Lots of people got opinions on riots and protests and I wanted to share my experience real fast.

I've been to several protests, so let me clear up some things.

TW: abortion, fetuses
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story begins in next tweet:

My first ever REAL protest was at my Alma Mater.They had given permission to a pro-life group to do canvasing on campus, without clearing what they wanted to canvas. I was horrified to find out that this group plastered imagery of aborted tissue everywhere to 'show' how bad it is

The rub is that they wanted to do this in February, to show 'solidarity' with black communities because they wanted to talk about how we have the most abortions so it was their role to 'help us abort less.'

The Black Cultural Center chapter got together and we did a peaceful protest. We showed up and they agreed to a meeting where they wanted to talk about how they handled it.

It was.....not productive.

Emotions were high, but what was most jarring was the leader of this group and the person who made the executive decision-a young white man-grew increasingly angry with us when we kept trying to inform him that what he was doing was disrespectful to history and black community.

He made it clear how he didn't care that it disrespected us, that it warped history to make it sound like we just were animals that loved to have promiscuous sex and evade responsibility-his goal was saving babies.

We shouted back 'not at the expense of our autonomy you won't.'

They then tried to bargain with us.
The offer: they say they were sorry our feelings got hurt but they get to keep spreading their message.

Nah.

When this hit the school paper (one of which I still have a copy of!) pro-lifers found our Facebook pages and harassed us. I had a guy make a fake profile who then made a Go Fund Me dedicated to me and called it 'Ugly Girl Needs Plastic Surgery'.

It had a picture of me and the Boy, with a bio that said 'this girl clearly so bitter, stupid, and angry because she's irredeemably ugly-I'm sure if we fix her face she'll be happier!'

And people donated to it.

Luckily, I had friends who worked faster than the trolls and not only got the Go Fund me shut down, but also got the FB profile pulled since none of the info on it was real.

This was my *first* protest.

This was the 'peaceful protest'.

A month later the posters came down.....because that's how long they had permission to keep them up. The group leaders and heads did absolutely nothing with the information we freely shared with them.

We didn't get mad, we didn't get angry, we didn't throw chairs or books or slurs.

We also got exactly zero results and significantly more frustration that we started with, as Purdue did *nothing* to address it.

This is your reminder: they blindly *cleared* it to go forward. When they saw how horrible it turned out to be, they turned the other way and shrugged.

Some years later, my friend Joe and I went to a resistance rally here in Indianapolis.

CW: BLM harassment, police brutality, racism
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ok.

We got clearance from the city to protest in downtown Indy for 3.5 hours. We followed everything by the book. Streets were barricaded, and traffic-goers were warned accordingly. This was when Trump first got elected.

I want to highlight that we had clearance for 3.5 hours. We started at 7:30pm and were given permissions until 11pm. That was the cut off.

That we were told.

When it hit around 10:15pm, we started noticing a shift in the police. They started getting more aggressive, more pushy. They were trying to shoo us off the roads.

to be clear this wasn't a BLM SPECIFIC protest. This was a catch all Trump Resistance rally.

So you could imagine our confusion, when a cop on horseback started pushing all of us to move forward and faster to 'finish things up'-we still had a good 45 minutes!

......right?

Well, one of the horseback cops decided he was done with it, and started waving traffic to go.

A man in a F150 actually almost ran through our entire crowd. The cop let him get just close enough to touch a few of the girls in the group. But didn't let him gas past that.

So....one of the women called it out.
"Why are you letting that truck hit us?"

We were told to keep moving.

"Why are you letting a truck hit us?!"

Keep moving.

"Sir this man has made it clear if given the word he will run us over. Why are you letting them do this?"

Nothing.

Then a car did break through.

No one got hit, but a car got through.
It became chaos, immediately.

I watched first hand as most of the people there-white-buckled immediately. The protest became "too much", and we were just being unruly. We were being unfair.

Out of nowhere.

They went from shouting 'we will resist!' to throwing their signs away and shaking the cops' hands.

The same ones who danced with letting a truck run us over.
The same ones who legally gave a man permission to run us over 'but not really.'

So, the crowd was mad now. And the ones who took to action?

The BLM women.

10:30pm. 30 minutes left.

Cops started grabbing their batons and calling cars that they had stationed around corners on standby. They told us we were over our time and we needed to leave.

the women stood their ground and did nothing.
The cops said 'move or we will make you move.'
they stood their ground.

I cannot make it more clear that these women

did not
do
anything

but stand.

And then a cop charged at them.

and when that cop charged, a woman went down.
Then another.

Then a third, and a fourth. They hit the third and fourth with their batons.

They did nothing, but were struck, then handcuffed and thrown in a TRUCK.

Not a car: a TRUCK.

A TRUCK: as in they had full plans and intentions to snatch up and arrest people that night. And the people they arrested?

They were all black women.

10:48pm. We start to disperse.

As we're leaving, I heard someone get really shrill and agitated. A woman was being interviewed against her will, and was trying to get the reporter to leave her alone: she was tired, angry and above all of that, she was pregnant.

I stepped in.

I told him he needs to leave her alone, and he looked at me and said 'but why? If she's going to be out here protesting she should be ready to defend what she has to say! She shouldn't have came out if she wasn't ready to defend herself!'

Y'all.

I was
f u r i o u s.

So I said 'nah, your fight is with me now. I have time.' To which he tried to pigeonhole me into saying that I thought abusing cops was OK, that I thought breaking laws was OK (reminder: we were told 11pm by city officials), and that I *embraced* violence.

I answered his questions and focused only on him...until I noticed tat he had drew his recorder from her-to me. At no stage did I consent to being recorded, and I caught wind of who he was-a local newscaster that pushed a heavy libertarian publication here.

I pushed it away.

His grip on it was loose. It flew from his hand and hit the ground, popping out batteries and the casing in a nearby sewer drain.

Before I could even say 'oh geez, I'm sorry'-a cop watching stepped up and said 'sir would you like me to arrest her for physical assault?'

??!!!

I want to make it clear what happened here: he did not ask for police assistance.

The cop waited for a prime moment to step in and OFFER to arrest me for physical assault. He was WAITING for the opportunity to arise. He had already decided he wanted to arrest me.

But of course he did, because look at who was in his truck already.

Before I could even fully grasp what was happening, the reporter immediately agreed, and the cop plus one other were gunning straight for me.

Blessup to the antifa kid who happened to be behind me that stepped in IMMEDIATELY.

Who looked the cop dead in the face and said 'she didn't do a damn thing wrong and you know it-so if you taking her you taking all of us.' My friend Joe was mortified.

The cops backed off immediately and labeled it a waste of time. The reporter got mad because I got to go home.

The next day, my friend Brian called me up and said 'hey, didn't you say you were at a protest last night?'

'yea. Why?'
'because there's a reporter on this podcast talking about it and when he got to the part about 'this short, ghetto, loudmouthed heathen that destroyed his mic' I got concerned. did you see anything?'
'........I think...that's me....'
'VANESSA WHAT'

It was hours y'all.

Hours and I went from defending this pregnant woman that was being serially harassed by this man and accidentally knocking out his recorder to a 'loudmouth, ghetto, heathen' who was responsible for him not getting any more footage.

The clips he uploaded made us all sound like we didn't nothing but fight, start shit, and were of the utmost delirium.

He did.....exactly what I thought he would.

And I almost got arrested for it.

When I got home, Paul wanted me to swear to not do anymore protests. I told him I couldn't do that.

These are those PEACEFUL PROTESTS y'all are supposedly talking about.

Peaceful protests are tools that are made for cis/het/able/white people, by cis/het/able/white people.

It's why my misunderstanding almost got me jail time but men twice my size and 4x as loud and angry don't even get cuffed.

I know y'all want to believe peaceful protest works, but if it did?

Stonewall wouldn't have been bricks in the bar.
MLK wouldn't have been beaten, thrown in jail, then assassinated.
Pride wouldn't have it's roots in literal RESISTANCE.

And I want y'all to notice who consistently takes the brunt of the abuse and pain in these protests.

It's the protestors.

So why are y'all shocked and surprised when, after seeing our bodies splayed in the street *yet again* that it goes further in to rioting?

Our bodies trampled over for pipelines, our bodies abused because we just want to marry our partners, our bodies discarded because 'you know, we just don't like you.'

Of course we're mad.

but that you would look at things so grotesque, so tragic, and observe the history around change widespread, and go

'.....but does it HAVE to include looting and rioting? :c
that trash can didn't do anything :c '

is some of the nastiest, most privileged, and non-nuanced takes.

This excessively long thread is only TWO of my peaceful protest stories. These are the ones that stood out.

The one where my alma mater allowed a pro-life group to traumatize everyone on campus with legally, and the time I almost got ran over by a damn F150 and arrested.

Peaceful protests are easier to control and coral from an oppressor standpoint. They can throw legalities at you, and make any reason to shut you down if they want. It's why the protestors for #GeorgeFloydMurder were met with tear gas in a pandemic.

Read that again.

They teargassed peaceful protestors in the middle of a pandemic.

They forced people to forgo their ability to breathe or engage exposure to a virus that could put them down for days, weeks, or permanently.

The way you get people to heed action is to start fighting back.
History shows this.

Throw fucking bricks if you have to.
Because right now?

A lot of y'all are more pressed about a stolen TV than you are the three bodies (which could've been four) and it's not it.

I just....

I am just hoping that we can see at least one change, god just ONE, before this lifetime ends. And right now?

Those odds are looking bleak.