Crowd singing- "Hands up, please don't shoot me."
Crowd chanting- "Feds stay clear, moms are here."
In terms of what sort of reaction they've received,
I think it's been positive if not a little mixed.
So from other protesters, I think the idea is,
they are taking up a lot of attention and space.
And there's a fear that they sort of wouldn't be there
if it hadn't been for the federal troops- that their real,
their real aim is the Trump administration and the federal troops
and if it had just been about Black Lives Matter . that they wouldn't have shown up.
And I think that's a legitimate concern-
That sort of these white suburban women show up . not for all causes of injustice,
but only for select ones.
It's a fascinating thing when you start digging-
how many times, and in how many ways and in how many places
the motherhood identity has been deployed, and it turns out,
there's an extensive history of motherhood being . deployed for political purposes.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving is one of the most prominent ones in the US.
It's long running, it's respected and well known.
It's not typically on the frontline of protests,. but there's lots of other organizing.
You'll see the the Mothers of the Movement, right, which is the
group of mothers who have had children killed either from police violence
or some kind of racist vigilante violence.
So Trayvon Martin's mother is a part of it,
Michael Brown's mother is a part of it,
The Mothers of the Movement are a small group of women
who go out and they make political claims on behalf of Black Lives Matter
and sort of ending police violence in general.
They they are their Black women and so we don't,
they don't get a lot of big media attention in the way the wall of moms does.
But they certainly are making the same kinds of claims about
"These are our children our kids are at risk."
But even going back further, so Mother's Day
starts as a political statement by a peace activist who,
her name is Anna Jarvis and she her mother had been a peace activist
following the Civil War and had taken care of
Civil War soldiers from both sides and just was horrified by war.
And so when her mother died, she,
Anna Jarvis said we need political action against war
in the name of the mothers who have to watch their kids die.
So Mother's Day actually has an interesting movement,
a social movement history that we don't often talk about
now that it's just sort of "Oh send your mom a card and some flowers."
It has a really politically pointed history.
And then internationally,
there have been movements of mothers in
Sri Lanka and South Africa.
There's a very famous long running
movement of mothers called
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina.
Excuse my terrible Spanish.
And they first came together in the 1970s
protesting the military regime there
and their disappeared children. They were a group of
you know, of a dozen, maybe a few more mothers who
found each other in, in the court system
and just trying to figure out what happened to their children
who had been killed by the military.
And they started protesting in the biggest, most public square.
They would wear white scarves, and they would
carry pictures of their children who had been disappeared.
And they would very publicly criticize
the government at a time when nobody else could
when it was was a death sentence to question or protest against the government.
The government for at least a while felt like they couldn't do anything
about it because they were relying on this idea that
their government was going to bring back
safe families and that they were doing this for, you know,
family values kind of argument and so to-
they couldn't gun down a bunch of mothers.
So the idea that,
you know, they they did fire at moms,
they did tackle moms,
The federal troops did all of these things
to women who were their self professed as moms.
And so then those women go out
and they talk to the news, and they talk to their friends, and they talk to their churches
and they say, "Listen, you know,
you all... you all who were not protesters thought
'Oh, those are just some troublemakers downtown,'
when in fact, they said we weren't doing anything wrong,
and it happened to us.
So we can't trust this narrative that these protesters are just troublemakers.
Right, they can bring this sort of personal
bearing witness to the violence from federal troops or from police.
And that's a really effective thing.
And they don't get that attention if they're not
deployed as moms
right if that identity isn't of a mom isn't right up front.
It's a really effective strategy.
