Three very different politicians made strikingly similar statements on Saturday, in response to protests erupting across the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis. Jacob Frey, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, blamed the destruction in his city on people who are “not Minneapolis residents.” (He later walked the statement back.) New York’s Mayor, Bill de Blasio, said that he had heard, from community leaders, “how resentful they were that people were coming in in many cases from outside the community and creating negativity and violence that did not represent their community.” And William Barr, the U.S. Attorney General, threatened to prosecute anyone who crossed state lines “to incite or participate in violent protesting.” President Trump, in his tweets, picked up on both Frey’s and Barr’s statements, issuing threats.
The shared premise of these comments is that people have no right to act politically in a neighborhood, city, or state that is not their own. This is specious. New Yorkers like me, for example, have a stake in the life of our entire city and the behavior of our entire police force. People may choose to protest in their own neighborhood, next door, or a two-hour bike ride away from home. There are many reasons to move through the city: to participate in an action together with friends who live in a different neighborhood; to find a particularly crowded or particularly empty public space; to address someone directly—city officials, police brass, or the people who suffer most at the hands of the police. The same is true for the country: the residents of the United States have a stake and a say in police regimes that exist across our country.
We have already seen—and will surely see more—reports of actual provocateurs in the streets of Minneapolis and other cities. Provocateurs are the parasites on the body of protest: they will always be there. But blaming all violence and destruction on outsiders performs a sleight of hand. Dividing protesters into two categories—interlopers on the one hand and peaceful protesters on the other—delegitimizes some of the protesters, eliding their presence and their actions. It also preëmpts a key question: Why would you expect protests against state-sanctioned racist murder to be peaceful?
The outsider-as-danger trope has been especially strong in recent months because of the coronavirus pandemic, when outsiders have been portrayed as vectors of contagion. But the fear and blame of perceived outsiders is one of America’s deepest political stories. It drove the deportations of radical activists in the early twentieth century, the denaturalization and deportations of Mexican-Americans in the nineteen-thirties, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the nineteen-forties, the McCarthy witch hunts of the fifties, the anti-Muslim violence of the past two decades, and more. It is the story that made Donald Trump possible, and a story that has been amplified manifold by Trump himself. It is a bipartisan story that brings together two Democratic mayors who used to be known as progressives and Trump’s authoritarian Attorney General.
In his late-night press conference on Saturday, de Blasio justified the actions of police officers who beat protesters and even drove their vehicles into crowds of demonstrators, explaining, in effect, that it was the outsiders’ fault. “It’s clear that a different element has come into play here who are trying to hurt police officers and trying to damage their vehicles,” he said. “If a police officer is in that situation, they have to get out of that situation.” It is as though, having declared the protesters’ presence illegitimate, the Mayor made their bodies themselves illegitimate. A body that is in the wrong place at the wrong time, he seemed to say, can be subjected to police violence. That line of thinking is exactly what had brought people out into the streets in the first place.
