There are three reasons I moved my protest away from bloc tactics: I'm now over 40, and I don't heal as well as I used to. I have a professional license that can go poof with any arrest (not a conviction) and I'm more use to all resistance if I have my profession, money and street/academic cred.
Here's why I did bloc: Anonymity. Being in uniform means I was less vulnerable as a woman, as an LGBTQ activist, and as a person in opposition to vulture capitalism. (And I had a lot of privilege on my side - white, I present more or less straight, I blend in in conservative circles. Bloc tactics matter a lot for POC, people who can't code switch, and people with other vulnerabilities.) Being masked prevented employers, agitators, and local cops from targeting me based on press coverage. Being a front-line defender meant I was protecting far more vulnerable people -- young ones, people on probation, the elderly, and the medically fragile -- from people who will happily do harm to the least able to defend themselves. I'm Quaker. I don't start fights. But it is well within peace ethics to defend those who are being targeted, and it's absolutely within peace ethics for a volunteer group to meet a professional or pro-am force with resistance. Bloc doesn't have gas grenades or flash bangs. (We'll roll or kick them back to the people who lost them. But that's just being polite and returning carelessly dropped property. 
) When we have shields, they're scavenged junk made of plywood or pickle buckets, not professional armor paid for with taxes or the disposable income of the weekend warrior. Bloc doesn't carry weapons because we know there's a better than even chance we're getting arrested, and having a weapon means a prosecutor is far more likely to charge with a felony.
Here's the practicalities of bloc tactics: you want bloc in a uniform because 1) it's harder to identify any specific member later; 2) you want to present visual unity; 3) the uniform itself protects the person in it by covering most of the skin, keeping the hair confined so it can't be pulled, protecting eyes, nose, mouth and ears from chemical or physical assault; and 4) it makes it easier for us to coordinate ourselves. We choose black because almost everyone has long sleeves and long pants in some shade of black so it's cheap and readily available. (I've also Rainbow Bloc'ed and Pink Bloc'ed. Rainbow Bloc is fun, because we get to spend a weekend doing tie dye, too. It just depends on the group.)
Bloc tactical groups have had most of a decade when we were mostly off duty, so there's been some knowledge lost. (As in, I'm not seeing this current generation doing secret signals the way we used to. My groups used a specific arm band color for each action that we distributed via phone tree the evening before. That way we knew that anyone who showed up in black without the color was likely an agitator, and that person got surrounded and moved out of the herd. For example. As I totter out to my porch to wave my cane and tell the kids to get off my lawn.) But Bloc is also dealing with a much nastier threat now than the one I dealt with as a WTO and HIV/AIDS bloc'er. There are more guns, more people willing to use them, the cops are more willing to fire first, and there's a massive narrative that we're the problem.
Bloc tactical groups are mostly young, so yes, they're more aggressive. They're often fairly male, so young and dumb and high on their own testosterone. But they're present as a first line. They go in knowing they need to be up front, taking heat. And they're re-learning fast. Trust me, they're okay with you, as non-bloc, being somewhere other than on the front line. They'd prefer it, because when concentrating on keeping the other side from breaking skulls, they don't want someone who doesn't know the basics in their ranks.
But not being on the front line isn't the same as not going. What the opposition wants is for people like you to just stop showing up. They want you afraid and cowering in your house. They want everyone to shut up and go away, and for the only protesters to be people who can be called criminals.
It's okay to be scared. It's okay to step away for an event and get a handle on your fear. But antifa is not your enemy -- we're allies and accomplices.
Ask me anything!
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