More white people are joining George Floyd protests. Is it a hopeful sign or a ‘fad’?
As protests continue weeks after the death of George Floyd, a trend is becoming clear: More white people are showing up.
Nearly two-thirds of the protesters in Washington, D.C., New York City, Los Angeles and London over a single weekend in June identified as white when prompted by a group of researchers, according to one early study.
Dana Fisher, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, and Michael Heaney, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, ran the study through a team of volunteers who gathered data from 195 protesters in their respective cities June 6-7, The New York Times reported.
“We found more than half of participants at every protest was white,” Fisher said on her website afterward. “In other words, white allies have joined this struggle like never before.”
What explains the surge in white attendance at what have been historically Black protests in the aftermath of police-involved deaths? Experts point to a variety of factors, from coronavirus restrictions to pent up aggression against President Donald Trump.
But activists say there are also challenges presented by white people’s presence at these events — including the fear that the Black Lives Matter movement will be co-opted by white voices.
A perfect storm
#BlackLivesMatter started in 2013, when George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a Black teen who was walking through the Florida neighborhood after buying a pack of Skittles and an iced tea at a convenience store.
The hashtag became the rallying cry of a movement as other Black men and women died at the hands white police officers over the years, though many people decried it early on as “divisive” and “too radical,” The Associated Press reported.
Seven years later, “the Black Lives Matter movement boasts a following of millions across social media platforms” and has helped generate a coalition of organizations known as the Movement for Black Lives focused in part on “defunding police departments and reinvesting in struggling Black communities,” according to the AP.
But how would the death of 46-year-old George Floyd — an unarmed Black man who died May 25 after now-fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes — and the resulting protests be any different than those that came before?
For starters, some prominent white names — including Republican Sen. Mitt Romney and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell — are participating in Black Lives Matter marches or otherwise embracing the movement, according to the AP
In an opinion column for Business Insider, Fisher, the University of Maryland professor, attributes the shift to three things: “pent up anxiety,” a “violent government response” and “a diversifying movement.”
Chauvin and three other Minneapolis police officers have been charged in Floyd’s death, which occurred against the backdrop of a global health pandemic. The coronavirus forced a months-long shutdown in states across the country, pushing people out of work during “a moment of heightened anxiety,” Fisher wrote.
But the protests invited those hundreds of thousands of people “cooped up at home, craving human contact” back into the world, The New York Times reported.
What differentiates these protests is also attributable in part to Trump’s response, according to Fisher. She said his declaration calling for the National Guard to intervene and the use of pepper spray on peaceful demonstrators — such as in Lafayette Park outside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington— has only motivated protesters more.
Citing Fisher’s study, The Times reported 45% of white people surveyed at demonstrations said Trump was their motivation for participating. Meanwhile, 32% of Black people said the same.
Fisher points to what she calls the “American Resistance,” or individuals and groups that have been pushing back against the Trump administration. According to Fisher’s research, the majority of those involved are “highly educated, middle-aged white women.”
Those groups that spawned after Trump’s election in 2016 are now posting messages of solidarity and encouraging their members to join the current protests. “This show of support from progressive groups along with individual Resisters’ concern for racial justice and police brutality has contributed to the increased diversity and growing sizes of the crowds in the streets,” Fisher wrote.
Concerns emerge
White people suddenly attending protests en masse with changed attitudes on racism in America does not, however, mark the arrival of a “national reckoning,” Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University, told The New York Times.
Others have echoed that sentiment.
Jennifer Chudy, a political scientist at Wellesley College, told The Times that protesting for some participants in the George Floyd demonstrations “may be nothing more than a fad.”
In an opinion column for The Washington Post, journalist and author Stacy Patton also questioned whether there was substance to white people’s involvement.
She pointed to some problematic instances, such as the “white agitators inflaming conflicts” while Black leaders try to de-escalate, and people using Floyd’s death as some type of performance art with mass “die-ins.”
“This cosplaying of the dead would be akin to white people imitating lynchings in the early 20th century by pretending to hang from trees in a show of solidarity,” Patton wrote.
She questions the timing — why now, after so many years of “silent complicity” — and also their intentions — is attending a protest a way for white people to “assuage their guilt?”
Patton quotes Simon Balto, a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Iowa, who said white allies offering “displays of solidarity are good when offered genuinely.” But they should not be “driving the action,” he said.
“A white person saying ‘I can’t breathe’ at a protest when they are at essentially zero risk of ever enduring a police chokehold is not a particularly meaningful act,” Balto said in the column. “It is a centering of the white self that at least partly dislodges focus from the matter at hand — black safety from the police.”
This concern over white voices co-opting the moment has played out in some ways with YouTube stars and influencers.
Jake Paul, a YouTuber known both for “performing stupid stunts online” and “inserting himself into national tragedies,” according to the Washington Post, caught flak in May for filming looters in Scottsdale, Arizona.
His Instagram story showed Paul in a mask “wandering around the mall as rioters smash store windows,” the Post reported. Some viewers said it looked like white privilege on display.
“To the Jake Paul’s of the world, those EMBODYING white privilege, publicly victimizing themselves for being tear gassed yet showing up with vlog cameras only to loot and trash the city is beyond unacceptable,” musician Lauren Sanderson said on Twitter. “if you’re not coming to fight for black lives, don’t come at all.”
Kris Shettsel, who runs both a YouTube channel and Instagram account with hundreds of thousands of followers, was similarly shamed after footage of her clad in a black flowing dress posing in the street during a protest in Los Angeles went viral, CNN reported.
The social media account “Influencers in the Wild” shared the video with this caption: “Stop treating the protests like Coachella!”
Several other videos of influencers caught monetizing the moment have been featured on the same account, from posing in empty streets barricaded by police to borrowing a guy’s drill while pretending to help board up businesses.
Patton referred to these stunts as a type of “performative distraction” in the Washington Post.
Alicia Garza, one of the three co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, told Patton white people who believe black lives matter must push for “substantive changes” to be truly helpful.
“Roll up that yoga mat up and get to business,” she said. “Withhold your money until you see some progress instead of performing black death. White people are okay.”
Sakira Cook, director of the Justice Reform Program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, echoed that, saying “Black Lives Matter is not just a rallying cry.”
“It actually means you have to start to interrogate the systemic racism and inequalities that exist in our society and help to dismantle them,” Cook told the AP. “You must make sure you’re not co-opting this for your own purposes.”
This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 2:59 PM with the headline "More white people are joining George Floyd protests. Is it a hopeful sign or a ‘fad’?."
