“Noobs are forever.” That’s what my partner jokingly said to me this weekend, after the two of us attended the strikingly huge Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in Philadelphia on Saturday.
We were talking about the phalanxes of newcomers to the movement — often identifiable by their well-meaning but tone deaf signs — who had joined with more seasoned BLM protesters who have been at this for years. We’d both been to BLM protests before, most notably an enormous one in New York in 2014, after an NYPD officer choked Eric Garner to death. But there’s no question that something has shifted, and lots of people who had previously stayed out of the movement now felt compelled to pick up signs and march in the streets against police brutality.
The result is not just that protests seem bigger, but almost more numerous, spreading out not just to every large city but also the suburbs and small towns of America. (The Texas town where I went to high school, which has a population of 6,000, saw a protest on Saturday that drew hundreds of attendees.) There have been many and varied protest movements in the era of Donald Trump, with some — like the Women’s March or the climate strikes — being more successful than others. But BLM seems to be rising above, becoming the protest movement that is doing the best at harnessing the larger anger out there about Trump and his supporters and enablers.
Black Lives Matter is capturing those who have just woken up and, more than any other progressive movement, is turning that noob energy into action.
After spending a lot of time in the quiet reflection that marching while people chant around you offers, I have a theory about why this happened: BLM, more than any other progressive movement in this country, represents an understanding of the democratic crisis in this nation. Activists against police brutality saw firsthand how the forces of authoritarianism organized themselves in a way to gut democracy from the inside out. They were fighting that fight while much of the country lived in blissful ignorance under Barack Obama. BLM has the tools to lead the rest of the country in the fight to save democracy — or, honestly, to restore it — before Trump annihilates it completely.