No Justice, No Peace: How Stuyvesant Students and Teachers are Protesting

People want justice. In all five boroughs, outraged New Yorkers are making posters, masking up (hopefully), and heading onto the streets in droves. People pump their fists in the air and chant the names of black men and women who have died at the hands of the police. They hold their renderings of Floyd up high—Floyd in pencil, Floyd with a halo and wings, Floyd in watercolor. Peaceful images.

“It was very positive. It was very calm. We were gathered peacefully,” senior Lydia Burke said of a protest near the Manhattan Bridge that she attended on the night of May 30. Burke, who has attended three different protests across the city, has observed that the protests tend to become violent when the police arrive: “As soon as the police officers came, they were the ones who started agitating the crowd and making something very peaceful not peaceful at all.” Burke herself was shoved by the police at the Barclays Center protest on Friday night. “I felt two very strong hands shove me in the back directly forward, and I would have fallen flat on my face in the stampede if there hadn’t been people in front of me. The cops started using their bikes as weapons. I definitely didn’t feel safe,” she said. “I want to show people that even non-violent protestors can be subject to police brutality.”

Other protestors had a more positive experience with the police. “A lot of the police were people of color. They mostly just stayed to the side and watched the protest go by,” said junior Max Kahn, who attended a protest at the Barclays Center on June 1. Still, the sight of police was a bit of a shiver-trigger for him. “It was almost scary to look at [the police] just because you’ve seen so many videos of the awful [EXPLETIVE] that cops have done.” For Kahn, attending the protests was a matter of leaving a historical footprint. “This is history,” he said. “This is a moment that will go down. You’ll look back and tell your kids about when this was happening. What do you want to say to them?”

Other student protestors were thinking less about the next generation. “I went to the protests because I felt that it was important for me to do so at least once,” senior Adrian Dickson wrote in an email interview. “It’s a cause that I believe in wholeheartedly both as a black person and an American citizen, and though I may only be one person, everyone should feel empowered to do what they can for what they believe in.”

Others think differently. “What qualifications do YOU have to change the world?” asked an anonymous male sophomore (referred to as Anonymous), perhaps rhetorically, in an email interview. To him, teenagers need to learn the rules of the game before they call it rigged. “I don’t believe in youth protesting. How can someone who hasn't graduated from high school, has not developed emotionally, mentally, or physically, and has not faced any real hardships completely understand the crux of the issue?” Anonymous also disputes the idea that in-the-streets protests are the only way to make a change: “The idea the only way to change the world is by protesting is wrong. Instead of protesting, you can focus on school, graduate, get a job, advance your job, be in a position of power, and then change the system.”

Protesting is a possible way, though not the only way, of creating lasting change. Education, too, can create change. “The most important step for teachers and for anybody is to learn and to educate themselves, to understand the history and the context that this is happening in,” Assistant Principal of English Eric Grossman said. “Everyone is entitled to come to their own conclusions about the best course of action. Those conclusions ought to be informed by awareness of the context.” To Grossman, learning is constructive in a way that looting is not. “I understand why this level of frustration can result in all kinds of destructive behavior. I get that. That doesn’t mean that [looting] is justified,” he said.

Others are able to excuse not just the motives behind violent protests but also the violent protests themselves. “When I found out that they were burning down the police precinct, I wasn’t like ‘Oh no, this is awful.’ I was more like, ‘This is how you fight the oppressor,’” Kahn said.

But protests, violent or not, can come with unintended side-effects, especially in the midst of a pandemic. Standing in solidarity (at least physically) might not be a wise choice with a virus on the loose. “I suspect coronavirus cases will spike in one to two weeks,” Anonymous predicted. “There will be new outbreaks across the U.S. because of protests. It could lead to a second wave of cases and deaths.”

Fortunately, not all fights for justice have to be fought hand-to-hand. Technology makes the battle possible from home. “Make phone calls. Sign petitions. Education. Awareness,” Kahn said. “Don’t continually repost stuff and say you’re really serving something.”

Grossman, too, cautioned against patting yourself on the back for reposting a few Black Lives Matter posts here and there. “What I tend not to think is that helpful is virtue signaling on social media,” he said. “Social media can spread knowledge, but I think it is also really easy for people to post something and feel ‘That’s it. I’ve done my work.’ That doesn’t require much of them ultimately.”

For protestors looking for #change, this is just the beginning.