What’s the next move when the powers-that-be are determined to come down on you like a ton of bricks?

You can run for cover.  You can go along with it.  You can try to muster violence to meet violence.

Or you can do what Washington, DC’s Mayor Muriel Bowser did—counter with a curve ball mightier than all troops from the 82nd Airborne that the Trump administration has threatened to unleash on the citizenry demanding racial justice in the wake of the execution of George Floyd.

Mayor Bowser’s counter-offensive?  An art project. 

But not just any art project. 

BLACK LIVES MATTER was slathered in massive yellow lettering on 16th Street just north of the White House, beginning at 4 a.m. today, Friday, June 5.  For good measure, she officially renamed the street “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” 

Deploying artist Simone Leigh and her crew, Bowser made her point loud and clear with the bold street display spanning two large city blocks and stretching from sidewalk to sidewalk.  It was installed on what would have been the 27th birthday of Breonna Taylor, who was killed by officers of the Louisville Metro Police Department in March.

With this action, the mayor publicly repudiated the administration’s plans to militarily occupy the nation’s capital, a position she had formally conveyed in a letter to the president the day before, where she explained that she was ending the city’s state of emergency and raised strong concerns about “unidentified federal personnel patrolling the streets” of the city. 

But, even more, she turned the tables symbolically.  Where Trump this week declared that the protesters clamoring for racial justice are “terrorists,” Washington’s mayor dramatically reversed this appraisal.  With one pointed gesture, she not only vindicated the activists who, at great risk, have mobilized in Lafayette Park—a former slave market which the president cleared with flash-bang violence last Monday night—but also those who have poured out into the streets in hundreds of cities across the United States and around the world.

It is unusual for a government, even a city government, to champion a movement.  It shows that, in this fraught and unprecedented moment, the unusual can become “a thing.”  But it shows more than this.  It hints at the genius of the phrase, which crystalizes in three words the powerful and obvious point—obvious, but so thoroughly contested since 1619. 

As the philosopher Schopenhauer once said, truth passes through three phases. First it is belittled and ridiculed. Second it is fiercely and violently opposed. And third it becomes self-evident.  For four hundred years, this process has been a long road of terror and suffering, moving from one stage to the next, and back again. It has so much further to go, a road inflicted on those wrenched from Africa and their descendants by the haughty privilege and cruelty of white supremacy.

BLACK LIVES MATTER boldly occupies the street to the White House. It is not the end of the road, but this street is a little stretch of this long, historic road that boldly declares the self-evident truth that a culture of violent injustice has refused to acknowledge. 

It is great public art, but it is also a kind of nonviolent action, which perhaps will contribute—through its bold enunciation of the obvious facts—to a tipping point for the monumental, concrete steps needed to achieve the racial justice so long denied in these United States.

As if to remind us that this public art installation has emerged in the midst of the fraught realities of our complicated time, Black Lives Matter D.C. today tweeted out its concerns: “This is performative and a distraction from her active counter organizing to our demands to decrease the police budget and invest in the community. Black Lives Matter means Defund the police.”

The road is long. There is much to do.