It’s been quiet here on The NBB, but that’s mental health issues for you. Thankfully, I’m back on an upswing and am coming at you all with a few new posts that I’ve been working on.
A couple of weeks ago, I got to interview an awesome barista out of Milwaukee who has wished to remain anonymous. What I really appreciated about them is at the end of our conversation, they asked me what my goal was with these posts and it really got me thinking. I had this idea to interview TGNC baristas because it seemed like a way to engage with what was going on around me, since I couldn’t participate in the protests in person due to health concerns.
Sophia Roe, recently, did a beautiful talk on Instagram about the difference between reaction and response. My original intention with these interviews was more about what could I offer, which was sharing these stories. This was a reaction. Meanwhile, as I talked with and interviewed more people, the protests evolved and my view on what I was doing with these interviews changed. I’ve learned so much from every interview and I want to share more stories not because it’s something that I’m doing but because these stories and experiences are so much bigger than myself or this blog. I’m not one to care about blog statistics, but these interview posts don’t always do as well with views but I think that making space for these people who are willing to take time out of their day to share their experiences protesting is more important than page views and likes.
***The below interview has been lightly edited for length and some details have been omitted to respect their privacy.
Would you like to introduce yourself?
My name is *name redacted*. I use they/them pronouns. I’m based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
So, you were involved with all the protests. Can you tell me what all you did?
The first thing to know is that Milwaukee is statistically the most segregated city in the US and, as such, we’re fairly accustomed to police brutality and civil unrest here. To the point where when cops shoot people, it doesn’t make the national news. About four years ago, an officer shot an unarmed mentally ill black man steps away from city hall and was shot multiple times and we don’t hear about it. His name was Dontre Hamilton, and that officer never went to prison. He did stand trial, but there were riots here for quite a while. Because of that existing social dynamic, there’s a really strong activist network here. There’s not like one person who is the face. There are several different people. A few weeks before George Floyd was murdered, an officer here in Milwaukee killed a young man named [Lucas J.] Alverado, and that officer is still suspended with pay and is still not charged. So, there were protests here before but when the national outrage over George Floyd’s death got people out to the streets, those protests escalated. A lot of people think of Milwaukee as this white outdoorsy place and, some of the state is, absolutely, but the larger ethnic majority is Black and that definitely is not reflected in representation, business owners, anything.
So, how did you get involved? Did you go by yourself, connect with any of these activist groups, or meet people along the way?
I went by myself. At the time, it was really well known here that cops were tracking people and so, if you organized with people about when you were going to meet or anything like that, it was pretty well-known that you were going to be tracked down and arrested. So, I just went. Some of the different activists, activist groups, local community organizers, and politicians were posting about the protests in different places. Here, people were marching 5-10 miles a day so it was really easy to catch up with them at some point during the protests, and march with them. They’re still marching. And so, I brought extra masks and bandanas. I had those on hand. People have been really good about wearing masks at the protests, which is really good.
Yeah, I kept noticing that and kept hearing from people that weren’t for the protests saying, “Yeah, the protests are the reason that Covid is spiking.” And I kept telling them, “No, literally, in all the protest photos that I see, everyone’s wearing masks.” All the pictures that I would see, it was all the cops that weren’t wearing masks. Like now, they kind of are. They’ve kind of caught on but… it’s kind of hit or miss, but no, it’s the cops who aren’t wearing them.
Yeah, that’s not good.
We had curfew enacted here and I never stayed out passed curfew for a lot of different reasons. Despite my whiteness, I am still a person who is more vulnerable to be a target of violence so I still try not to stay out after dark. I have friends who were ticketed and arrested after dark. There were a few instances where the police were getting aggravated, up in people’s faces, and I put my body between the cop and whomever it was because I felt pretty confident that I was right but the cops weren’t going to hurt me because that would be a bad video for them.
I mean they’ve kind of been showing that they don’t care about bad videos at this point.
Right, well, they’ll think twice. They are less likely to hit a blond white person than anyone else.
What was your experience out there and how does that compare to how people were writing about the protests and talking about it?
So, I’m very aware that I live in my own socialist bubble. A lot of the content that I saw about the protests were from people that were actively supportive of the protests or actively participating in them but I did see people who were like, “These protests are violent. The 1963 March on Washington, when we got Civil Rights, we got without any violence.”
I felt like most of the media coverage talked about the violence of the protests as though it was one of those things that was inevitable. That the protests were going to become violent, when in fact I never saw any violence from protestors. Cops were quick to use batons and tear gas, and, even as stories were coming out that disproved these claims about who started it, what prompted it, meanwhile the media was just reporting on it like, “Here’s this fascinating other side to this story. Like wow, the cops could be lying.”
It’s one of those things where the assertion was made and continues to be made that, despite all this evidence that we have, that it’s the police that are arresting people, tazing them, tear gassing them, and that they were justified. And I think that that comes from our social belief that fundamentally, the police only target people who do bad things and the police don’t arrest bad people. I find it demoralizing that as we get more and more irrefutable evidence that that’s not true, that the conversation and the perception doesn’t seem to be changing genuinely. Like talking about it as though there are a couple of bad apples and not that every time that force is used is bad. There’s no reason for tear gas to ever be used. That is not ever justifiable.
So, how did things change day-to-day? As the protests evolved, I’m sure so did protestors, the marches, etc.
The marches, themselves, have scaled down quite a bit. There were a lot of back-to-back ten mile marches going in different directions, going out to the suburbs. At one point, several players from the Bucks joined in, which gave a lot of credibility to the marches but that was fleeting. It also was a great show of solidarity that these professional athletes came out. When curfew was put into effect and the National Guard was brought in, they were flying helicopters overhead, the mood definitely changed here. It became very much a kind of us-versus-them, as though we were under attack from our own government, and I guess we are. And, while the mayor and the governor, both eventually moved the national guard and curfew, things are definitely not back to normal.
Do you see any similarities between the protests and your work in coffee?
I don’t know if I saw any similarities, but I definitely learned a lot from the protests and the organizers that is applicable to my work in coffee. Like there was a disability friendly march that was done, where they organized so that people who used wheelchairs were able to participate in the march. That really changed and challenged the way that I think about accessibility, that there really is no reason that everything shouldn’t be accessible. Like, when you work in coffee and especially when you work as a barista in a cafe, you are literally serving your community.
The weird thing for me was the last cafe that I spent most of my career was in an extremely high end and wealthy neighborhood, where racism was rampant. Early on, when the shop was open, we would have cops come in and ask if we had seen a Black man and that was it. Not, did you see someone that matches this description? It was, “Did you see a Black man walking around down here?” Asserting that Black straight up was a crime in that neighborhood. So, in a lot of ways, the protests were more about serving my community than working in coffee ever has been. I knew a lot of other baristas who were out marching.
So, what safety measures did you take to protect yourself from Covid? From the police?
Well, I had Covid early on and this was back in the days when it was like, “If you’ve had it, you have immunity.” And, now, it’s like, “Well… maybe not!”
I’m gonna be honest when I say that I didn’t think that hard when protecting myself from Covid, like I wore a mask and changed masks. Things like that. And I kept masks around for other people. Tried to maintain some level of distance.
I took goggles with me and used them, wore glasses instead of contacts, just in case I got tear gassed or pepper sprayed. Which did happen, do not recommend. And, I took small bottles of water with me as well. To protect myself from the police, most of the time I had my head covered completely to reduce identifiable characteristics. The fact that we were all wearing masks is a great deterrent. I wore all black to reduce the possibility of being identified.
So, what’s been your biggest take away from all this?
I mean there’s a couple of things. First, I wish the community valued the people who die in it. Like within this community, they should value them more because it wasn’t until George Floyd was murdered that people really started to hit the streets and you know, we’ve had dozens of children murdered by cops in the last ten years. There was a brief period here where it seemed like we got some traction but the police force and the government here is deeply racist. And, the way this city has dealt with Covid is deeply racist. It is massively and disproportionately affecting the Black community. And I wish that I could say that maybe something has changed but it seems like for the most part that there are some people who have some privilege, who were really excited to protest for a couple weeks and then they just got bored. And there’s still a lot of talk about how “you can’t go to that neighborhood because it’s not safe there.” While protesting police violence is important and that is technically what these protests are about, it is disheartening to see how racism is pervasive. That it has not changed the way in which people are actually thinking about how people are dealing with race.
Yeah, I’ve started noticing kind of like a shift from “Black Lives Matter” and, there’s still a little bit of that, but now it’s police brutality. And like you said, that’s a huge part of the issue but now, and like I’m based in Portland, so now it’s like let’s talk about how the Feds are here and how they are taking people. Let’s talk about how the police are tear gassing everyone. And it’s like that is the point but it’s not the broader point. We’re losing the Black Lives Matter aspect of the protest of police brutality.
Right. There has been so much rhetoric about Fuck the Police, All Cops are Bastards, which is not an inherently bad position but the fact that that’s the rhetoric and people are profiting off of those messages is just furthering the devaluing of Black Lives.
Yeah, one of my friends shared something that was talking about this idea and it struck me that literally all the conversations that I’ve had with people lately have been about Fuck the Police and not about Black lives. Like I’m guilty of this too. We need to shift the focus back.
Right. We can have both conversations. We should be having both conversations. I have seen, like there was this big push to buy from Black owned businesses for a while and, I got be honest, I don’t remember the last time that I saw somebody post or retweet a list of Black coffee roasters. Or the new Barista Magazine features Black coffee professionals, which is great but that should be normal though. There’s a post on social media that’s been getting retweeted and shared that is, “It’s Black Lives Matter before Fuck the police.”
A huge thank you to this barista again for their time. If you want to share your story, shoot me an email (that’s in the about page) and we can set it up. And, saying it again, Black Lives Matter!