(All images taken by me).

There will be no justice for Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, or anyone else killed at the hands of America’s law enforcement officers. There will be no substantive reform, no systemic change, and nothing to write home about. I know this because I’ve spent several nights at the protests in Oakland and Berkeley over the past week (far more in the former than the latter) and I can report to you that these protests are going nowhere.

Don’t get me wrong—I want justice, reform, and change. Not just of police departments but across the whole ‘criminal justice’ system, from the cops to the courthouse to the correctional facility. I agree that we need to work on all that and more. But if these protests have anything to say about it, we’re going to get none of that.

It’s not hard to see why. Take a second and ask yourself this: what are the protestors actually saying? What do they want? Hm. Well, every night I heard the following chants several times:

“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”
“I Can’t Breathe”
“Black Lives Matter”
“Shut it down for Michael Brown”
“No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police”
“This is what Democracy Looks Like”
“The Whole World is Watching”
“Peace-ful Pro-test” (that was in Berkeley)
“Fuck The Po-lice” (that was in Oakland)
“I Said Indict, Convict, Send that Killer Cop to Jail, The Whole Damn System is Guilty as Hell” (Oakland)

These slogans are catchy and make a powerful impression when spoken by a large group, but at the end of the day that’s all they are—slogans. But here’s the reality: the system doesn’t respond to slogans.

It responds to demands.

And that’s precisely what these protests lack—demands. I mean, damn, it was Frederick Douglasswho said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” After spending nearly one week in Oakland and Berkeley and I can tell you that I have no clue what the protestors’ demands are.

I tried to find out and came back with nothing. After I spotted a woman at the Oakland protest who seemed to be leading things—well, she was ‘leading things’ to the extent a protest in Oakland can be led—I asked her what the goal was. She didn’t miss a beat: “To take the highway. We’re gonna block the highway.”

And I’m thinking to myself: “The fuck is that going to do for Mike Brown? For reform of the criminal justice system? For anything at all?”

Ah, but then there’s the response I’ve heard so many times before: “We’re doing this to raise awareness.” And again I think to myself: “Raise awareness? How much more awareness do we need? At this point all I have to say is ‘Eric Garner’ (to pick one of, sadly, far too many names) and you know what I’m talking about.” Let me be clear: the awareness has been raised.

What’s needed are demands.

But unfortunately we don’t have any. That body-camera proposal? A joke. We don’t need moresurveillance in America—we need less. And cameras don’t even begin to solve the innumerable other problems with the criminal justice system. It’s like trying to cure a cancer with a band-aid—not going to happen. That DOJ investigation proposal? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have much faith in any investigation/conversation/committee spearheaded by those who let Wall Street laugh all the way to the bank after the financial crisis, by those who strengthenedNSA surveillance, and by those who sanction drone-strike killings of American citizens abroad. Even presuming these techniques yield anything, the results will almost certainly be myopic and focused on the individual cases at hand rather than on systemic reform.

Perhaps you, too, feel that the protests will eventually die out and that nothing will come of this. Well, that’s why the protestors need to start thinking about—and making—demands. Put bluntly: protests fade, demands don’t. Indeed, you can see for yourself that the protests fade almost immediately after they happen. Take a look at this New York Times article on the Berkeley protests. The whole thing is about the protest as an event—who was there (Berkeley kids, lots of others), what they did (blocked the freeway, etc.), where they were (Berkeley, Oakland)—but what’s missing is why they were there. There’s literally nothing in the article about what the protestors were demanding.

And not that’s not because the message was falling on deaf ears—it’s because there was no message. Let’s be honest with ourselves. It’s worth considering what Frederick Douglass said right after he observed that power concedes nothing without a demand. He went on: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”*

The only conclusion that I’m left with after experiencing the protests in Oakland and Berkeley is that our endurance is great indeed. We endure a conversation about body-cams when we alreadyknow that won’t even begin to solve things. Ditto for the DOJ investigation and Obama’s conversation. We endure it all—when you think about it, we’ve been enduring a series of turtle-paced reforms for decades now—knowing that the world we really want to see is not even on the horizon.

I want to believe these protests will be meaningful. I want to believe that there will be justice for Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and the innumerable others who have died at the hands of a seemingly-ubiquitous, militarized police force. But what I saw in Oakland and Berkeley showed me, clearly and convincingly, that my hope is misplaced.

Well—at least for now. Things can always change, I suppose. Until that point, however, I’m left reflecting on the fact that I heard slogans—not demands—at the protests. The whole experience reminds me of this passage from George Orwell’s 1984: “At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant … [which] was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.”