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NY Times, June 14, 2020
Young New Yorkers Want You to Know Why They’re Marching
By Somini Sengupta
They are movement newbies.
Mostly in their 20s and 30s, emerging from different corners of New York
City, they call this their personal turning point. No longer, they say,
could they just post on Instagram, or just give money, or just vote.
They needed to put their bodies on the street after the killing of
George Floyd in Minneapolis.
So for roughly two weeks, they have protested. They have protested on
bikes and skateboards. They have knelt. They have poured across the
bridges, faced off with the police and gotten arrested, detained for
hours in crowded precinct station houses. They come out and march again,
in steamy heat and in downpours.
For many, it’s their first movement. It’s their chance to be a part of
history, they say, and for some, a moment to examine who they are.
These young New Yorkers are part of a global generational revolt
erupting at a time when strongman leaders have ascended around the
world. Their peers were out on the streets in Hong Kong and India.
Climate protests were led by schoolchildren worldwide last year.
In this country, too, there were young adults in the rank and file of
Black Lives Matter since its inception in 2013. And in 2018, the school
shooting in Parkland, Fla., spurred a surge of activism by teenagers for
gun control.
The groups known as millennials and Generation Z are the United States’s
largest and most racially diverse generations. According to opinion
polls, they tend to be progressive, they are less likely that older
Americans to think the United States is superior to other countries, and
they embody a profound demographic shift: Among Americans in their 20s
and 30s, about 40 percent are people of color, compared with about 25
percent of those over age 60.
Here’s why a few of those who are new to protesting have taken to the
streets:
“This is pretty much my life now,” Xavier Martinez, 21, said, fresh from
a march in Manhattan and searching for another, in Brooklyn, on a night
that the city was under curfew.
“I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I weren’t here,” his friend,
James Luckey, 21, explained.
Mr. Luckey grew up on Staten Island. He was 17 when Eric Garner died in
a police chokehold not far from where he lived. Mr. Martinez grew up in
Queens. One of his relatives was a police officer. They met as students
at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan.
On a recent Friday, they snaked through Downtown Brooklyn, past Park
Slope and onto Eastern Parkway. Mr. Luckey had been protesting nearly
every day for a week. The faces on the streets were becoming familiar.
“Hey, I remember you,” Mr. Luckey said to two young women who were
walking in his direction along Eastern Parkway. “Is it still going on?”
They recognized him, too. They told him how much further to walk to meet
up with the night’s remaining protesters.
“Stay safe,” they said to each other. It’s the refrain of the streets
now: “Stay safe.”
Neither Mr. Martinez or Mr. Luckey belong to an established
organization. They follow no particular leader. There are many leaders,
they say. Some are the bicyclists who whistle and clear the path for
marchers. Others lead chants. Suddenly, in a crowd of hundreds, someone
else will command the group to kneel in one of the busiest intersections
in Brooklyn, bringing the streets to a startling near-silence.
“The first person who makes their presence known is the leader,” Mr.
Martinez said.
Mr. Luckey was arrested last week and spent eight hours in police
custody. He had taken a day off to recuperate and then headed out again.
He knows that people in the 1960s did this, too. “We’re doing all the
things they were doing in the past,” Mr. Luckey said. “It’s different
now because we do have a lot of allies.”
Adopted from Peru by a white American family, Belinda Stahl, 29, grew up
in Maine, one of the whitest states in the country. As a child, most of
her friends were white — otherwise, she laughed, she wouldn’t have had
any friends.
Ms. Stahl moved to New York City to attend art school. She left, then
came back, and by the time the coronavirus hit, she was juggling a
series of restaurant and retail jobs while working on her passion,
fashion design.
.
Police violence was not a new discovery to her, she said. But two things
jolted her this time: the brutality of Mr. Floyd’s death, and on top of
that, the timing.
“We are down and out,” she said. “We are in a pandemic. We don’t know if
we are going to have our jobs back. At a point when everyone is not OK —
that you would still do this?”
Instagram brought her images of protests in Minneapolis and then New
York. Ms. Stahl had been isolated in her apartment for more than two
months. She worried about the virus, but there was no way, she said, she
could stay home.
“It was this feeling of helplessness, like I’m not supposed to leave my
house, but this is wrong, so wrong, and they’re going to get away with
it unless there’s a huge group of people to draw attention to how wrong
this is,” she said.
On the fourth night of the New York protests, she called a friend and
they headed to Barclays Center, epicenter of the demonstrators in
Brooklyn. She carried a homemade placard: “THIS ENDS NOW.”
Ms. Stahl reached out to more friends in the days after. Some of them
had been beaten by the police in those protests, she said, which only
steeled her resolve.
“It’s even more unifying,” she said. “You are all unarmed against people
in riot gear. You’re just standing there and what do you have around
you? You have people.”
Her 67-year-old mother, Ms. Stahl said, would join the protests were it
not for fear of the virus.
“The conversation we are having right now to break systemic racism has
begun with our parents,” she said.
“My focus has shifted to more actively focusing on those conversations.”
First came a text from a friend. People were protesting a block away, in
the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where she lived. Quin Johnson and her
boyfriend made signs at home and started walking with the crowd.
“It kept going further and further into the city,” Ms. Johnson, 36,
said. “I felt like walking was my duty. I could walk all day.”
That night, the demonstrators walked across the Manhattan Bridge and up
to Union Square. What scared her most was the police tear-gassing the
crowds.
Days later, on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, a police car drove through a
crowd of protesters, scattering everyone toward the edge of the street.
“The more people see what police departments are doing, the more people
get revved up,” she said.
“There are days even when I’m tired, I feel I have to walk and be part
of this movement.”
The only protest Ms. Johnson had ever joined before was one for climate
action last year. She has voted since she was 18 and follows the news.
She is keenly aware of the long history police violence. But this is the
first time she has been out, day after day, for something she believes
in. Last Saturday was her first time out past curfew. She was terrified,
she said.
“I’m not an activist; It’s my first time speaking out,” she said. “We’ve
all been drowsy or sleeping.”
David Dacosta, 32, immigrated from Jamaica. His wife, Danielle, 31, came
from Trinidad. To be stopped by the police in his country, Mr. Dacosta
said, was to risk having to pay a bribe.
Police violence became part of their education about black life in the
United States.
“My parents didn’t tell us what black parents tell their kids,” Ms.
Dacosta said. The thought of having that talk with a child of her own
one day terrifies her, she said.
“I felt like I was ignorant of what black Americans have been
experiencing,” she said. “It’s been eye-opening for sure.”
They stood close to each other, on the fringe of a crowd of over 1,000
at Barclays Center one evening last week. Two women spread out a mat,
knelt and prayed. A Muslim relief group handed out falafel sandwiches.
The Dacostas, who live in Brooklyn, planned to head home well before curfew.
The video of Mr. Floyd’s death jolted them; they knew it was the latest
of many. Being silent, they told each other, was no longer an option.
“This is the first time I’m out marching for something,” Ms. Dacosta
said. “Something has to be done.”
Mr. Dacosta added: “I’ve never really been political per se. Seeing the
violence right now, it’s too much. To be silent is to be complicit. I
can’t do that anymore.”
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