60 year old historian Martin Bühler (who identified himself to the press, I do not identify activists without consent) appears to ‘photobomb’ a lot of media images of the G20 in Hamburg. In reality he is a long time observer documenting police brutality. In Hamburg he chose to cultivate the most non-activist ‘white bystander in a suit with a bike’ look he could manage and casually walked in front of police. As police slowed down or interrupted attacks and waited for the ‘bystander’ to get out of the way (being caught on camera trashing what look like bystanders is bad press after all), activists had time to regroup or retreat.
oh my god, what a fucking badass
This is such an important example of racism playing a major part in how the police treat people.
this is a classism thing not a racism thing. the cops were attacking protesters of all colors, orientations, etc and they stopped only when “one of them” was in the way.
It’s both.
Because of racism POC are never fully perceived as middle or upper class the way white people are. You can be a lawyer in a fancy suit in a restaurant, if you’re not white random white strangers will assume you’re a waiter. You can drive an expensive car, cops will pull you over for ‘looking suspicious’. Etc etc.
The tactic Buhler used in Hamburg can only be done if you are constantly automatically assumed to be middle class or up. Since the middle class is collective imagined to be white, having white priviledge is a big part of being able to do it.
And that’s before even getting into the ‘people of color are seen as threatening 1000 times faster no matter what they’re doing’ aspect of white privilege that allowed Buhler to do this.
(There are probably gonna be white people replying ‘that kind of racism happens in the US, not Germany….’. They’re lying. It happens in Germany they just don’t wanna see it.)
I would say it’s more an example of white privilege than racism, but that’s obviously splitting hairs semantically because it’s two sides of the same coin.
As someone from Hamburg, though, that’s STILL brave as fuck. I know white people, plenty of them, who got on the wrong side of cops during those days and suffered for it, and not all of them were looking “young and lower class”, if you know what I mean. Police also actually targeted reporters with clear press credentials on display, which is on another level of scandal altogether.
All very very true. Privilege in these situations means being less at risk, it doesn’t mean not being at risk at all. Especially with the police being as incredibly violent as they were in Hamburg during the G20.
QueerAnarchism 