Cracks: New York City Curfew June 3, 2020
It was a bit after 8:30, still had half an hour until the end of my Zoom social therapy group. We live in Carnegie Hill, a wealthy neighborhood on the upper east side. I never feel like I belong here, but that’s another story.
I started to hear shouting, a protest march coming into the neighborhood. I looked at the clock and immediately felt fear and angst in the pit of my stomach, “It’s past curfew, this is dangerous for these young people!” My husband Ed opened the bedroom door to grab some clothes and ran out into the street. I moved my laptop into the living room where our windows look out at 95th Street — we live on the corner of Madison Avenue. By now the shouting was louder and I could tell there was a melee going on in the streets. I was still on my therapy call so the whole group could hear what was happening and they were also asking me to tell them. Ed had gone outside, so I put my head out the window to find him and saw the cops, in riot gear, beating a demonstrator literally right in front of our window. Ed was videotaping this. I was terrified for his safety and enraged and frightened by the action of the cops. A cop rushed towards Ed with his bully club in the air to stop him from taping, telling him to “Go home!” And Ed responding, “I am home! This is my home!” He kept the video going. I was screaming, “Edward, be careful, Edward!!!”
Ed was yelling to the young man they were now handcuffing, “Don’t resist! Don’t resist!” so that the cops would not beat him. Ed was shouting at the cops, “This isn’t the military, you are not a soldier, you are a police officer! I was in the military — this is not the military!”
The next thing we knew something flared up again on Madison Avenue. The cops rushed in on the protestors like a swarm. I saw one cop from outside of the crowd push his way through with the aggression of the playground bully who wants to “get me some.” I know enough to know not all cops are racist thugs but this one clearly was.
I was screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!” as loud as I can. People in my group were saying to me, “Call the cops!” But they didn’t see that THIS was the cops. What would it mean to call the cops when the cops were doing the violence?
The street finally cleared, and Ed came upstairs. By now I was sobbing. I couldn’t catch my breath. Joyce and the group helped me to breathe. We all breathed together. We had spent the previous hour talking about what is happening in our country and, given who we are (most of us are activists), how we are feeling and how we are thinking about what is happening. And then it comes literally to my door.
We talked about the cracks. Institutions falling apart. The social contract falling apart. Cracks. Will these cracks allow for the seedlings of human development to break through? We can only hope so. We can only keep building what we are building. We can only keep performing.
I’ve been so distressed for months, weeks, days about the lack of leadership at a national level. The lack of leadership to give shape to the social motion, to the righteous anger, to the unemployed, the locked up/locked down, the left out, the marginalized, the poor and the forgotten. COVID lockdown was the first blow. Unemployment the second. And the ongoing murder of our Black men the third … in the form of a brutal execution by the police of yet another unarmed Black man.
And now here it is, at our doorstep.
“New York’s Finest,” I thought. This is how I was brought up as a New Yorker, proud of our police force because they don’t operate like other police forces. But that was a long time ago when I was younger and naïve about how the world works.
The perfect storm. Police who are now being related to as soldiers — which must be both disconcerting, frightening and nightmarish for them, many of whom who are young men and women of color. A curfew. Days and days of demonstrations. A President calling for violent responses, “crack down!”
Young people without leadership. A country without national leadership.
We marched with Sharpton in Bensonhurst when Yusuf Hawkins was murdered for being Black. That was the summer of 1989. We are still marching.
Saturday a large march came down Madison Avenue chanting “No Justice, No Peace!” adding “Fuck the racist police!” No internal security. No one thinking about how dangerous it is to have a chant that taunts the police. No one telling the police the route. Putting lives in harms way. But I feel no choice but to run down and join the march. It was mostly African American youth; I think it was organized by Black Lives Matter. I marched by myself in the middle of the crowd with my fist up. Silent most of the time, sometimes chanting. Tears of rage flowed down my cheek. We have been marching for decades.
I ask a young woman where the march originated. She told me, “125th Street … when did you join?” I told her I ran out of my house on 95th Street to join. Then I shared with her that I had marched with Rev. Sharpton when Yusuf Hawkins was murdered 31 years ago, expressing my outrage that we are still having to march. She turned to me and said, “Oh, so that’s what you do…” in the most giving way, with a smile of solidarity on her face. She raised her hand for a high five. I felt the solidarity. This is what motivated me as a 25-year old Jewish progressive New Yorker looking for a multiracial movement for change.
Early in my life as an organizer, the year was 1985, Dr. Fred Newman and Rev. Al Sharpton held a meeting at Small’s Paradise in Harlem to discuss the relationship between Blacks & Jews. I’ll never forget that event. It was there that I understood something about leadership. Leaders are ordinary people who do extraordinary things. They take risks. They have guts. But they don’t have to have all the answers. What they do need to do is take their responsibility as leaders seriously and that means creating the environment and building the institutions necessary to empower people. Newman and Sharpton spoke eloquently, both using their working-class sense of humor and intellects to bring to the forefront the critical importance of this alliance between Blacks and Jews. The history of the civil rights movement lives on in us.
I don’t march as a guilty liberal. I don’t march to do penance for my white privilege. I don’t march for me. I march for the young people. I hold my fist up high. I march with pride for our 40+ years of organizing. I march with pride for what we have built, small though it is. I march so that the young people around me could see a 64-year-old Jewish woman holding her fist up in solidarity. This is the best of America — our diversity — our ability to come together across race, class, gender, country of origin — to fight for decency, justice and now… to save our democracy. Or what little is left of it.
I’ve spent the better part of my life building new institutions that lead with development — that place loving demands on people to do what we do not know how to do. To build environments where people can grow. To create new conversations and new performances.
I’ve struggled with my own subjectivity so that I can lead. I am a woman. I have been socialized to be a victim. I am a Jewish woman. I get frightened. My great grandparents perished in the Holocaust, and that history lives inside of me. I am enraged by male privilege. And I was taught by my liberal parents that racism is not to be tolerated. I took them seriously.
We have worked tirelessly for 40 years to create something independent of this thoroughly corrupt two-party system. We see what it has wrought. We will not be saved by Joe Biden.
Cracks.
Possibility.
Hope.
Development.
Performance.
All power to the developing!
