In my 50-some years of community and political ministry and organizing, I thought I had seen it all. Then, when Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old former DOGE worker and software engineer known online as “Big Balls,” was assaulted in Dupont Circle in a reported carjacking incident, it was déjà vu of Boston and the neighborhood where I lived, Roxbury, being turned upside down again.
I thought I had already seen the worst of white reaction to Blackness, but again I was wrong. Trump and the MAGA/white supremacist chorus used the Coristine incident as justification to argue D.C. is “a city gone wild” that needed to be brought under control.
I listened and heard all of the political hyperbole on the airwaves and in social media that I had heard before. It was another version, I thought, of Raymond Flynn, mayor of Boston during the 1989 Charles Stuart hoax, declaring that it was a “terrible night in Boston” and turning loose the police on the Black community and advancing tactics like “stop and frisk.” As it turned out, of course, Stuart had murdered his own wife, Carol, and blamed it on a Black man.
Lately, I’ve listened and heard once again similar words and statements, this time to justify the Trump-MAGA regime’s initiatives to demonstrate to his white base that at all cost white life will be protected and the Black culprits brought into line. It seems that everyone has conveniently forgotten the feigned genesis that was used to justify this attack upon our city, on our democracy, home-rule in D.C., and civilian government.
I’ve watched and listened as a legal battle unfolded between the Trump administration and D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb over who would be in charge of the new municipal/federal police force. Schwalb took the matter to court, and it was determined that the D.C. Chief of Police would remain in charge, for now. But in compromise the D.C. government bowed to the anti-sanctuary sentiments dictated by the Trump regime.
Trump talked about how dangerous D.C. is and said it is plagued with crime, that visitors fear for their lives, that the parks need to be cleaned up from homeless encampments, Confederate statues needed to be replaced, and the cracked marble on monuments need to be repaired.
Trump stressed the dangers and disrepair of Washington and challenged Mayor Muriel Bowser’s management of the city. Recently, he’s threatened to erase home-rule all together and completely “federalize” the city. Mayor Bowser first attempted to appease the white supremacist Trump regime when it returned to power earlier this year. She dismantled “Black Lives Matter Plaza” on 16th Street NW leading up to the White House, which was created after the murder of George Floyd and Trump’s upside-down Bible photo-op in front of the Episcopal church sitting on the edge of Lafayette Square.
But there would be no appeasement, and the mayor proved how out of step she was in this historical moment by citing crime statistics and the facts about crime rates being down. Trump could care less about crime statistics but offered what happened to “Big Balls” as an example of a threat to all white people. Trump cited the incident as proof of how mismanaged the city is and how dangerous it is to live here.
I am someone who can admit to the dangers of D.C. today, but not in the terms presented by Trump and his band of parrots. D.C. is indeed a dangerous place today—precisely because of its occupation by federal law enforcement and troops.
What I have seen and experienced over the last week has been marked and unmarked cars with masked and unmasked personnel roaming the streets. I have seen their awkwardness and discomfort interacting with the people of D.C. What I have seen and experienced during this brief time has been many different kinds of law enforcement agencies, stopping people for all kinds of concocted offenses.
While driving with a friend a few nights ago, we past at least ten police cars from various agencies, including Secret Service, with a Black man held and handcuffed standing behind a car. He was surrounded by different kinds of cops. I turned the car around, parked it, got out, and went over to question the police on what they were doing.
A D.C. cop who seemed to decide that he was going to be my liaison explained that the man was stopped for driving with tinted windows. The handcuffed man explained and appealed to me, saying that his grandmother, who was seated in the passenger side of the car, needed to get home safely. He continued, saying that he had taken her to dinner and she needed to get home if he was being arrested. The incident drew more than 10 cops. The man eventually was arrested, supposedly because of the windows. The D.C. lieutenant who interfaced with me assured me that he would get the man’s grandmother home.
Another incident I witnessed took place a few days later on a Saturday. Many of us have been running a picket line supporting the boycott of Target in conjunction with the national campaign. The Target picket I help staff is at a store located in an area with a concentration of immigrants. It is the Columbia Heights/Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C.
We have been on the picket line for months, and on 14th Street NW, the street has always been busy with shoppers of diverse populations. Normally the street is lined with grassroots vendors selling all kinds of wares and goods. The immigrant community has shopped there, immigrant vendors sell there, and the street has always been crowded with tents and tables ladened with whatever people were selling.
Over the course of our time picketing Target, and in the last few weeks especially, we have watched the vendors disappear. We have seen the street get quieter, and the shoppers diminish. But on this particular Saturday, as the Target picket line was disbanding, the D.C. police stopped a Latino motorcyclist supposedly for having the tags on his motorcycle turned upward and for illegally parking.
It so happened that I knew one of the D.C. cops and went over to talk to him. He assured me that he was not going to check the immigrant status of the individual. I thanked him for that but admonished the D.C. police for harassing the man in the first place. The cop I knew responded to me that he was under strict orders to stop people for what they would not ordinarily stop them for. I told him that this was a sad state of affairs, and he agreed.
Just then, Homeland Security showed up with other agencies wearing brown uniforms as if they were patrolling in Iraq or Afghanistan. It was then, when those federal law enforcement entities showed up, that the crowd that had been watching the encounter became more vocal, agitated, and were unified in their demands.
With cellphone cameras in hand, people began to yell, “Get the fuck out of here!” “Nobody wants you here!” “Leave hard-working people alone!” and “Get the fuck out of D.C.!” The crowd of onlookers quickly swelled from 10-20 to more than 100 people. They were white, Black, Latino, male, female, young, and old. It was everybody.
And what I realized, as I caught the image of a federal agent in a brown stormtrooper uniform staring threateningly at the crowd with his hand on his hip near his gun, was that his facial expression was almost declaring, “I dare you.” That’s when I saw what was the real threat to the residents of D.C.
As I looked at this anonymous agent with his blue eyes and hostile stare, I realized that he was hoping and wanting something to ‘hop off’ so that the military presence might become thoroughly justified.
I also saw something rare, and that was unity. The jeering crowd yelling at the occupiers, demanding that they get out of D.C., and hurling “F” bombs were unified in their anger, defiance, and solidarity with one another and those being victimized. I saw the mixture of law enforcement responding to minor and nonexistent incidents in D.C. and the unity of the anger from the community towards these occupiers.
It felt like there could easily be some kind of response that takes the form of an uprising. This is not something that I am advocating, but I have seen the defiance and outrage over the presence of federal law enforcement agencies roaming the streets of D.C. and understand how the actions of the latter could precipitate a situation that could quickly get out of hand.
We are witnessing cop stops that would usually entail one or two police cars currently demanding five and ten cars for nonexistent and questionable legal violations. I have seen agents with no identification on them (some of them masked) and National Guard units from states where there is a lack of people of color in the population making those National Guard details even whiter.
I have seen the over-concentration of law enforcement harassing people for no legitimate reason. I have also seen a unity of anger not seen before from the people of Washington, D.C. Combine that with the discomfort many of these law enforcement occupiers display among a racially and culturally diverse population…it’s like striking matches to gasoline.
We all know that an uprising is precisely what the white supremacist MAGA regime wants to see. They want an uprising so that they can call up more troops and take over more cities. We need to be aware of the racial fuse being lit that can be traced back to accusations of Black men raping white women or beating white men. It reaches back to the Charles Stuart hoax that I witnessed and lived through in Roxbury, Mass. The indignity that “Big Balls” experienced has been referenced and represents the global threat of violence to whiteness in the eyes of the administration and its base.
The fuse is being lit in cities where there are Black mayors and in places perceived as largely Black and non-white. They are trying to light the fuse, and the outrage that people are feeling is making every incident a potentially dangerous one. But the danger does not from the residents of D.C. but rather from the occupiers, some in uniform and some not. The occupation is inflaming public anger and could instigate an incident.
This is what I hope doesn’t happen, but at the same time I hope that the sense of defiance and the anger that I have seen will remain intact, vigilant, and unified. And finally, I want to be very clear: This occupation is not an attempt to make our cities safer; it is a step toward martial law.
If you walk or drive around the streets of D.C., you will feel it and see it—this is martial law without the declaration. Whether it is declared or not, the feelings and appearance is the same. We must continue our defiance and resistance, or we will find that the entire country will be changed and made into a dangerous hostile white plantation once again—this time for all of us.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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