Why So Many Protests Play Out on Highways
To march on a highway is to declare bravery in the face of danger — and an unwillingness to lose
Residence in America requires interaction with its vast network of highways. Yet the American highway system, born to defend against foreign military attacks and to transport commodities, is redundant. America and its highways are synonyms for each other; both narrative-based, costly, and destructive. This summer we’ve seen elected officials, and the judges they appoint, stretch every sense of the law to maintain white power structures, and we’ve seen how nervous they get when the people stretch our own power, moving from our streets to the highways. If nervousness is a barometer for the values held by those in seated power, then our use of highways as a means of protest is right, a simultaneous formal and informal opposition to imperialism and trade, an opposition to America.
On what would have been Breonna Taylor’s 27th birthday, June 5, I participated in a die-in at San Jose City Hall. Five thousand of us pressed our bodies into the ground for eight minutes and forty six seconds, the same amount of time Minneapolis police officer Derrick Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd. Finished with the scheduled proceedings, a woman with a bullhorn turned to the crowd, still energized, and…
