Using matching shades of white or yellow, the women at the “Wall of Moms” in Portland, Oregon, have become instant icons of the city’s protests, even though late-night mother gatherings only started last Saturday and the protests of The city have continued for over a month.
They join a long line of mothers’ protests against state violence and what they see as authoritarianism around the world, including in South Africa, Sri Lanka, Argentina and Armenia, which have shown that mothers can be particularly effective advocates of a cause but also that there is a catch
History suggests that mothers’ power is most potent when they can exercise their own respectability and the protections that come with it, like a political club. But that is easier for women who already have privileges: married, wealthy, and members of the dominant racial or ethnic group.
Mothers who are less privileged often struggle to reclaim that power, even though they are often those who need it most urgently.
Theresa Raiford, a black mother who is the executive director of Don’t Shoot Portland, a local group working to end police violence, helped organize and direct the first actions of the Wall of Moms, but noted that the response Positive to most white mothers have been proof of the same racism they protest.
The mothers had been participating in the protests for five weeks, but “no one recognized them until they literally turned white so they could stand out as white,” she said.
“What it shows us is that black lives don’t matter here, white mothers do,” she said. “And those mothers also know it. So they show solidarity with us. “
‘Mothers are symbolic for the nation’
Bev Barnum, who posted the original Facebook message asking moms to come to protest, and serves as the group’s leader and informal organizer, said he had asked women to coordinate the color of their outfits to stand out from the crowd, but he told them to dress “like they were going to Target.”
“He wanted us to look like mothers,” said Ms Barnum he said in an interview. Because who wants to shoot a mom? None.”
Ms. Barnum said she identified herself as Mexican American, not white, but other members say the group is primarily white.
Mothers’ protests are often powerful precisely because the gender roles that normally silence and sideline women, allowing them to be seen as non-threatening, become an armor for political activism, experts say.
During Armenia’s “velvet revolution” in 2018, a largely non-violent uprising that ultimately toppled the country’s leader, Serzh Sargsyan, mothers took to the streets pushing their children in strollers, indelibly tying their maternal identities to their political demands.
In Armenia, “mothers are symbolic to the nation and to some extent have immunity from protests,” Ulrike Ziemer, a sociologist at the University of Winchester in Britain, wrote in a chapter of the 2019 book on the uprising. “If the police had touched the mothers with their children in strollers during the protests, that would have brought shame individually, but also in the state apparatus that they represent.”
In Armenian protests, mothers from all walks of life were able to claim those protections, Dr. Ziemer said in an interview. But in societies that are divided on racial or ethnic lines, mothers of marginalized groups cannot access that full political power so easily.
In South Africa, Black Sash, a group of white women who opposed the apartheid regime, was able to use their gender and race as a shield for their political activity that others could not.
“The government has allowed Black Sash to survive while shutting down other anti-apartheid groups in part because white South African society has perched its women on pedestals,” The Times reported in 1988. “Police find it uncomfortable to pack rice carts well.” . race troublemakers who look like their mothers or sisters. “
The government had no such qualms about locking up black women. Albertina Sisulu, a pioneering black anti-apartheid activist who was also a married mother of five children, was arrested and held in solitary confinement multiple times. Countless other black women suffered even worse fates.
In Sri Lanka, women from the Tamil minority group have been protesting for years to demand information about the sons and daughters who were abducted by state forces during the country’s civil war and who have never been heard from again. Her activism has attracted international attention and limited commitment from the country’s government.
But when women’s demands went beyond their own individual pain and became more involved in politics, national politicians and civil society groups dismissed them as pawns of male activists, said Dharsha Jegatheeswaran, co-director of the Adayaalam Center for Policy Research, Sri Lanka based on expert group. As members of a marginalized minority group, she said, motherhood could take them only up to a point.
In the United States, there is a long tradition of black women claiming their identity as mothers when protesting shootings, lynchings, and mass police incarceration. But, like Tamil activists in Sri Lanka, they tend to be seen through the narrow lens of their own pain and fear for their children. White audiences have generally taken white women much more seriously as representatives of mothers in general, another case of bias on display.
Ann Gregory, an attorney and mother of two who joined the mothers wall in Portland on Sunday, said they hoped to serve as a buffer between other protesters and law enforcement.
“We realize that we are a group of white women, and we have privileges,” she said. “We were hoping to use that to protect protesters.”
“We don’t need silent victims, we need strong witnesses.”
Instead, the women received a crash course in the complaints that had triggered the protests in the first place.
Ms. Barnum, new to this activism, said she was surprised when other protesters warned her group that they could be in danger.
“The news says that if you give the police a reason to fear for his life, a reasonable fear, they could hurt you,” he said. “But if he didn’t give them a reason, then they wouldn’t hurt him.”
The mothers, he reasoned, would be peaceful and would not alarm officers, so they had no reason to worry.
That may seem like an unusual belief to someone who attends a protest against police violence, but it illustrates the privilege taken for granted by many people who have had no trouble with the police.
So on their first night in the protests, when federal officials fired tear gas and blast grenades at the group of mothers, “I couldn’t believe what was happening,” he said. “We were not being violent. We were not yelling expletives at them. ”
The power wielded by the police has long been justified by the assertion that officers must be able to use force when necessary to protect themselves or the public, and that people who have done nothing wrong have nothing to do. fear. Black activists and their allies have been contesting that claim for years, but the tide of public opinion has been slow to turn against the police.
However, when officers fire tear gas and projectiles at soccer moms with sunflowers, as happened in Portland on Sunday night, even more observers, who previously had not thought they might be at risk, see it as a destination that It could happen to anyone. And history suggests that it could have profound political consequences.
In Argentina, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, women whose children had been “disappeared” by the military government, confiscated, tortured and secretly murdered, were the most visible opposition to the diet, with its distinctive white scarves.
“They continually pointed out that the majority of the missing were not terrorists, as the junta claimed, but loyal members of the opposition, including people who had never been involved in politics and even some members of the establishment,” said political scientist Marguerite Guzman Bouvard. wrote in “Revolutionizing Motherhood”, her 2002 book about the group.
“By breaking the lies that served as justification for the terror of the junta,” wrote Dr. Bouvard, “the Mothers exposed the blatant weakness of the entire system.”
There are obvious differences between the Argentine dictatorship and the United States today. But Gregory, the Portland mother who joined the Sunday rally, was deeply disturbed by federal officials’ violent response to the protest.
“We were not a danger to them,” he said. “We were standing there with flowers. We are a group of middle-aged mothers. “
“This is not what the United States is supposed to be,” he said. “We are not supposed to be governed by militarized, boots-on forces.”
Ms. Raiford, the longtime activist, is cautiously optimistic about the power of that message and its messengers.
“Sometimes when people hear activists say, ‘Black lives matter,’ they say, ‘Well, that has nothing to do with me,'” he said. “But when we talk about the intrinsic value of humanity, and how all of our lives intersect because we have children, we have families, we live in communities, we have loved ones, I think that creates fewer barriers.”
She hopes the mothers’ attention will help spread that message. “We do not need silent victims,” he said. “We need strong witnesses.”
