After marching in a protest alongside Anti-Fascist Action (ANTIFA), a lot has been on my mind concerning the movement and what I saw that day. Watching the political action group march down the streets with their communist flags and starting fights with the police was very surreal. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with them on certain issues. I too believe Capitalism is evil, police are corrupt and that neo-nazi’s can choke. The only thing I couldn’t fathom, was how the group could talk about taking down a system pitted against the common people while also talking over people of color.

It wasn’t hard to see that the ANTIFA members at the protest were mostly a bunch of white guys dressed in all black and bandanas. White allies, believe it or not, are actually pretty handy. They have a platform to speak that they have been squatting on since birth, and they have it simply because they are white. It’s a platform that is abused each time a white person uses it to speak against marginalized groups. While I don’t want to necessarily say the ANTIFA members were abusing their platform, it was definitely steering the attention away from the other protesters in attendance.

A member of The Brown Berets de TejAtzlan of Bell County, who shall remain nameless, was attempting to speak to the crowd towards the end of the protest. However, ANTIFA was using that time to shout at the police with the help of their handy dandy megaphone, effectively talking over the other speaker. A person of color was attempting to speak out about white supremacy, and he was overshadowed by a group of white men who ultimately are not threatened by white supremacy.

The main thing that set me off was the fact that the ANTIFA members were picking fights with the police. Namely that they were doing so with little to no regard for the safety of the other people in the protest. It seems these members are willing to send their message without worrying about things like getting arrested or punched by a cop, but that doesn’t go for everyone else. When ANTIFA protesters pick fights with the police out of nowhere, they’re not just putting themselves in danger, they’re putting marginalized people around them in an unsafe position. It would be easy for a white man to get off easily after being arrested. If, say, a random black person were arrested alongside them, they wouldn’t be as safe. It would be harder for them to be released from police custody. In general during a protest, an innocent person of color is more likely to get shot than a white man with a communist flag.

My grandmother and her family moved to this country from Mexico when she was only 14 years old. She had five children and was left by my grandfather when her youngest child was only three. Her whole life she worked hard against a system that was working equally as hard to keep a single, Mexican mother of five from succeeding. It is a system that is still working against me, her granddaughter. It is a problem that you contribute to when you continue to speak over people of color and unintentionally put them in danger. White allyship is valued, but how it is wielded matters.