The race

October 2, 2015 5:44 PM

This week, the mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota and a local Black Lives Matters group came to an agreement to prevent the disruption of this Sunday's Twin Cities Marathon.

Guest post: What NOT to do when Black Lives Matter stages a protest at your goal marathon

posted by roomthreeseventeen (27 comments total)

This happened here (well, in St. Paul and I'm in MPLS) last Thursday. I was out of town and didn't even know. In the time I have lived here, I have known personally two people who actually witnessed police shoot and kill unarmed mentally ill people. One case was just like this one, where the guy's family called the cops because they were afraid the guy would hurt himself. I know two people who each saw this happen! It has happened a lot here!

I guess you could argue that we all ought to be disrupting everything every day until it's stopped. I'm glad Black Lives Matter feels good about how this has worked out, but I wouldn't fault them for disrupting the marathon, personally.
posted by Frowner at 6:19 PM on October 2, 2015 [15 favorites]

Just to give my own perspective, as a marathoner myself, after Boston, everything changed for us. The way every city runs security now is very different, and everyone and anyone on our course is considered a huge security risk. So while I often defend BLM and their actions, I have to say that I would have been terrified to run TCM if they were still planning to disrupt. Way too high a chance for serious violence.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:25 PM on October 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

No, I wouldn't really fault them either. I have doubts about the wisdom of targeting a marathon because of Boston (as roomthreeseventeen notes, on preview) and I think this is the more sensible outcome. Still, the reactions from some in the running community in the US were flat out horrifying. I belong to a women's running group on FB and while most of the discussion was measured, some was just really gross and racist.
posted by frumiousb at 6:32 PM on October 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Mod note: One comment deleted. Maybe let's skip the lighthearted "race" puns, it's far too easy to end up saying something much more offensive than you intend.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 6:38 PM on October 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

I would have been terrified to run TCM if they were still planning to disrupt. Way too high a chance for serious violence.

I'm not sure I understand--is the fear that BLM would themselves commit Boston Marathon scale violence, or is it that they could somehow provide cover for a terrorist attack, or something else?
posted by kelseyq at 7:00 PM on October 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

Way too high a chance for serious violence.
Based on historical precedent, I'd say most likely from the police.
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:03 PM on October 2, 2015 [13 favorites]

I would primarily be concerned with police violence against the protestors on the course, but if you've ever seen someone at mile 25 of a marathon, they usually aren't coherent or showing good judgment, and I would not be surprised if runners acted violently towards someone in their way.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:04 PM on October 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

At mile 25 of a marathon, I'm constantly surprised that everyone doesn't just lie down and surrender to death.
posted by figurant at 7:23 PM on October 2, 2015 [20 favorites]

What a draining complicated week. I am in the (apparently) very small intersection of runners and social justice advocates.

I am running in the race. It is my first marathon. My running partner survived Boston. She was so horrified that I had any understanding of, or sympathy for what BLM proposed, that she won't run it with me if I interact with them.

I wish that more of the running world was in the place to hear the pain my city is in. To hear that they have shared experience of being on the receiving end of violence. To know that "why me" is a question is a lot of people in North Minneapolis ask too.

I spent a lot of time at the Health Expo (a very very white event), collecting stories, so I could try to feel 1% of her fury at what is being disrupted. And running is filled with amazing stories of people triumphing over their limitations.

I didn't like having to defend *blm* while trying to back away from this specific action. I was desperate to find any way to spin this into a positive shared victory.

I feel compromised and disgusted, that if I had been stopped at 25, I might have gone through.

I wish that the runners, who are strong enough to carry the weight of 26 miles of road, could carry some empathy for my city too. I imagine how a 10000 person die in might look! What if we all wore armbands. What if blm joined us for the last mile to the finish. Our victory.

I had thought that my big political issue in running was to going to be to make it safe for trans* and genderqueer folk.

I am glad no one has been killed or hurt or arrested. I am glad not to have to run into a riot. And I am privileged that I don't have to worry about those things.


(Thanks for posting. I had an FPP with a billion links ready, but I am much too close to this.)
posted by gregglind at 7:28 PM on October 2, 2015 [38 favorites]

gregglind, I hope you have a good, meaningful first. There's nothing like it, and all 11,000 of you have become this year's spotlight.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:35 PM on October 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Something that's missing in all of these articles is what sort of benefit BLM is getting from agreeing not to disrupt the course.

There is no indication any city policy is changing.
There is no indication any police policy is changing.
There is no indication any policymaking priorities are changing.
There is no indication anything will change.

What am I missing here? It seems like a literally useless protest.
posted by saeculorum at 7:41 PM on October 2, 2015 [6 favorites]

roomthreeseventeen, I think there is plenty of spotlight to go around. I wish more of it was illuminating the places no one wants to look, not lighting my photo op.

I feel very sad about it all, and I wish I could dedicate some part of the attempt to something meaningful. Running is saving my life too right now, but it's an indulgence.

Maybe running isn't big enough to hold me :)
posted by gregglind at 7:42 PM on October 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

(Saeculorum, they got a meeting with Mayor Coleman. And none of them will be arrested in the crackdown that probably would have happened. I read all this as a graceful retreat. The "official" blm mpls disowned the action.)
posted by gregglind at 7:45 PM on October 2, 2015

I'm not sure I understand--is the fear that BLM would themselves commit Boston Marathon scale violence, or is it that they could somehow provide cover for a terrorist attack, or something else?

I too have this question.
posted by zutalors! at 8:34 PM on October 2, 2015

Like most metro areas, the Twin Cities is so sprawled that most people are virtually never in any kind of a shared public space other than a shopping mall. You go from your work to your car to your house in a subdivision and need never encounter anyone you disagree with. And despite having a significant minority population, it's completely possible to live your entire life here and never actually speak to a member of a minority if you choose not to.

This is a huge problem for BLM. There's just nowhere they can protest where anyone will even see them. The Mall of America was a good try, but it got them in serious legal hot water (since even though it's partially publicly funded, MOA is private property). Blocking the freeway was also a good try, but it only really works once. Gigantic central areas like Peavey Plaza and the State Capitol lawn are just about empty during the day, you could have an Isis rally and no one would even notice.

So how can they draw people to their side? How can they get white people who are completely immersed in their own world to actually notice that suffering is going on? For the Civil Rights movement in the 60s it was possible to disrupt public space. But now there's almost no public space left, and it just seems churlish to disrupt the little that's left.

I think the answer has to be through social media. Show people the conditions that exist just a few miles from their own homes. Not just police shootings, but run-down schools, inadequate housing, food insecurity. You can't show that in a protest, but you can show that in viral videos and Facebook posts. It would take a lot of money and talent but I think it could be done.
posted by miyabo at 8:39 PM on October 2, 2015 [44 favorites]

That's a really interesting and good point about the change in how public spaces are used, miyabo. I hadn't thought about it in those terms.
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:44 PM on October 2, 2015 [3 favorites]

Still, the reactions from some in the running community in the US were flat out horrifying. I belong to a women's running group on FB and while most of the discussion was measured, some was just really gross and racist.

I have more or less stopped going on facebook over the last few weeks; the local racist nastiness is so bad that I just...no.

But it should be pointed out that this matathon issue isn't an isolated thing. The BLM folks here have been staging a lot of high-profile demonstrations in recent months, most recently at the State Fair and white people had a shitstorm about that too for one reason or another. Same as they did when they blocked the freeway. For the local white people there will ALWAYS be a reason about why the BLM people staging a totally peaceful protest is in "bad taste" or disrespectful because it inconveniences people or whatever the fuck. Which of course totally misses the point that protests that don't inconvenience anyone have accomplished pretty much fuck all for black people, historically. AND the additional weird thing about how white people tell black people how things should be done and suggesting that is only okay to protest if they're doing it in a way that NOBODY NOTICES is also super gross.

So, leaving aside the particular security issues with the marathon (concerns which are valid and fair, considering what happened in Boston) there is also some local history with this. We had all this same nastiness not even a month ago with the fair (#blackfair on twitter if anyone's interested in looking back at it). From what I can see the BLM people have always been peaceful at their protests here, it's the white people who have been ugly and borderline scary and if you would have asked me my honest opinion, I would have guessed the protest on Sunday would not have gone forward because of fear of what white people would do. That's how much people are worked up about BLM here. It is straight up disgusting.
posted by triggerfinger at 10:05 PM on October 2, 2015 [14 favorites]

Or, what the guest blog post linked in the fpp said. That.
posted by triggerfinger at 10:08 PM on October 2, 2015

Somehow this is reminding me of an suicide attempt that blocked my drive home as a kid. I was 16 and had just learned to drive and had absolutely no sense of direction. I got detoured, and was pissed off that I had to figure out how to get home from someplace else. In retrospect, that anger was really fear (of how lost I'd get). Now I just laugh at how I was such a naive kid as to be angry at someone who was suicidal for "ruining" my drive home. It's as if all these people are stuck there like I was at 16 with the world too much of a big and scary place to be able to see that their experience isn't the only one out there. (fyi - the suicidal person was talked down successfully).
posted by lab.beetle at 10:33 PM on October 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

> It's as if all these people are stuck there like I was at 16 with the world too much of a big and scary place to be able to see that their experience isn't the only one out there.

More likely they're upset that something they trained hard for and looked forward to is being interrupted. We don't have to generate abstruse, meta reasons for people being upset.

The protesters feel their message is more important than the experience of the people participating in the event. The people participating in the event feel the event is more important than the protesters' message.

I mean, there's no doubt racism is baked into the whole thing, but the suburban mum who's spent 6 months training for the event had reason to be pissed.
posted by Maugrim at 11:27 PM on October 2, 2015 [4 favorites]

I've been to some Black Lives Matter and Black Liberation Project protests (I'm white, just ftr). I'm not at all intimately involved in it - I've met a couple of the more involved people, like, once in passing. What miyabo points out about public space is so true - it sometimes feels really weird because you'll be on this march and the space around you will be virtually empty, it's like marching to nowhere for nothing.

This is especially true because the police have adopted a "let them march, use cop cars to block off traffic for six blocks around, no one will see and then they'll go home" policy. It's different from the anti-police brutality protests I went to in the nineties and early 2000s. On the one hand, yes, it's great that one is not getting beaten down or pushed off the street, on the other hand, it's this spooky liberal "you can say whatever you want even if you criticize the regime because it doesn't mean anything" feeling.

Another issue is the tremendous segregation of the area. I am from MPLS and don't really know how St Paul works on this issue, but in MPLS, most people of color live either over North or in the Phillips-ish part of South, with a lot of Black people in particular living over North. North is really physically separated from the rest of the city - it's not that hard to get to downtown from there, but there's all these urban space barriers which separate it. This is intentional, as is the way the Phillips part of South is treated. (All I really know about St. Paul is that they ran a highway through the main Black neighborhood in the mid-20th century).

Our downtown isn't really like East Coast/old school downtowns. It is much, much deader outside of core business hours and it's rather sprawly. The parts that aren't dead outside business hours are the warehouse district/bar parts, and a protest there would get confrontational and fucked up in ways that make the marathon thing look polite.

Because of physical segregation, the few places that have made sense for other mass protests (Uptown, the Lake/Cedar area) don't work well - too far for anyone coming from St. Paul or over north. And St. Paul's downtown/the Capitol area is even more of a desert than MPLS. You can march around the Capitol all day and barely see a soul.

There's just not a lot of political traction on this stuff, and protesting at the Fair, etc, is an attempt to generate some. I think it's perfectly reasonable. There is ALSO background policy work being done by other groups, some with membership overlap with BLM, and I think that Black Lives Matter and the Black Liberation Project are important pieces of this puzzle.

This is a really racist place, but we've got things set up here so that if you're white it is extremely, extremely easy to ignore that fact - even more so than in other cities.

I've been, uh, protesting things around here for literally more than twenty years, which is weird to think about. The Black Lives Matter protests are the first that have been both very visible to the white people I know and racially integrated and had a large Black presence. (Immigration organizing has been visible and POC-led, but it has worked differently.) I add that the Black Lives Matter protests have felt meaningful and optimistic in a way that very, very few other protests have to me, and by this time I am a fucking protest connoisseur.

I sympathize with people not wanting to have their marathon disrupted. I also think that this is sort of a systemic-psychic problem, in that the actual instances of Black death and Black suffering remain so unreal to many white people that it seems very natural for us to weight them as lighter than our right to shop or complete a sporting event. We have been shaped not to see Black suffering* here - specifically here - as an emergency. It's exactly like the suicide example that lab.beetle talks about - we have a life-destroying emergency in our midst and yet we have been so strongly socialized to see it as NOT an emergency that any kind of protest which can't just be shuffled off into the corner by the courthouse and safely ignored seems like an unfair infringement on our time.

Which is, I guess, why BLM has to go to the Fair, etc. If it were possible to get people together at 5pm downtown and have a protest and have it make a difference, people would do that because it would be easier.

*And in MPLS-St Paul although Black Lives Matter focuses on Black lives, there's a big knock-on effect because it organically calls attention to the racism suffered by Native people, Latin@ people, and others.
posted by Frowner at 12:24 AM on October 3, 2015 [31 favorites]

It's just, it should not be that hard to work out police protocol for taking down someone in the grip of a mental illness who is armed only with a rock or a screwdriver or nothing at all without killing them. The cops here have had at least twenty years to work something out - that's how long I can remember this stuff happening, virtually always to people of color. Even if you for some reason decide to start the clock when I started going to anti police brutality protests, they have had better than twenty years to fix this stuff.
posted by Frowner at 12:41 AM on October 3, 2015 [7 favorites]

I kind of wonder why BLM hasn't (that I know of anyway) done any protests at the government center downtown Minneapolis? I work right by there and I remember the Occupy protesters being there for MONTHS. There aren't really any singular events going on there, which is what they seem to be focusing on as a tactic (and I forgot about the first Vikings game with my earlier comment, mainly because I pay zero attention to local sports), but there are lots of people downtown during the day, so I think they would get noticed. I know that Occupy did.
posted by triggerfinger at 10:43 AM on October 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also, someone in the comments of the above blog post posted an excerpt from MLK Jr.'s Letter From A Birmingham Jail, which I think is so appropriate:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
posted by triggerfinger at 10:51 AM on October 3, 2015 [6 favorites]

I would be honored if a Black Lives Matter representative had asked me to wear a shirt with their message in my marathon. As it is, I feel like I have no traction here. If I speak up against whatever iniquity, I get shouted down by the marginalized group and ostracized by (my) dominant group. I know, it's not about me, it's about black lives in this case. But from my perspective, yes, it is about me. I want to help. I'm standing here waiting to see what I can do.
posted by disconnect at 6:55 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think there's a lot you can do. Here are some ideas, but (imo) a very big thing you can do is to start to talk to other white people (assuming you're white) about these issues. You don't have to look hard at all to find people saying "all lives matter" or using racially charged dogwhistles like "thug". Talking to people about why these things are racist is a good start. If you aren't already, read articles and media on racism that are written by POC. Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic is a good place to start if you don't already read him. One if the ways to use your privilege for good is to speak out about these things because privilege means that people may listen to you more seriously than [marginalized group].
posted by triggerfinger at 10:08 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

There was a protest with about 75 people, surrounded by perhaps 150 cops (I'm going by news reports, I wasn't there). There was also a counter-protest with about 5 people... confusingly, one of whom appeared to be a black guy carrying a confederate flag.
posted by miyabo at 10:26 AM on October 5, 2015