Demo Diary: Black Lives Matter, Everywhere. Period.

Last weekend does seem far away already, doesn't it? So much has happened, since then: Minneapolis disbanding its police force, owing to its highly visible brutality and social toxicity. A Temporary Autonomous Zone was set up in Seattle, with the mayor's blessing. And in other news, racist monuments were being toppled all over the place, by cheering crowds playing Enya.

I've gotta be honest: I was off of social media for the last couple of days because I was hammering away frantically to finish an article about how the news media force feeds us depressing myths about humanity. Logging back on, though, I've found a 180 degree turn on that policy. There is now such a critical mass of humanity-validating events happening at once that I wonder if my article won't be redundant soon... Ah, well, it'd be worth it.

But getting back to last weekend.

The Black Lives Matter solidarity demo in Berlin on 06.06.2020 happened under favourable weather conditions, with beautifully hot and dry summer weather helping to draw an estimated 15,000-20,000 people (at least, that's the last count that I saw) in central Alexanderplatz.

In the run-up to the demo, a small but vocal minority of American commentators had been tacitly condemning these European demos, with insinuations that they were inspired by nothing more than a white guilt and a false sense of security that "this can't happen here". Their complaints were immediately disproven by the healthy representation of people of all colours, speaking German, English, Spanish and French at the demo.

Europeans are PoC too, you know.

The truth is that even I, as a relatively privileged white woman, have seen harrowing incidents of power abuse by the cops against my fellow citizens, both at demonstrations and just in day to day life. I've experienced brutality first hand (though nothing as degrading as the stop and search of a Sikh family driving through the City with two young children by armed cops, the last time I was in London. That's got to be a shit way to grow up).

Most of us have at least seen black men being searched or detained for no crime other than "being black in public". Maybe even more often than the average white American has, since many European capitals are more mixed than those in the US.

It is almost as if these Stateside commentators think that Europe is a continent full of white Aryans who have been living in some privileged, Ye Olde Worlde Shoppe white bubble since the days of Marie Antoinette. A borderline racist view in itself, and one that is utterly out of touch with our modern lives.

So, it was fantastic to see Berlin's PoC standing up for itself, as well as being supported by their non-PoC friends.

The meeting place, in front of Galeria and Primark (those timeless bastions of civil disobedience) was so oversubscribed that protestors ended up spilling over in all four directions and occupying what must have been a square mile of land. Everybody here was dressed in black. A hubbub of young mixed protestors had taken over a building site outside Primark to try and get a closer view of the speakers in the centre of the demo. There was a pretty laid back atmosphere, people chilling on the vast piles of rubble and building site trailers like they were sofas and loungers. Then the police came along and tear gassed everyone, seemingly staging their own demonstration in solidarity with racist and authoritarian cops in the US.  I'm glad to report it didn't affect the colourful, compassionate and firmly defiant mood of the people there.

Later, as everyone was leaving, the police cunningly sent in about a trillion vans full of cops to perform a MayDay style crackdown on the stragglers and footage came out of people of colour being bullied, beaten and arrested. I sincerely hope everyone came out of it relatively safe and unscathed. There are some legal funds set up for those who were detained.

Here in Europe, we know all too well that brutality against both black people and protestors is not only an American problem. Saturday's demo proved how, and it also proved that the only way forward is to stick together in the face of such assaults.

In typical Berlin style, the BLM demo took place partially on a building site.

Revised 22.06.2020