Whose Streets? Roadway Protests and Weaponised Automobility

Abstract

The article examines the role of automobility in US‐based anti‐racism demonstrations and counter‐demonstrations. We contrast the spatial strategies of highway occupations by racial justice activists, with so‐called “weaponised car” attacks by the American far right. Analysing online memes and anti‐protest legislation, the article explores under‐acknowledged links between “automobile supremacy”—the structure of motorists' privilege as embedded in law, the built environment and the popular imaginary—and the patterns of racial stratification often termed “white supremacy”. We document three ways in which automobility has been enlisted as means of violence against protestors and against wider Black communities in the US: through the use of vehicles, right‐of‐way conventions, and roadways as weapons. The article demonstrates how the imperative to make way for the motorist has long provided cover for racial injustice.

Beyond the Chokepoint: Blockades as Social Struggles

“…Blockades are thus capable of encompassing a wider range of activist demands, often drawing geographically disparate struggles and participants into coalition. Social movements have used blockades to obstruct flows—of traffic, oil, or other critical commodities—assert Indigenous jurisdiction (Bosworth and Chua 2021; Scott 2021; Spice 2018), intervene in imperialist extraction (Gilbert 2022), and call attention to the racialised and structural violences of the political economic systems within which transport infrastructure sit (Arcilla 2022; Maharawal 2021; Savitzky and Cidell 2022).…”

“…Moving away from articulating the chokepoint as a magic bullet for organising, authors in this Symposium nuance our understanding of their practice in broad historical and geographical scope. Beyond their obstruction of flows, blockades are powerful because they build networked forms of anti‐racist and subaltern agency (Featherstone 2021); act as sites for the material, political, and affective critique of infrastructure (Maharawal 2021); demand a right to the housing while disrupting real estate capital pathways (Arcilla 2022); assert the sovereignty of Indigenous lifeworlds (Bosworth and Chua 2021); disrupt military and state‐sponsored circulations (Davis 2021); reveal the white supremacist underpinnings of infrastructure (Savitzky and Cidell 2022); and establish models for alternative agrarian futures (Gilbert 2022). Authors also caution against romanticising such forms of resistance, arguing that we should examine how blockades act as regimes of governance (Davis 2021); become targets of settler‐state securitisation (Bosworth and Chua 2021) and anti‐protest legislation (Savitzky and Cidell 2022); and are a condition of possibility (rather than the certainty) of coalitional politics (Danyluk 2022).…”

“…Savitzky and Cidell (2022) argue that understanding the growth of highway blockades during US Black Lives Matter protests likewise requires a historically nuanced analysis of criminalisation efforts. Analysing the history of “motordom” and urban development that eroded public access to public spaces of mobility, their analysis reminds us that while highway blockades draw attention to the spatial infrastructures of racial injustice, this occupation of space draws deadly backlash, resulting in white supremacist reactionary responses that weaponised vehicles to run protesters over and called for violence against protestors.…”

“…Analysing the history of “motordom” and urban development that eroded public access to public spaces of mobility, their analysis reminds us that while highway blockades draw attention to the spatial infrastructures of racial injustice, this occupation of space draws deadly backlash, resulting in white supremacist reactionary responses that weaponised vehicles to run protesters over and called for violence against protestors. In calling attention to racial injustice and violence, blockades become struggles over Black mobility, and also expose the deadly asymmetries by which fossil fuel automobilities buttress “white patriarchal rule” (Daggett 2018:25, quoted in Savitzky and Cidell 2022:13).…”