How do we show what we stand for now?

Thinking about protest, gentle or otherwise

Hi friends,

The day before the US election, I met up with my Arvon non-fiction cohort for a two-hour online workshop on the political power of the personal essay. Our tutor, Cal Flyn, had sent us a piece by American critic Wesley Morris which just so happened to have been published during the final months of Trump’s presidency. It was called My Mustache, My Self: A quarantine facial hair experiment led me to a deep consideration of my Blackness.

Morris pictured for NYT Magazine October 2020

“I made bread on my face,” he says, self-deprecatingly, of the lockdown conditions that prompted the initial facial hair experiment. The reviews at the start had been “predictably mixed and predictably predictable. “Porny”? Yes. “Creepy”? Obviously. On some video calls, I heard “rugged” and “extra gay.”” He felt with all this attention he had little option but to lean in, but to what exactly he wasn’t quite sure. Then one day a friend said, “You look like a lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund!”

For Morris, a lightbulb moment. He recognised this as one of the truest things anyone had said about him in a long time. His friend had situated him and his facial hair in a tradition of Black American men “dressing for contempt”: utilising the quiet, groomed power of the moustache as a weapon of resistance:

Any time 20th-century Black people found themselves entangled in racialized peril, anytime the roots of racism pushed up some new, hideous weed, a thoughtful-looking, solemn-seeming, crisply attired gentleman would be photographed entering a courthouse or seated somewhere (a library, a living room) alongside the wronged and imperiled. He was probably a lawyer, and he was likely to have been mustached.

The gratitude came in part from his reflection that, as a queer man, he’d long struggled with his Black identity. He hadn’t felt “Black enough” to raise his fist with conviction during the Black Lives Matter protests and, as a student at Yale, felt more of an identification to the character of Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (often the subject of ridicule on and off the show for his “Oreo” Blackness) than he did the Black Panthers.

Not without ambivalence, he understood he had succeeded in America by dint of becoming a certain type of Black man. The kind who followed his father’s command to keep his head down and be “good”. Who would, that way, hope to avoid becoming the kind of Black man who’d be pulled over by police just because of the colour of his skin. Who would grow to understand implicitly the need to cultivate a non-threatening Blackness. Who would understand the game, learn how to play it and then, at times, “forget” there even is a game.

It worked, to an extent. He tells the story of a white friend who said to Morris he wasn’t the kind of Black man in danger of being racially profiled. Morris wasn’t convinced, but pondered the implications of his friend’s statement. What kind of Black man had he become?

By the essay’s end, Morris arrives at the decision that it wasn’t the growing of the moustache but the keeping of it that’s important because it signifies a subtle stepping outside of the dominant system. And if he ever were to find himself targeted, then, unlike the clothes on his back, a moustache couldn’t be stained or bloodied. Snatched at or seized. His moustache becomes a “magisterial vestige of elegance in defiance.” A symbol of his belonging to a community of gentle protesters.

And you can’t be arrested for having a moustache.

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Three years ago this weekend, we were part of a community of gentle protesters, too. The signifiers of belonging? COVID-appropriate face coverings, colourful homemade banners and children clad in Swedish-brand waterproofs. With tens of thousands of others, we marched and chanted through the streets of Glasgow while Cop 26 took place in our home city. This was the “good” kind of protest. You wouldn’t be arrested, so long as you followed the rules.

The following Saturday, I was away with friends when my dad texted to tell me his granddaughter was on the telly. “The face of COP,” he said. And there she was, when I tuned into the evening bulletin, sitting on her dad’s shoulders with a Saltire flying between her head and a patchy November sky, a pensive expression on her six-year-old face.

Inevitably, she watched this back and said no, she’d just been cold and was thinking about a hot chocolate and playing Animal Crossing when she got home. What was it we marched for, again?

Regardless of how much she took in of that day, we are trying – nay, encouraged – to raise a generation of politically-aware, rights-aware young people and this was one of the small ways we’d chosen to show them what that looked like. Ditto the gentle activism we’ve engaged in locally on the climate emergency and the discrimination experienced against our local Roma population. As the children grow we’re having more sophisticated conversations, helping them understand the context of the Ukraine war, the genocide in Palestine and the war crimes being committed in Lebanon. Running through all of these dinner table chats is the fact that we want them to grow up to understand their voice has power. That it can be used to fight back against injustice in all its forms, whether directly experienced by them or by others who cannot advocate for themselves. It feels safe for them to engage in such discourse. Voice their dissent. And before you say it, yes, there’s privilege in all of this, I know. I’m not trying to suggest otherwise; nor am I equating our experience to that of a Black American man.

However.

This week, a reel has been widely shared on social media of another mother a few years ahead of me. A woman who has brought up her children to know right from wrong; to speak out in the face of injustice. Who likely felt, to an extent, that the justice system in this country worked for her not against her. This mother, though, has been talking about her own wrongful arrest and imprisonment and that of her daughter, Ellie, one of the Filton Ten, a group of young people protesting outside Elbit, the Bristol factory where Israeli arms are being manufactured.

A protest outside Elbit Bristol HQ, January 18, 2023 Photo: Palestine Action

Emma is a 57-year-old single mother who, because of her “association” to her daughter, was dragged half-naked from her home in the middle of the night by riot police citing the Terrorism Act. Her electronics were seized and she was detained in solitary confinement in prison scrubs for five days 150 miles from home before being released without charge, without an apology and without her belongings:

My only part to play in the direct action against the monster Elbit was to raise a young woman with a great moral compass. Look around you, people. Life has changed. Young conscientious people are being locked up under the abuse of the terrorism act and silenced for taking direct action to stop the murder of innocent civilians.

Britain is complicit in genocide. It is the responsibility of each and every one of us to stand up, push back; reclaim our human rights or this story is coming to a town near you. They cannot lock us all up; there are more of us than them. Make sure you are standing on the right side of history.

Unlike Morris, I bet she never would have thought she could ever be in danger of such treatment at the hands of the law in her own country, nor have her daughter classed a terrorist. And what, exactly, do governments expect of our politically-engaged young people when the soft side of protest is celebrated? When the UNCRC – the most ratified human rights convention in history signed by 196 countries excluding only the USA – is embedded in our teaching (here in Scotland, anyway) from the early years onwards?

Let’s Explore our Rights (English, Scots and Gaelic): a book produced by the Children and Young People’s Commissioner for pre-5s

“Scotland is particularly good at this,” says a friend, a legal officer at the Scottish Human Rights Commission. “We’ve gotten to a point where people finally accept that human rights must be upheld and the Government and our public bodies love talking about them; particularly children’s rights. However, they’re still resistant to actually changing things to make sure that those rights are upheld when something goes wrong. Our Government likes to paint a picture that we’re a progressive country. That this progressive ethos is sewn into the fabric of our society. It says that it wants to incorporate various treaties, the UNCRC being just one of those, but they then constantly avoid the accountability arm. Essentially, we’re still on a human rights journey in Scotland.”

She goes on. “If you teach young people about human rights, they’re going to have certain expectations, as well as things they’re just not going to accept from their representatives, for example when a government funds a genocide or completely disregards climate targets. Human rights are not about being nice to people; they’re about firstly, make sure things don’t go wrong – and building that into your processes – but then when something does go wrong, that you’ve got an accountability mechanism. You’ve got laws that are meant to protect you, the citizen, against arbitrary detention and so on. These accountability structures are what governments most strongly resist, ignoring that it’s integral to a rights-based society.”

She tells me about the PANEL Principle (a UN-endorsed approach to breaking down human rights into five key areas):

• P – Participation

• A – Accountability

• N – Non-discrimination

• E – Empowerment

• L – Legality

It’s the Accountability bit we’re missing, she says. “Governments say, “You’re allowed to challenge us, take us to court and so on when we don’t uphold your rights,” but actually, this is always what’s missing. We don’t strengthen the structures that are going to allow us to scrutinise whether governments or other bodies are actually doing their jobs. We don’t embed them properly in our legal framework, but then citizens expect that human rights will be upheld.”

And by liberally using human rights language – sometimes called human rights washing where you take all the “nice” bits of human rights and then bury the accountability bit, the difficult part – you get away with looking like you’re doing a good job on human rights because you’ve said what, on the surface, appears to be the right thing.”

Basically, when the citizen tries to hold the Government to account for acts that are not human rights complaint, then the whole thing breaks down. It’s as if they didn’t expect the politically-engaged young people we have been told to raise. “No, this isn’t what we meant,” the grown-ups shout. “We didn’t tell you all this for you to develop opinions and strategies of your own to fight back against us.” When they said young people should grow up to understand their rights and become politically-engaged citizens, what they really meant was: grow up to be “good”, just like Morris was told by his father. Learn the game and play it. Effect change from within the system by exercising your democratic right to vote.

Well.

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So, what can resistance and protest look like now, when direct action is made illegal and those who hold their governments to account for breaching their side of the deal are then stripped of the human rights they’ve been taught to believe are inalienable? When their actions are in solidarity with others on this fragile planet who cannot exercise them for themselves, but result in them being rounded up and treated with measures more punitive than convicted criminals in our prisons?

The climate protestor and journalist, George Monbiot, has long argued that protestors now must be prepared to be arrested for their actions. That this is now the necessary consequence of engaging in direct action. But for those who cannot – for all manner of reasons – risk this, then what is left if we cannot safely engage in true rather than tokenistic protest?

What if (when) our attempts to hold governments to account are squeezed further? Will folk be left with the equivalent of growing a moustache to signify to others what they stand for? Perhaps in the online world we’re there already. Isn’t the SM version of the moustache the watermelon emoji? Or a photo of your dinner with text over the top, asterisks and dashes in place of key letters in a country’s name? How long until the algorithm suppresses these, too? It’s been on my mind as I think about the shareable images for this post and the words in the title and subtitle, too. I’m choosing them carefully hoping you’ll decode my meaning. In this way, there’s sadness as I contemplate the smaller and subtler ways people are forced to assert resistance.

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Martin Luther King was as particular about his moustache as many of his Black contemporaries says Morris, and requested it sit off the lip “like a butterfly.” Becoming a butterfly is a long, arduous, and ugly process. Certainly, looking at a common caterpillar or a dull chrysalis, knowing yet not quite believing a majestic yet fragile creature will emerge requires faith, at least. Dr King, says Morris, was “trying to align the country with that mustache.” Acknowledges that the US is “not there yet, but we’re working on it.”

I’m sure Morris really believed, four years ago, that his country was moving closer to embodying Dr King’s butterfly dream. I wonder how far away he feels it might be this week.

Lindsay x