Can We Have a Party?

In June 2020, a friend and I were walking to a Black Lives Matter protest in Columbus, Ohio. Pristine downtown storefronts with boarded-up windows made things feel fake-apocalyptic. Then we heard the sound of glass smashing and people screaming. My friend wanted to leave, but I insisted we turn the corner to see what was happening. We stuck our heads past the faux-brick wall and saw no one. The screaming and window-smashing cut to dialogue. It was coming from a television in someone’s apartment. The protest, when we found it, was also an overproduced phantasm. Mainly, my memory is of people with signs marching around a blond and smooth-faced boy who lounged atop a shiny Mustang, phone in hand, chains glittering in the ringlight. As an outlet for collective outrage, the protest was very successful. It endures as a feeling captured in iPhone videos that no doubt garnered millions of views on that blond boy’s TikTok. But other than setting a moral agenda, the protests of the 2010s and 2020s achieved no tangible political outcome. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act never made it through the Senate, and the post-2020 police department budget cuts have been restored, even augmented. Police violence has increased; in 2019, cops killed 1,098 people. In 2024, that number was 1,271. But Jeff Bezos, defender of “personal liberties” in the Washington Post, did (let’s not forget!) redraw the Amazon logo to say “Black Lives Matter” in June 2020.