Reflection on Rebellion — Intro

We are at the end of June 2020. The month opened up with the largest rebellion on US soil since the 1960s, due to the public police lynching of George Floyd.

I participated in the first Chicago protest in response to Floyd’s murder and watched events unfold throughout the month from the lens of an activist on the ground and in organizing meetings.

I’m neither a journalist nor a scholar. My goal here is not to provide an in-depth analysis of the entire situation. It is not to provide a concrete history of things. Instead, my goal is to reflect on how the rebellion has played out in Chicago and what I witnessed in it: both in terms of actions and political debates. In the heat of the moment, there wasn’t time to stop and think, there were only meetings-after-meetings and actions-after-actions, with plenty of confusion and paralysis in between.

This rebellion is cooling down, for now. For me, this means that this is the moment to think through what was witnessed, what was discussed, what was done, and what could be done better. We should reflect on lessons from this past month because this was only the first rebellion.

The Covid-19 pandemic put our entire society into high tension. The US government and ruling class have actively resisted calls to provide relief to the masses. Their resistance to providing aid has only been matched by their drive to reopen the economy and use police violence against communities of color, especially the Black community. In other words, all of the ingredients for the first rebellion are still in place.

The rebellion revealed the deep anger at the police and at the misgovernment of our society. But nothing was resolved over the course of this month.

We need to prepare for the next rebellion, which will probably happen sooner than later. Especially since we are already seeing spikes in Covid-19 infections as economies reopen. There will be new uprisings and they will build on what was/wasn’t learned from the first round. That goes for both sides: us and them.

They are undoubtedly thinking through how they can clamp down us, or give partial concessions during the next round. Let’s think things through to help our side push the next rebellion further and begin resolving some of the contradictions by actually #DefundingPolice and #FundingOurCommunities.

Who knows: maybe the next rebellion could even go into new, pre-revolutionary territory?