on peaceful protests and hardworking immigrants

and superfluous adjectives

Like many of us, I've been keeping my eyes peeled on Los Angeles over the last few days. Say what you will about the city, but it does not play when it comes to protecting and defending its own, whether it's working actors or immigrants. We could all stand to learn from it.

As always, when resistance to violent government forces breaks out, people are intent on describing this resistance as peaceful. I understand why: it's a way of defending these demonstrations, of painting them in the most positive light. The platonic ideal of a protest, the kind that Kendall Jenner tried to sell in a Pepsi ad.

The problem is that such a pronouncement—such a defense—holds the people to a standard to which the state is never held.

We are better than the state because we are non-violent in our pursuit of justice, the peace insisters seem to be saying. In the past, I would've been one of them. Do not compare us to Them. Our methods rise above. But what that does is look at protests/demonstrations/resistance in a vacuum. It pretends that resistance just Exists, not as a reaction to the state, but as a stand-alone act. And that's simply not true. The theory falls apart the second you begin to apply even a modicum of logic to it.

People are out there, fighting for themselves and their communities, because the state keeps increasing its threat to our safety and our humanity. The violence existed before we ever left our doorsteps. We did not create it. We are not responsible for the continued funding of ICE, for unidentified state actors showing up in masks to schools and hearings and job sites, for unlawful and immoral detainments and deportations, for the shameful rhetoric that calls human beings illegals, for a cash bail system that keeps poor people in jail long before they've ever been convicted of a crime. That’s the real violence.

So why, then, do we keep insisting on our own peacefulness, when it is the state's persistent aggression that is being protested?

Photo: Jamie Lee Taete.

Because at this point I actually, and do forgive my language, do not give a fuck if a protest is peaceful or not. Not when the cops and the National Guard and the Marines are sent to tear gas and shoot rubber bullets and forcefully intimidate demonstrators and journalists alike. Because here's the playbook: resistance starts out non-violently, people describe it as such so as to justify it, the state shows up with its weapons and its riot gear and its intimidation tactics, the so-called peace is lost, and inevitably, the protest is no longer deemed legitimate. Que pena. Should've turned the other cheek, babes. Should've let yourself be shot. Should've kept your eyes wide open when the tear gas canister was thrown at your feet. Should've let your neighbor be arrested.

What a joke. To put it plainly: There is no reason for us to make peace and non-violence a necessary condition of a legitimate act of resistance against the state's own violence. It frankly makes us look foolish. Look, ma, no hands! But who said you couldn't use your hands? Is the state tying theirs back?

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A more minor point, maybe, but the same goes for Hardworking Immigrant. I say that as someone who is herself one of those, and who comes from a family of them. It doesn't make me more worthy of being in the States than someone who was not a recipient of the "you don't want to be average, do you?" talk from their parents. Truly, what does "hardworking" even mean? Why must we diminish ourselves, our health, our relationships, in order to be deemed a Good Immigrant by someone who's never once had to leave their first home?

Oh, it's not just any immigrants being detained, it's hardworking ones. So??? Does that mean that a high school dropout should be kicked out? Someone working a minimum wage job? Despite this imperfect country being, in all likelihood, the place they've made a home out of? When will we learn that trying to deprive someone of their dignity only leaves us bereft of ours?

The descriptor is superfluous and it is unintentionally callous. It's okay to drop it. Immigrant is fine.

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