Meaning daily. It’s a city of millions, including a large number of activists and activist organizations. There are labor protests, antiwar protests, protests focused on foreign policy, protests aimed at arcane legal changes, demonstrations about housing laws, demonstrations leveraging whatever happens to be in the news. At times those protests are massive, a coalescing of activism around a common theme, as they were following the death of George Floyd earlier this year after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. But even when the protests don’t involve tens of thousands of people, they exist as an undercurrent.
For several days, the protests in May and June over Floyd’s death spiraled into something else. As happened in other places in the same period, groups of looters and vandals used the protests as a jumping-off point for theft and property damage. That quickly faded. When the protests shifted to focus attention on tributes to leaders of the former Confederacy and those who had participated in the slave trade, New York — not exactly a hotbed of Confederate nostalgia — was not an epicenter. City leaders did agree to remove a statue of Theodore Roosevelt from outside a museum, but that was more because of the presentation of the statue itself than anger at Roosevelt specifically. Continue reading.