White chicks up front!

Tim Druck

From the London Review of Books:

White Shields

Neve Gordon, Nicola Perugini

At a protest in Louisville, Kentucky, last month---the city where Breonna Taylor was murdered by police on 13 March---Chanelle Helm, a leading organiser in the local Black Lives Matter group, turned to the white protesters with a loudhailer. ‘If you are going to be here,’ she said, ‘you should defend this space.’

The white protesters---most of them women---linked arms and formed a line between the black protesters and the police. 

Tim Druck, a local photographer, took a picture. It went viral after the Kentucky National Organisation for Women and other groups shared it on social media.

Another tweet that went viral at the end of May was by Virgil Cent:

I think the craziest thing I witnessed today on the frontlines was Black People yelling ‘White Shield’ when the police were blocking and pushing us back. The white people moved to the front and protected us + the cops became less violent like wow wtf

Human shields used to be known as ‘human screens’, and they are screens in a double sense: not only a form of protection, but a surface on which something can be projected and made visible. 

The appearance of human shields can help to illuminate the political and legal order---and thus the inequities---of any society...

Rob's comment:

In a few anti-war demonstrations during the US attack on Vietnam, I heard the call by some guys as the police approached, "Chicks up front," as a tactic to mitigate potential police violence. 

But the call was seen as a joke and greeted with laughter. In my experience, unlike the above, it was a tactic never actually used by the anti-war movement.

Rob Rogers