SLO County should worry more about broken lives — and less about the ‘right’ way to protest
On June 5, unknown men costumed in camouflage and armed with assault rifles stood on the rooftop of a business on the main street in my hometown of Arroyo Grande (informal motto “nice town, normal people”). They were apparently terrified of a small intergenerational group marching peacefully several blocks away against the extrajudicial killing of American citizens.
A few days earlier, on June 1, “peace officers” in riot gear in downtown SLO carried their own assault rifles. They were apparently terrified of another group of young people demanding justice — this one admittedly a little more fierce than in AG but far from violent. Still, that night San Luis Obispo (informal motto “happiest city in America”) became one of 100 cities nationwide to fire tear gas —a chemical weapon illegal in warfare—against its own citizens.
Last week, on July 21, SLO police surrounded local protest leader Tianna Arata and shoved her into the back of a police vehicle with no explanation. And so, amidst a sea of white people, SLOPD singled-out and arrested a young Black leader for social justice just as she was leading a protest against police mistreatment of Black people. Were they trying to prove her point? Is this 1965 or 2020?
What does it say when there is more outcry about unrest — more concern about window glass, mild inconvenience and the “right” ways to protest — than about people literally being assaulted (see SLO PD’s so-called “vandalism victim” driving into protesters), harassed (see Arata’s creepy arrest), and murdered in the streets (see George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the countless other victims of police brutality for whom protesters demand: say their names)?
This baffling miscalculation of what’s actually important — broken windows or broken lives, superficial order or profound justice —reveals a powerful mythology at play.
The first myth is of exceptionality, as if “we” in sunny SLO County were magically apart from the country writ large.
In fact, as local historian Pete Kelley documents in his recent book “The Quick and the Dead: Resistance, Banditry & Vigilance Revisited on the Central Coast,” SLO County has a long history of racialized violence. In the year 1858, vigilantes hung seven Mexican-Americans without trial in front of the Mission. Then there’s the posse “comprised of some of the towns ‘finest citizens’” who told a group of Chinese-American workers “that if they ever saw them again, they’d shoot them on sight.”
These stories and countless others since then — cross burnings, racial slurs, blackface parties, white supremacist flyers, noose drawings, Confederate flags, disproportionate arrests of people of color, to name just a few in the last decade alone in SLO County —are examples not only of racism but of the deliberate construction of a white identity on the Central Coast.
Which brings us to a second foundational myth at play (yes, even here) — the myth of whiteness. We do well to remember that race is a social invention; there is no real difference between people of different skin tones, but American society for centuries has been in the business — and it is a lucrative business, from slavery onward — of building up the false notion that human worth is in direct relation to melanin levels. If it is no longer acceptable to suggest this openly, its effects are all too evident in our society today. And we’re in the midst of an overdue reckoning.
James Baldwin, writing 65 years ago, said it best: “The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant. Or — as they are, indeed, already, in all but actual fact: obsolete. For, if trouble don’t last always, as the Preacher tells us, neither does Power, and it is on the fact or the hope or the myth of Power that that identity which calls itself White has always seemed to depend.”
In SLO County and across America, white people can feel their supremacy being threatened. As SLO County Republican Party Chair Randall Jordan said, “Black Lives Matter protests” are attempting to “change the power base in our country.” Jordan’s right. For too long, the power base has been rooted in individuals like Sheriff Ian Parkinson, who is so absorbed in his own whiteness as to be able to say — when a Black person in America is more than twice as likely to be murdered by police than a white person, when the average white family in America has a net worth ten times higher than the average Black family, when the nation was literally built by slaves —that he’s “never seen any indication that systemic racism exists.”
To be sure, it is a terrifying thing when your sense of power comes under attack. Which is why, as Jordan says, “Our group will fight this effort as vehemently as we can.” As Parkinson says, “The sheriff’s coming to town with the posse — it’s not going to happen.” As the armed men on the roof did, as the authorities firing tear gas and arresting leaders did, the terrified will grip their power a little tighter.
But there is another choice, and it is being led by the young. Many more of the youngest generations, spearheaded by Black activists but across demographics, realize that the ideal of a free, just and equal America is still only that — an ideal. They are choosing to work for it, to struggle toward it. They carry on the prophetic proclamation: none of us are free until we all are. History will not look kindly upon those who cling to power and comfort over justice. They must choose: become human or become obsolete.
Kyle Berlin, a lifelong Arroyo Grande resident, is an incoming Mitchell Scholar studying culture and colonialism at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was valedictorian of Princeton’s Class of 2018.
This story was originally published July 31, 2020 at 10:00 AM.