From the Administration that Brought You Kids-in-Cages, It's Tear-Gassed-Moms
As nightly protests have dominated downtown Portland for nearly two months, both local officials and the Trump administration have attempted to cast the largely peaceful demonstrators as ruffians with suspect political values, hellbent on destruction. “It’s a very big difference between protests and the kind of mayhem that we’ve seen every night,” deputy chief of the Portland police Chris Davis insisted at a July 8th press conference. “Protests and this are two different things.” President Donald Trump delivered the same message from the Oval Office on July 20th: “These are not protesters. People say ‘protesters’; these people are anarchists. These are people that hate our country. And we’re not going to let it go forward.”
But the composition of the protest crowd in Portland is changing, following revelations that “the federal government effectively kidnapped people of Portland streets,” to quote the city attorney’s description of unidentified federal agents hauling protesters off into unmarked cars. Hundreds of mothers from across the city have shown up downtown this week, wearing yellow shirts and bike helmets or hard hats and improvised goggles. They’ve locked arms near the front of the protests to form a “Wall of Moms,” attempting to shield younger, edgier protesters from law enforcement violence. As one mother protester, Tara Russell, described her intentions on Facebook on July 20th: “Going to join the Wall of Moms…. I really hope I don’t get tear gassed, but I can’t sit at home anymore and watch these brave young people get beaten and rounded up by the Federal Secret Police. (And the Portland Police for that matter).”
The Wall of Moms draws on a long history of anti-authoritarian activism, particularly in Latin America where mother protesters famously demanded accountability for the thousands “disappeared” by right-wing regimes in Argentina and Chile. But the arrival of these demonstrators to protests that arose out of fury against official violence against Black people is complex. The layers of race- and class- and gender- privilege and expectation and subversion involved when a large group of (largely) white mothers shows up to make it more challenging for armed federal agents to injure marginalized people require a lot of unpacking. But many have welcomed the Wall of Moms:
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The arrival of the moms has certainly made it more difficult for local and federal authorities to justify their crackdown on protests by appealing to public hostility toward black bloc agitators. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, pulled no punches:
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/from-the-administration-that-brought-you-kids-in-cages-its-tear-gassed-moms-1032760/
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