Grandstand. The great protest movement which has invested several hundred American cities raises the question of its social and political geography. Pending detailed investigations, it is already possible to make a warm, generational and historical reading, and to draw a political hypothesis.
The first reading concerns the age of the demonstrators. A central feature of the current movement is that it is led by young people (adolescents and young adults). It’s young America who takes to the streets, as in the 1960s, as in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, and in dozens of other cities after the murder of Michael Brown.
"It’s anti-Trump America that is on the street, that of metropolises and medium-sized university towns that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016"
In a way that reminds Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963 (where a thousand black students had been expelled from their school after having participated in movements against racial segregation), the initiative to demonstrate can sometimes come from high school students who take part of the local population with them. Some of the most mobilized high school students are those who organized, last year, demonstrations in favor of the climate, as in several small cities of Vermont. Greta Thunberg mobilized them; George Floyd too. The political socialization of youth woke ((of the verb to wake, "To wake up", to be aware of the injustices which weigh on the minorities) around the environment has undoubtedly prepared the current mobilization. In addition, with the closure of the high schools, the timetable for these young people is freer than in normal times.
Classically, a large number of students are also participating in the movement: Minneapolis is an important university city, as are most major urban centers, but also medium-sized cities such as Charlottesville (Virginia), Bloomington (Indiana ), Austin (Texas) or Gainesville (Florida). Two 19-year-olds, one studying at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), the other at Howard University (Black University of Washington) are behind the demonstration in Oakland (California), June 3, which brought together 15,000 people, unheard of since the 1960s.
Old demonstrative practices
Nationwide, the map of current protests and that of universities are similar. This does not mean that all the demonstrators are young, far from it, but that the university towns have old demonstrations about the rights of minorities, women, migrants, etc., which are quite naturally extended today. , including when the African-American population is very small, as in Seattle or Burlington (Vermont).
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