Don’t Let Liberals Co-opt The Uprising.
By: Lauren Elizabeth
Tags: Government, Justice, Politics, Equality, Society

Don’t Let Liberals Co-opt The Uprising.

None of this belongs to them, and we can’t let them minimize it.

Screen grab of democratic lawmakers kneeling in silence for George Floyd

With over one hundred thousand people dead here in the United States in the midst of a global pandemic that left tens of millions unemployed, accompanied by criminal negligence and lack of relief on the part of the government, for weeks I’ve been wondering what the catalyst would be for the American people to take to the streets, and demand change. The murder of George Floyd at the hands of officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police department has sparked the largest civil rights movement in history, generating protests not just in all fifty states but worldwide, and talk of defunding the police has become mainstream in leftist political discourse. But in the past couple of weeks since these protests have taken place, I can’t help noticing how liberals — and those in positions of power in particular — have responded to these demonstrations.

The Mayor of Washington D.C. Muriel Bowser generated a lot of buzz when she had Black Lives Matter painted on the road that leads to the White House, and had it christened Black Lives Matter plaza. Today, in one of the most brazen and disgusting political ploys I’ve seen in years, Democratic lawmakers donned in Kente cloth, made a show of taking a knee in front of the cameras and taking a moment of silence for George Floyd. The Twitter page for the Democratic party wasted no time in sharing a web ad with the caption ‘Enough is enough’, attempting to turn what is clearly becoming a nationwide uprising in to a jab at Donald Trump, complete with a few cable news worthy images and sound bytes.

Make no mistake, they will not be allowed to co-opt this uprising.

Absolutely no part of what is happening right now belongs to “liberals” or the democratic party, and they will not be turning an actual movement in to another partisan tool for their own resistance aesthetic agenda. None of this is theirs to claim, and thankfully it appears as though the American people aren’t buying it. These optics, unfortunately for them, are a little more difficult to sell to the public when we are all too aware that it’s in cities with Democratic mayors where protestors are being brutalized by police and tortured with chemical weapons like tear gas. I do not care that D.C.’s Mayor Bowser has painted the words Black Lives Matter on her city’s street when just back in February she was calling for doubling the size of the city’s cadet program.

She isn’t alone. While Andrew Cuomo slashes medicaid funding in the middle of a pandemic, the NYPD has an additional $249 million dollar budget for new cops to save $200 million on subway fare evasion. Over the course of the past twelve years, as New York State becomes increasingly gentrified and programs that actually benefit the people continue to see brutal budget cuts, the NYPD has watched their budget increase by 46 percent, tripling the population growth of the city. The Los Angeles Police Department is seeing a budget increase as well from $1.18 billion to $1.68 billion, largely to cover police bonus’, all at the same time the city and L.A. county at large struggles with how to handle the issue of homelessness.

As for our democratic lawmakers in Washington D.C., they aided and abetted one of the most rapid consolidations around a political candidate in modern history. A candidate who wrote the 1994 crime bill that has decimated communities of color all across the nation, pushed Ronald Regan to the right when it came to policing, and opposes defunding the police. A policy proposal he full well knows simply means slashing policing budgets just like is so often done to medicaid and education, and using that money for those programs instead.

Evidently these politicians see no shame in kneeling, while at the same time finding it controversial that ensuring our classrooms are as nurturing of an environment as possible should be of higher priority than the continued perpetuation of the brutal occupying force police departments all too often prove themselves to be. They kneel, full well knowing they won’t do a single meaningful thing to combat this issue on the systemic, structural level it will require. They do not get to claim this. This is not for them to use.

This is a movement that belongs to the people on the streets, who are not going to forget the democratic culpability in the very issues that communities are taking to the streets to protest. It belongs to the community organizers and young people of color, aided by allies who have put their bodies between people of color and the police. It belongs to the young woman who was thrown to the ground by the police and had a seizure as a result. It belongs to the seventy five year old man who was violently pushed and had his skull cracked on the pavement as a result, who — as it turns out — has spent his entire life fighting for justice and equality. It belongs to everyone out there in the streets forced to subject themselves to this kind of brutality in order to create the necessary, meaningful change our government has neglected for decades.

In one of the poorest and most rural counties in all of New York State, I attended a protest of well over 1,000 people organized by young black men and women attending a local college. I, and I’m sure countless others, will not allow their work and the pain that their communities continue to go through to be co-opted by politicians who care about nothing more than resistance optics and their next re-election. They will not water down this moment, or lessen the impact it can have. This is far bigger than their sad excuse of an opposition party, and they’ve done nothing to prove they have any place within it.