I didn’t feel compelled to join a “No Kings” protest in June or last weekend, and don’t know any other Black person who had been burning to attend one. But Saturday in New York City, I met a friend from out of state for lunch, and she said afterward that she wanted to attend a protest. So, we went looking for one. While walking toward Union Square, someone randomly handed me a “No Kings” sign. I took it and held it high, becoming a sort of one-woman march — and a target — as we walked 30 blocks. Eventually, we saw a spattering of what was left of the protest at 14th Street. The New York Police Department reported that 100,000 people demonstrated across all five boroughs, but our late arrival meant we had missed the thousands that had crowded the square.
What are they going to do now that this demonstration is over?
Where were they now? I wondered. And, more importantly, what are they going to do now that this demonstration is over?
As for my friend and I, we heard a few speakers, and then we wandered away.
There were reportedly more than 2,700 “No Kings” protests across the U.S., and organizers said nearly seven million people participated. That is far smaller than the 15 million to 26 million people who told pollsters they protested George Floyd’s murder in 2020. And even though more people appear to have attended Saturday’s protest than the up to five million people believed to have attended the Women’s March the day after Donald Trump’s first inauguration in 2017, it’s my assessment that “No Kings” doesn’t match the other two in power.
Within the Black community, one heard lots of comments suggesting that the “No Kings” protest was not something we should bother with. LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, pushed back against that idea in a Monday interview with “Here and Now.” However, even as she argued that she didn’t think Black people should withdraw participation from “No Kings” events, Brown did say that Black women are saying, “We will no longer be the shock absorbers for all the pain that happens politically in this country.”
Brown spoke about the frustration of Black women always being expected to be on the frontlines and leading the charge “challenging patriarchy” and “these racist systems.”
There’s no clear sense of what percentage of Saturday’s seven million protesters were Black or how many typically engaged Black people deliberately decided against participating Saturday, but it struck me Saturday that there are at least two major reasons Black people aren’t really bothering with the “No Kings” protests.
First, “No Kings” seems like an attempt for white America to figure out something about itself, namely the relationship between whiteness, white supremacy and democracy. While I’m not convinced white Americans can do that work without Black people, many of us just refuse to make ourselves available to spell out this relationship for the umpteenth time. The people organizing and attending “No Kings” protests want to make these protests about universal democratic values, as if whiteness has not always been the great challenge to those values. Whiteness and its allies created the mess we’re in; so white people need to get serious about their collective behavior and forms of resistance that can truly meet this moment.
Second, and as importantly, “No Kings” is not disruptive enough to build the sort of momentum that social change requires. It feels like a type of collective action that lacks teeth. Saturday’s protest, at least the one in Manhattan, took place on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, not, say, on a Monday or Tuesday when more people would have had to walk out of work or school, or when city streets would have been hopelessly gridlocked with traffic. We need solidarity, and the “No Kings” protests are not without value, but they seem woefully inadequate at the moment. The goal shouldn’t be just to gather in large numbers on a weekend, but to make the Trump administration and its corporate allies feel the political blowback of trying to push a king on us. Think back to ABC’s decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel for comments that followed Charlie Kirk being killed, and how swiftly people canceled streaming subscriptions of its parent company Disney until Kimmel’s show was returned to air. Why was Kimmel the cause célèbre? And why was only a few days of economic punishment for the corporate elite the response? Unless we intend for them to only be symbolic, marches demand more of us — think French political protests — and they are far from the only form of collective action available to us. Come up with a collective action that doesn’t disregard the problems inflicted on Black people in particular, and more Black people might join. The Black community has been engaged in various economic boycotts and what MSNBC host Al Sharpton and his National Action Network calls “buy-cotts” for most of this year. The NAACP has listed on its website the names of companies that have pulled back their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, policies and a list of companies that have continued their commitment, as a prompt to what consumers should do. Imagine if the white majority joined the Black community, not for a weekend but for the long haul. Or came up with their own that lasted longer than a handful of days. Come up with a collective action that has more bite and that doesn’t ignore and disregard the problems that have been inflicted on Black people in particular, and more Black people just might join in large-scale protests such as “No Kings.” To Brown’s point, I’m not saying we’re going to run to the frontlines — when we protest we’re called rioters and are met with guns drawn — but if we see protesters remain committed and not only to the issues that affect them personally, then we might make ourselves more available to a wider public fight.
Robyn Autry
Robyn Autry is a sociology professor and director of the Center for the Study of Public Life at Wesleyan University. She is the author of “Desegregating the Past: The Public Life of Memory in the U.S. and South Africa.” 
