you do the tally in the aftermath, you'll find that the majority of the zipcuff nerve damage and teargas-triggered asthma attacks and beatings and felony charges average out to a whole lot more melanin than he'll ever have.

Escalation is the lifeblood of movement.

White unilateral decisions to escalate in Black movement space or dictate its terms are irresponsible and oppressive.

These things can both be true.

The end.