Marching Down Gravier Street

Clarise Quintero

photo credit: Clarisse Quintero

Last week, my cousins and I packed up our car with signs and masks and headed downtown. There was a kind of charge in the air, mixed with New Orleans’ typical humidity—an electricity that would hum throughout the day. We met up with a group of friends and joined the assemblage of people raising signs like flags above their heads: 

Say Their Names

Defund the Police

Black Lives Matter

The atmosphere remained charged equally with sorrow and hope. All of us tried to joke with each other, to help us keep calm, to keep our minds off the looming, but not as of yet present, threat of tear gas and rubber bullets. We’d been lucky. New Orleanian protestors hadn’t yet met the aggressive resistance that other cities had. But we prepared for the possibility. We knew we were protesting for something more worthwhile than haircuts.

Marching down Gravier Street, I couldn’t stop my mind from wandering back to the summer of 2016. I was a high school sophomore in San Jose, California, a largely white and affluent tech enclave in the Bay Area. Throughout most of my education, I was either the only black kid in my class or one out of three. Because of that, whenever an issue like police violence, or even just the question of the how much racism persisted in even the most liberal parts of the United States, my opinion was often either overlooked or seen as excessive—too farfetched for my white peers to comprehend, much less see for themselves. To put it bluntly, I was outnumbered.

Rather than fight, my education instructed me to hold my tongue. When Trayvon Martin was murdered by George Zimmerman, I created a presentation on Black Lives Matter; and in history class, I examined the history of the Ku Klux Klan, but in both cases, my teacher encouraged me to focus on the positives. But what positive can you find in a black boy shot dead in cold blood? What positive is there in white crowds posing for photos in front of hanging black bodies?

I was either seen as the angry black girl or the token black girl—there was no in-between.

But that sophomore year was an awakening. Not because of some suddenly enlightened high school curriculum, but because two black men – Philando Castile and Alton Sterling – were gunned down by the police two days apart. To see the same crime committed with impunity one after the other in two separate parts of the country was a stark representation of what it means to be black in America.

Once we heard that a Black Lives Matter protest had been organized in San Francisco, my friend and I hyped each other up, hopped into her car and headed to the city. Fueled by teenage bravado, and a recklessness that masked our fear, we found our way into the crowd. It was an awakening. We were young enough to believe that this protest was going to change the world—securing for black people that promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As we marched toward City Hall, we still couldn’t help but be nervous. Despite feeling emboldened, we were nonetheless carrying our anger at what we and our friends and our families and strangers had suffered through. The signs around us called for justice. On them were written the names of those who had been lost. To reflect on the names was to fall into tears. So, we cried.

But then we chanted. We yelled and we screamed and the wind moved with us as our voices raised together. We held strangers’ hands, locking arms to transform our bodies into walls, a resistance, a movement. We screamed, we raged. We grew up. 

All we wanted was the rights we had been promised. We wanted to walk down the street without feeling anxious at the approach of a police officer. We wanted to leave a store without being accused of theft. We wanted to be what we were: teenagers. Teenagers who enjoyed the same freedoms as non-black teens.

To be a black child in America is to know that your skin color can be used as a justification to harm you, or even kill you. My friends and I were tired of having to live with that burden. That summer in 2016 was the first time in my life where I felt like that burden had been lifted.

It didn’t take long for that youthful optimism to wither on the vine. More black people were shot in the years to come, and the energy behind the movement had seemed to wane. And all around me was the evidence of institutionally-endorsed and supported racism, white supremacy, and historical revisionism. Its legacy was everywhere, including around the campus of the college I would soon attend, Loyola University in New Orleans. It was just before I began attending that a Loyola economics professor named Walter Block (who somewhat famously authored Defending the Undefendable: The Pimp, Prostitute, Scab, Slumlord, Libeler, Moneylender, and Other Scapegoats in the Rogue's Gallery of American Society) was quoted describing slavery as “not so bad.”

His dog-whistle quote, which he described as “out of context” (though he was also notorious for relishing in insulting and inflammatory remarks, including statements he made against women and the Take Back the Night movement) seemed tame compared to what happened in the fall of 2016, when a frat house at Tulane University, Loyola’s literal next-door neighbor, surrounded their house in sandbags covered in anti-immigrant slogans and the words Make America Great Again spray-painted across the length. I wasn’t there for these scandals, but they laid the groundwork that at the very least tolerated and at the very worst cultivated an environment shot through with micro- or full-aggressions for students of color.

This isn’t unique to these universities. This is just the experience of day-to-day life as a black person. To this day I still get anxious if I leave a store without buying anything. I still get nervous around police officers. I even have a shortcut on my phone that will immediately and automatically text my friend a video of our encounter in case something happens. How many young white girls have even heard an app like that?

I watched George Floyd die. Just like I watched Alton Sterling die and Philando Castile die and Sandra Bland moments before her death. They were all murdered for being black, a mark that made them suspect in the eyes of police and the public. I broke when I learned how Breonna Taylor, a medic – one of those first responders we keep thanking and thanking in the middle of this pandemic – was shot eight times while asleep in her bed.

So, it was in once again mourning the unjustified taking of black lives that despite the lockdown, despite the pandemic raging around me, I’d have to go out and protest. It was my duty, called to arms to fight for the country I dreamed of – a country that guaranteed equal protection under the law and equal opportunity for life, liberty, and that pursuit of happiness – and against the country in which I lived. A country whose systems had been designed and reinforced to suppress, to deny, the right to life of people who look like me.

Our protests last week ended peacefully. To leave was bittersweet. The car was filled with silence as we drove home. We were satisfied with the work that was done, but still eager to continue the fight.

In that silence, I thought of my mother. She attended the Million Women March in Philadelphia in 1997, advancing the cause of equal rights of African American women. It was my mother who not only educated me in the power of protesting structural inequality but who modeled through her actions the way a young woman like me can be a part of something greater.

The names of the remembered dead have changed. The circumstances have shifted and I have grown a little older, but I still feel that same feeling I had when I was sixteen: that we are at a turning point, that change is possible. What started as mourning for George Floyd has grown into a movement against the injustices perpetrated against people of color worldwide. The air feels charged.

Clarise Quintero is an emerging writer and junior at Loyola University in New Orleans. She has loved writing and literature for most of her life and hopes to use her voice as a writer to spread awareness on social justice issues. She livesUptown and spends most of her time, like the rest of us, indoors, reading, baking, or doing yoga. @beenacq