By Hal Brown
This is the text is below currently on the website: The Wall of Moms. It also has a slideshow consisting of several photos.
Welcome
CALLING ALL MOMS - July 21 at 8:50pm, we meet again at the Salmon Street Fountain on the waterfront. We will walk over together at 9pm to the Justice Center. Wear yellow and protective gear if you can. Due to the escalated violence by the Feds, please know your participation may result in arrest, tear gassing, and being shot by rubber bullets or more once assembled in front of the justice center. Thank you to all you brave mamas!
- We listen to Black leaders. We are here to follow their direction, behind the scenes and at the justice center. We go where they tell us.
- Our goal is to push the media to turn the focus where it belongs: Black leaders.
- We will use our white bodies, not our white voices.
- Bev’s vision was that we moms would take some physical hits in hopes our Black and Brown kids, friends, neighbors, and loved ones will be spared some pain. To summon that mom warrior spirit to protect our kids-- ALL our kids. To let the Feds/cops hit, gas, shoot us first. Not to be the voice of the movement.
- A lot of us haven’t put our bodies in harms way like this. It’s really scary and awful. But it’s what’s been happening to Black and Brown bodies for years.
Let’s help each other do this. And thank you all for your grace and courage.
There are many tweeted videos online in numerous articles and the Portland group now has a Twitter page so I won’t waste space putting them in this opinion diary.
This is from The Washington Post:
Mayors, members of Congress and state officials have pushed back, telling the federal government they do not want or need federal troops in their cities. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) has for days called for the immediate removal of federal troops.
Now, the moms are getting involved.
Many of the mothers say they were summoned when George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis in May, cried out for his mother with his last breaths.
There has been some criticism, again from The Washington Post:
Though the Wall of Moms has become an overnight Internet sensation, the group has also attracted skepticism. Some scholars and racial justice activists have criticized the group and the attention it has attracted for centering the voices of mostly white mothers.
Black mothers have been calling for criminal justice reform and racial equity for many years. They have lost sons and daughters at the hands of police. A group of seven mothers who have lost African American children to police action or gun violence, known as the Mothers of the Movement, have toured around the United States to protests and conferences. But they have never gone viral quite like the Wall of Moms.
While it is true that the group consists mostly of white women I do not see this as a reason to criticize it. The group has made it clear that their purpose is to amplify the voices of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Wall of Mom organizers said they want to help amplify the voices of mothers like these — mothers who have suffered losses and who have for years fought for systemic change in police practices.
“When you have the privilege that we have as white women, you have to use it for good, and I hope that that’s what this is,” said Vinson, who is white. “I think it’s really, really important that we gain the trust of the black community here and that’s going to take some work, because we haven’t always been dependable. We have an obligation to be humble, to listen and center black voices.” (Washington Post)
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For one thing, there just aren’t that many black residents of Oregon to form a wall of black moms.
According to a 2019 estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau, 87% of Oregon’s population of 4.2 million is white, and only 2% Black. Portland is not much more diverse, with whites making up 77% of its population of 655,000, and Blacks 5.8%. Latinos account for 9.7% of the total and their growing presence has evoked some resentment. USA Today
I have no doubt that as the movement grows more black women will join and their numbers will become more diverse.
As a strategy, however, it is important that a large number of the participants are white women. The mostly white male Trump thugs who are attacking the peaceful protestors have white mothers and, at the risk over overgeneralizing, I suspect they have racist attitudes that would make them more likely to attack a black woman than a white woman.
Consider what happened when Maxine Waters tried to monitor a police stop with a black male.
It is a crying shame that a racist president has at his beck and call an armed force who have no compunction over manhandling peaceful protestors, causing them bodily injury, kidnapping them, and spiriting them away in unmarked cars. Not only do they do this willingly but I hazard a guess in saying some do this with relish because Trump has labeled them as the enemy, as the other, worthy only of contempt and certainly not deserving the respect they‘d afford to someone wearing a MAGA hat.
In Portland where because of the demographics from what I can tell watching local TV most of the peaceful protestors are white. Being white offers no protection, nor does being a white female protesting alone, although it did with one daring nude protester, Naked Athena.
An organized group of women who so far are mostly white will not only offer protection to other protestors but they will assure that the national media is covering them. No longer will the coverage be limited to cellphone videos which go viral, but there will be camera crews and reporters putting the national spotlight on what Trump’s storm troopers do. That is, if they dare to do anything.
This is more than an simply an effective tactic to be used in the Black Lives Matter movement. It is an a seminal moment in the downfall of Donald Trump. While the Oregon lawsuits to restrain activities in, or remove the federal SS entirely from Portland may take some time to resolved, the Wall of Moms has had an immediate effect.
The gratifying irony of this is that it comes just after Trump once again revealed his true colors by the gobsmacking comment he made about Ghislaine Maxwell:
Trump has found that he can’t fight a microscopic virus. He is now about to discover he can’t fight a wall of moms.
The Poll:
In answering consider the optics of these heavily armed masked storm troopers wearing combat armor and camouflage fatigues laying their hands on a peacefully protesting women. Even if Trump doesn’t care, even if he would get a thrill out of watching it, will his closest advisors dissuade him from ordering this? Will those in charge of these groups (whoever the hell they are) strongly argue against these orders. Will some of the actual officers refuse to obey them on the proper grounds that they are illegal?