As I read some of the headlines covering the coronavirus lockdown protests over the last month or so, I noticed that many journalists and commentators were fixated on one particular characteristic of the protestors:

  • Salon.com: Trump’s fake protest movement: Authoritarian stagecraft meets white privilege
  • Vox: The whiteness of anti-lockdown protests
  • counterpunch.org: Why Trump and Anti-Lockdown Protesters’ Calls to Return to Normal Are Acts of White Supremacy
  • Raw Story: Trump’s fake protests are staged events that demonstrate the enduring power of white supremacy in America
  • indy100: Aggressive, armed protesters stormed a state building last night and the police did nothing – imagine if black people had done the same
  • Salon.com: White supremacists are using anti-lockdown protests to recruit new members
  • NowThis News: Anti-Lockdown Protesters Embody White Privilege

I’d like to remind us of two of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous quotes. From his I Have a Dream speech:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

and from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Wouldn’t King have wanted us to listen to the content of the protestors’ grievances and not dismiss them because of their skin color, and recognize that if they are protesting real injustices, those represent a threat the wellbeing of all Americans?

I believe so and think that discounting the potentially legitimate grievances of ordinary Americans based on their skin color divides us in the face of powerful interests who rely on this division to continue economically unfair policies. In other words, this is divide and conquer in action.

Several years ago in a college course about race relations I watched the following video of Tim Wise explaining how the wealthiest Southerners in colonial America pitted poor whites against blacks to maintain their own economic superiority:

In the 21st century, a time when rising healthcare costs, tuition fees, housing prices, etc. affect nearly all Americans outside of the wealthiest .01%, those benefitting financially from these rising prices are still trying to divide us, still based on our skin color.

This strategy of division has been given the term ‘Othering’ by UC Berkeley professor john a. powell, who describes it as the following:

When societies experience big and rapid change, a frequent response is for people to narrowly define who qualifies as a full member of society – a process I call “Othering”…

Othering is not about liking or disliking someone. It is based on the conscious or unconscious assumption that a certain identified group poses a threat to the favoured group. It is largely driven by politicians and the media, as opposed to personal contact. Overwhelmingly, people don’t “know” those that they are Othering.

…demographics play a crucial role in the process of Othering. The attributes of who gets defined as Other differ from place to place, and can be based upon race, religion, nationality or language. It is not these attributes themselves that are the problem, of course, but how they are made salient, and how they are manipulated.

powell defined the term to describe President Trump’s behavior:

The rhetoric and language coming from Trump has begun to both define and normalise Othering. This is a threat to all the things we value. When Mexicans can be called “rapists and drug dealers” in direct contradiction to the facts, it becomes a much easier step to call for their deportation, and for a literal wall to divide us.

But ironically, as Marshall professor Stephen Cooper argues in ‘The Othering of Donald Trump and His Supporters’, Trump supporters were also dehumanized by politicians and the media, perhaps most famously in Hillary Clinton’s Basket of Deplorables speech.

Which brings me back to the fixation on the skin color of lockdown protestors. Rather than focus on how, as Matt Taibbi writes, “ordinary Americans face record unemployment and loss, (while) the COVID-19 bailout has saved the very rich”, American ‘elites’ would like us to focus on the white faces of lockdown protestors and not the reasons why they are protesting, while they take advantage of the lockdown to consolidate their own power.

They don’t want you to see the protests through the eyes of the ordinary Americans who took time out of their days and gas out of their tanks to drive to state capitols. As documented by the Leatherneck Reconnect YouTube channel, among these protestors were a laid off ER nurse from an area with very few coronavirus cases, a retiree concerned about hospitals not admitting people with medical conditions unless they have coronavirus, and a farmer unable to plant his garden, which he relies on for food.

If you did, you might start to see that you have a lot in common with those demonstrators, and suddenly a lot of the political divisions that are keeping us locked in an incredibly unequal societal contract are erased.

Perhaps the narrator of the Leathernect Reconnect video said it best:

I find it interesting…how passionate people get about certain things in politics. They can get so vicious… What it all boils down to, to be honest, is someone’s got one point, and the other person’s got another point, and most of the time if both people are logical people, they’re both right.