have surged on campuses, around cities and in offices across the US in recent weeks, a visible tension has emerged between the desire for public protest and a fear of professional reprisals.
While protesters are covering their faces to prevent harassment and retaliation, they also cited Covid concerns as an additional reason to mask up while attending mass gatherings. The ubiquity of masks, according to one organizer, was representative of a general concern for everyone demonstrating and the potential harm they face as a result.
“At least in New York City, there’s a very big concern around police surveillance,” said one protester, who asked not to be named out of fear of personal and professional harm. They added that some organizers specifically told demonstrators to cover their faces and handed out masks at protests.at Harvard that posted the names and faces of students who signed a pro-Palestinian open letter on the side of a billboard truck and branded them “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites”.
Concealing identity while protesting has a long history in the United States, and in recent decades has been a tactic commonly associated with anticapitalist activists at government summits or antifascists counter-protesting far-right rallies. Mask-wearing became enough of a hallmark of leftist protests that, in 2018, Republicans attempted to passthat would have punished anyone protesting in a mask and acting in a threatening manner with up to 15 years in prison.
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