Why Protests Happen
An exploration of progressive protests at U-M and beyond
I can’t find the Palestine protest. I’ve been walking in circles. Shouldn’t I be able to hear people chanting? Drumming? Shrieking?
It’s cute downtown, but I’m at a strange intersection. The bookstores proselytize for wokeness. The student cafes have updated their rainbow flags again, this time with a hollow purple circle to represent the “historically oppressed intersex population”. At the crosswalks, I tell several panhandlers, who stagger in a drug-crippled daze, that I don’t have change, despite the jingle in my pockets.
I give up on finding the protest with my senses and pull out my phone. “Where is the protest at the University of Michigan?” At the Diag, which is short for “The Diagonal Green,” an open space at the center of U-M’s campus. It’s only a few hundred feet from where I am standing.
The encampment is underwhelming. A few tents pitched in the main square on a floor of concrete. On the north side of the encampments, a few photographers for mainstream media are standing on a mound with their cameras, laughing and chatting, paying no attention to the protest. On the south side, on the steps of the Hatcher Graduate Library, construction workers are putting up scaffolding. The laborers and protesters occupy the same square; livestock grazing on the same grasslands.
The few signs along the borders of the protest seem to be doing all the work. LIBERATED ZONE. ENCAMPMENTS FOR GAZA. DIVEST NOW! LONG LIVE THE INTIFADA. Most tents are green and seem to have been bought fresh for the protest. Slogans sprayed on rainflies. Less than one hundred people. Mostly women. The others are…well, not exactly men.
Keffiyehs, N95 respirators, cloth masks. It’s not to protect against viruses circulating in the warm spring air, but to conceal identities. Many students are afraid of being doxxed because reprisals could be severe. Suspensions or expulsions, degrees and careers in jeopardy. Others are worried about their families being targeted by mere association. In any case, for most students, it’s better to remain anonymous. The few who decide to go mask-off seem to be organizers. For them, the protest is not a risk to their reputation; it’s a chance to build one.
As I walk through the encampment, I notice that several cloth masks have been dyed rainbow. There isn’t much going on, besides some people sitting on lawn chairs. Cold dry falafel and decent-looking tabouli on folding tables. At the center of the protest, near the tabouli, two white men in their 60s have a discussion. The tall one with the ponytail tells the short bald one: “It wasn’t until I got back to Engels and the dialectic that I truly understood.” I giggled loud enough to draw their glares.
People are looking at me. I am conspicuously without a mask, the fellaheen tea-towel, or any other congenial symbol. I decide that I need some kind of in-group signal to assuage suspicion. Back on Google: “Middle Eastern food in Ann Arbor.” Pita Kebob Grill, which inside, to my surprise, has no protesters in line and only three hood rats shouting on speaker phone. Music-blasting, blunt-rolling street urchins saturate Ann Arbor, who knows how that happened.
Returning to the protest, and ostentatiously waving my wrap in the air with garlic sauce dripping down my chin, I’m excited to see that something is happening. Arab women in headdresses stand on a platform surrounded by a captive audience. But I can’t hear anything. Their megaphone is broken. Instead, a black man on a small bicycle emits deep ebonic grunts. Music blares out of headphones wrapped around his neck.
More Palestinian protesters arrive. Two hunched-over octogenarians on walkers slowly shuffle towards the square. They each have hand-drawn Palestinian flags sticking out of the tubing of their handlebars.
