The Enormous Scale of This Movement
A child sat on her father’s shoulders, squinted through layers of new fencing separating the White House from protesters, and asked, “Where’s Trump?” Demonstrators chanted “George Floyd!” in the tunnel under K Street so loudly that the name echoed through the length of the underpass. Streams of sign-carriers seemed to arrive at the White House from every direction, all day, and kept coming, coming, coming.
The demonstrations that have seized America’s cities, towns, and villages, including the nation’s capital, have no national leader. There are only people, hundreds of thousands of them, spilling into streets, clogging , and filling . Nor does the movement have a single objective. The demonstrations are in the service of a constellation of hyperlocal and national goals, from small, material targets like tearing down statues of racist men that literally loom large over communities, to a whole-scale reimagining of how law enforcement
