The New York Times - USA (2020-07-26)

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALSUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020 0 N 13

Wearing matching shades of
white or yellow, the women of the
“Wall of Moms” in Portland, Ore.,
have become instant icons of the
city’s protests,
though the moth-
ers nightly gath-
erings only began
last Saturday and
the city’s protests
have been going
on for more than a month.
They join a long line of moth-
ers’ protests against state vio-
lence and what they view as
authoritarianism around the
world, including in South Africa,
Sri Lanka, Argentina and Arme-
nia, which have shown that
mothers can be particularly
effective advocates for a cause —
but also that there is a catch.
History suggests that mothers’
power is most potent when they
are able to wield their own re-
spectability, and the protections
it brings, as a political cudgel.
But that is easiest for women
who are already privileged:
married, affluent, and members
of the dominant racial or ethnic
group.
Mothers who are less privi-
leged often struggle to claim that
power, even though they are
often the ones who most urgently
need it.
Teressa Raiford, a Black
mother who is the executive
director of Don’t Shoot Portland,
a local group that works to end
police violence, helped to orga-
nize and direct the Wall of Moms’
early actions, but noted that the
positive response to the mostly
white mothers has been proof of
the very racism they are pro-
testing.
Mothers had been participat-
ing in the protests for five weeks,
but “nobody recognized them
until they literally put on white
so they could be highlighted as
white,” she said.
“What it does show us is that
Black lives don’t matter here,
white moms do,” she said. “And
those moms know that, too.
That’s why they’re standing in
solidarity with us.”

‘Symbolic to the Nation’
Bev Barnum — who posted the
original Facebook message ask-
ing moms to come and protest,
and serves as the group’s infor-
mal leader and organizer — said
she had asked women to color-
coordinate their outfits in order
to stand out in the crowd, but
otherwise told them to dress
“like they were going to Target.”
“I wanted us to look like
moms,” Ms. Barnum said in an
interview. “Because who wants
to shoot a mom? No one.”
Ms. Barnum said she identified
as Mexican-American, not white,
but other members say the group
is mostly white.
Mothers’ protests are often
powerful precisely because the
gender roles that ordinarily
silence and sideline women,
allowing them to be seen as
nonthreatening, turn into armor
for political activism, experts say.
During Armenia’s 2018 “velvet
revolution,” a largely nonviolent
uprising that eventually toppled
the country’s leader, Serzh
Sargsyan, mothers took to the
streets pushing their children in
strollers, indelibly tying their
maternal identities to their politi-
cal demands.
In Armenia, “mothers are
symbolic to the nation and, to
some extent, have immunity in
protests,” Ulrike Ziemer, a sociol-
ogist at the University of Win-
chester in Britain, wrote in a
2019 book chapter about the
uprising. “If police would have
touched mothers with their chil-
dren in prams during the pro-
tests, that would have brought
shame on them individually, but
also on the state apparatus they
represent.”
In the Armenian protests,
mothers from all walks of life
were able to claim those protec-
tions, Dr. Ziemer said in an inter-
view. But in societies that are
divided along racial or ethnic
lines, mothers from marginalized
groups cannot access that full
political power so easily.

In South Africa, the Black

Sash, a group of white women

who opposed the apartheid re-

gime, were able to use their

gender and race as a shield for

their political activity that others

could not.

“The Government has let

Black Sash survive while closing

down other anti-apartheid

groups in part because white

South African society has

perched its women on pedestals,”

The Times reported in 1988. “The

police find it awkward to pack

the paddy wagons with well-bred

troublemakers who look like

their mothers or sisters.”

The government had no such

compunction about locking up

Black women. Albertina Sisulu, a

pioneering Black anti-apartheid

activist who was also a married

mother of five, was arrested and

held in solitary confinement

multiple times. Countless other

Black women suffered even

worse fates.

In Sri Lanka, women from the

Tamil minority group have been

protesting for years to demand

information about sons and

daughters who were kidnapped

by state forces during the coun-

try’s civil war and never heard

from again. Their activism has

drawn international attention

and some limited engagement

from the country’s government.

But when the women’s de-

mands went beyond their own

individual grief and engaged

with politics more broadly, na-

tional politicians and civil society

groups dismissed them as pawns

of male activists, said Dharsha

Jegatheeswaran, co-director of

the Adayaalam Centre for Policy

Research, a Sri Lanka-based

think tank. As members of a

marginalized minority group, she

said, motherhood could take

them only so far.

In the United States, there is a

long tradition of Black women

claiming their identities as moth-

ers when protesting against

police shootings, lynchings, and

mass incarceration. But, like the

Tamil activists in Sri Lanka, they

have tended to be viewed

through the narrow lens of their

own grief and fear for their chil-

dren. White women have typical-

ly been taken far more seriously

by white audiences as represent-

ing mothers generally — another

case of bias on display.

Ann Gregory, a lawyer and

mother of two who joined the

wall of moms in Portland on

Sunday, said they had hoped to

serve as a buffer between other

demonstrators and law enforce-

ment.

“We realize that we’re a bunch

of white women, and we do have

privilege,” she said. “We were

hoping to use that to protect the

protesters.”

Bearing Witness

Instead, the women got a crash

course in the grievances that had

set off the protests in the first

place.

Ms. Barnum, new to such

activism, said she was surprised

when other demonstrators

warned her group that they

could be in danger.

“The news said that if you give

the police officer a reason to fear

for their life, a reasonable fear,

they could hurt you,” she said.

“But if you didn’t give them a

reason then they wouldn’t hurt

you.”

The moms, she reasoned,

would be peaceful and give the

officers no cause for alarm, so

had no reason to worry.

That may seem an unusual

belief for someone attending a

protest against police violence,

but it illustrates the privilege

taken for granted by many peo-

ple who have not had run-ins

with law enforcement.

So on her first night at the

protests, when federal officers

fired tear gas and flash-bang

grenades at the group of moms,

“I couldn’t believe what was

happening,” she said. “We were-

n’t being violent. We weren’t

screaming expletives at them.”

The power wielded by police

has long been justified with the

claim that officers must be able

to use force when necessary to

protect themselves or the public,

and that people who have done

nothing wrong have nothing to

fear. Black activists and their

allies have been contesting that

claim for years, but the tide of

public opinion has been slow to

turn against law enforcement.

However, when officers fire

tear gas and projectiles at soccer

moms holding sunflowers, as

happened in Portland on Sunday

night, even more observers —

who may not previously have

thought they could be at risk —

see that as a fate that might

befall anyone. And history sug-

gests that could have profound

political consequences.

In Argentina in the late 1970s

and early 1980s, the Mothers of

the Plaza de Mayo, women

whose children had been “disap-

peared” by the military govern-

ment — seized, tortured and

murdered in secret — were the

most visible opposition to the

regime, with their distinctive

white kerchiefs.

They “continually pointed out

that the majority of the disap-

peared were not terrorists, as the

junta claimed, but loyal members

of the opposition, including peo-

ple who had never engaged in

politics and even some members

of the establishment,” the politi-

cal scientist Marguerite Guzman

Bouvard wrote in “Revolutioniz-

ing Motherhood,” her 2002 book

on the group.

“In shattering the lies that

served as a rationale for the

junta’s terror,” Dr. Bouvard

wrote, “the Mothers exposed the

glaring weakness of the entire

system.”

There are obvious differences

between the Argentine dictator-

ship of and the United States

today. But Ms. Gregory, the Port-

land mother who joined Sunday’s

demonstration, was deeply dis-

turbed by the federal officers’

violent response to the protest.

“We weren’t any danger to

them,” she said. “We were just

standing there with flowers.

We’re a bunch of middle-aged

moms.”

“This isn’t what America is

supposed to be like,” she said.

“We’re not supposed to be ruled

by militarized, jackbooted

forces.”

Ms. Raiford, the longtime

activist, is cautiously hopeful

about the power of that message

— and its messengers.

“Sometimes when people hear

activists say ‘Black lives matter,’

they say ‘well that has nothing to

do with me.’ ” she said. “But

when we talk about the intrinsic

value of humanity, and how all of

our lives intersect because we

have children, we have families,

we live in communities, we have

loved ones, I think that that

creates less of a barrier.”

She hopes the attention on the

moms will help to spread that

message. “We don’t need silent

victims,” she said. “We need loud

witnesses.”

U.S. Mothers’ Voices,

Raised in Protest,

Join Global Tradition

Organizers told the “Wall of Moms” in Portland, Ore., to color-coordinate but otherwise dress “like they were going to Target.”

MASON TRINCA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

AMANDA

TAU B

THE

INTERPRETER

The Black Sash mothers in South Africa, left, and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, right, helped draw worldwide

sympathy to their causes by turning gender roles that ordinarily silence and sideline women into armor for political activism.

GALLO IMAGES, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK EDUARDO DI BAIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

GAUHATI, India (AP) — More
than 100 animals, including 10
one-horned rhinoceroses, have
died in massive flooding at the
famed Kaziranga game reserve in
northeastern India, officials said.
The flooding prompted Prince
William of Britain and his wife, the
former Kate Middleton, to express
their concern in a letter to the
park’s authorities, officials said on
Saturday.
“Since the first week of June, we
are having no respite with wave
after wave of flood that has
wreaked havoc inside the Kazi-
ranga National Park and Tiger Re-
serve,” said Kaziranga’s park di-
rector, P. Sivakumar. He said an
animal that had drowned in a

swollen river near the park on Sat-

urday brought the death toll of the

endangered rhinoceroses up to 10.

The British royal couple, known

formally as the Duke and Duchess

of Cambridge, had visited the

park in 2016 to learn about conser-

vation and anti-poaching efforts.

“The deaths of so many ani-

mals, including one-horned rhino,

are deeply upsetting,” they wrote

to Mr. Sivakumar.

The flooding is the result of a

monsoon that has dumped rain

across parts of India, Bangladesh

and Nepal, displacing 9.6 million

people, according to the Interna-

tional Federation of Red Cross and

Red Crescent Societies. More than

550 people have been killed in the

floods, the group said.

The organization warned of a

humanitarian crisis, saying that

close to one third of Bangladesh

has already been flooded, with

more flooding expected in the

coming weeks.

In India, more than 6.8 million

people have been affected by the

flooding, mainly in the northern

states of Assam, West Bengal, Bi-

har and Meghalaya bordering

Bangladesh, the group said, citing

official figures. In Assam, home to

Kaziranga, 96 people have been

killed in floods and another 26

have been killed in mudslides.

Some 50,000 people have sought

shelter in government-run relief

camps.

Flooding in Indian Park Kills Scores of Animals

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