‘Joy is the revolution.’ Boise activists seek to reclaim a fraught protest narrative
On Sunday afternoon, a procession of a few hundred dancing, singing people curved through the streets of Boise’s North End neighborhood, as the music blaring from the lead car drew surprised residents to their front doors and yards.
At one point, Boise State University student Ryann Banks jumped to the front of the parade as it paused at an intersection.
“Whose joy matters?” she asked the crowd. “Black joy matters!”
A group of Black Idahoans, Boise activists and members of the new advocacy nonprofit Inclusive Idaho planned the weekend celebration to allow community members a chance for respite amid a pandemic and protests and to “overcome injustice with joy.” In a model one of the organizers, Boise resident Rashad Peniston, drew from similar events in Salt Lake City, participants reclaimed an outside narrative that can cast all racial equality movements as negative or violent and tried to raise community awareness about the “positive aspects of Black realities” in a climate that can focus on Black suffering.
The main message — and theme — was simple: Joy is the revolution.
“Against all odds and in the face of perpetual and corrupt attempts to ensure our marginalization and erasure, we are still here,” Austin Foudy, the community outreach director for Inclusive Idaho, told the crowd gathered at Camel’s Back Park. “We are still here, and we are still Black.”
The event was also intended to provide a space for people who had felt unsafe attending previous events because of counterprotesters or a lack of social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. Several families with young children were present.
Organizers advertised the event quietly in an effort to avoid attention and attendance from counterprotesters, and all attendees were required to wear masks and practice social distancing. Although organizers and leaders were largely people of color, most of the crowd was white.
In May, thousands of masked Idahoans joined an emotional candlelight vigil in front of the Idaho State Capitol building mourning George Floyd and other Black lives lost to police violence. The night was only briefly marred by tension between Black Lives Matter supporters and counterprotesters — but long after vigil organizers left and urged attendees of the vigil to leave as well.
But that wasn’t always the case in other rallies, especially as online rumors about the presence of Antifa everywhere from Boise to Payette to Coeur d’Alene drew many other Idahoans to patrol protests with firearms. In many cases, Idaho police departments addressed these rumors directly, urging locals to verify information before they shared it or acted on it.
During one rally in June, Black Lives Matter protesters claimed they were attacked by people in a crowd of counterprotesters outside Boise City Hall, some of whom were armed. Other counter protesters shouted “white power” and “heil Hitler” at the protesters who were calling to defund the police, and some in the crowd had patches and tattoos with SS Bolts, the symbol for Schutzstaffel, a common white supremacist/neo-Nazi marking.
Boise police eventually charged at least one Nampa man with assault.
The mood of the parade and event couldn’t have been more different from the sometimes fraught rallies of the past months. Before the parade began, leaders urged participants not to engage with negative reactions, but there were few. Boise police officers were intermittently present on the outskirts of the crowd, but an officer only stepped in once to ask the crowd to move to one side of the road when the parade began encountering heavy traffic.
“We raised a lot of questions and now people are going to have to look at us in a different light, so I’m just excited,” said Nisha Newton, one of the organizers. “The narrative has been negative, and so I’m excited for it to really reflect us.”
As the group passed families walking their dogs, standing on their porches or confused residents poking their heads over backyard fences, many cheered, filmed on their phones or joined the parade themselves.
“For so many people, the movement is on their Instagrams,” Boise resident Kiah Jones told the Statesman after the parade. “And I’m like, it’s not! It’s here.”
When the parade of participants returned to where they started at Camel’s Back Park, Newton — who wore pants painted with the phrase “no more martyrs” — addressed the crowd.
“That joy was infectious,” Newton said. “But like the good kind — not the COVID kind!”
This story was originally published August 11, 2020 at 8:12 AM with the headline "‘Joy is the revolution.’ Boise activists seek to reclaim a fraught protest narrative."
