Rachel Cohen first made headlines last year when she left her job at the high-powered law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, after organizing more than 600 of her fellow lawyers to sign an open letter condemning Donald Trump’s threats to the legal profession. Since then, she’s continued to call out the administration’s actions both on the ground and online. From her account @cohen.489, Cohen posts about her work community organizing and protesting ICE in Chicago, as well as the news. She recently went viral for a video where she confronted Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino at a convenience store.

Cohen joined Current Affairs News Briefing writer Emily Carmichael to discuss protest movements, our moral obligations to confront injustice, and the censorship that’s made it so hard to discuss political resistance online.

 

emily carmichael

So, something you’ve talked a lot about is fear, and who really should be afraid right now and who should be out in the streets. Tell me a little bit more about how you think about that.

 

RACHEL COHEN

There are so many people with privilege that are hiding behind this subjective fear of a hypothetical reality that might come for them that looks very similar to the actual reality that many people are living in this moment. Particularly when I was in big law, right, there are so many people that are worried about career implications and finances. There are so many people in this country who are afraid to leave their houses, even to go to work right now, because they might just be disappeared off the streets[…] White people are worried about safety if they show up to a protest, when there are five-year-olds that are getting taken off the streets because they are Latino.

And so it’s kind of this hypothetical fear that's really, really crucial to ideas of empire, and to pressuring privileged people to accept a kind of twofold humanity, right? The idea that state violence is normal for some people and is both abnormal—extremely abnormal, and an okay reason to be so afraid as to opt out—for other groups of people. And those things can’t coexist. Like it can’t both be so abnormal when a police officer murders a white woman that it is in the consciousness of over 80 percent of the electorate—that can't be true, and also that it's not safe for white people to be out in the streets. Those things simply don't coexist. They are inherently in conflict with each other. It is crucial that people with more privilege show up in this moment, because the risks to them are so much lower and even kind of the lower risk harm that can happen, like being handcuffed or being pepper sprayed or similar — and the comparatively very rare extreme harm that we’ve seen twice now, where white people are murdered by the state — those things drive so much attention and outrage, whereas 32 people died in ICE detention last year, at least five have died in ICE detention already this year, and it does not generate the same kind of attention and outrage. And so all of that to say, and maybe this is the lede, and I buried it: People who the system is supposed to work for are the ones who need to be out protesting the way that the system is working. Because they are more protected and because they are amplified.

 

carmichael

One of the things I heard you say, sometimes it can feel existential for people with privilege to be handcuffed. It can feel like an existential threat to be pepper-sprayed, and that’s a misunderstanding of the situation. It is not existential. There's a much greater existential harm to other people.

COHEN

Yeah, I think a lot of white people need to grow the fuck up. Like, frankly, I think that we need to be serious. If we're honest with ourselves, we’d say, “You know what, I'm not willing to bear the risk that I get pepper-sprayed as my neighbors are being disappeared to work camps.” Then say that. But don't say “this is now comparatively unsafe for me.” Don’t hide behind the tragic but incredibly infrequent instances where the state murders white people when they murder non-white people constantly and that’s just accepted as normal.

carmichael

And one of the things you talked about in your video was opting into fear. And I thought that was a really interesting phrase. I'm curious, do you ever get scared?

COHEN

Oh, yeah, but my fear is subjective. It's rooted in this kind of nebulous fear of, “Oh my gosh, I am out in a place where harm could befall me.” I get scared when I fly sometimes too, right? That doesn't mean it's reasonable.

carmichael

What do you do, when you do feel afraid? Do you just tell yourself that it's unreasonable, or is there something else, like, is there a tactic that you have in the moment to help calm yourself down?

COHEN

I tend to get frightened beforehand, much more than I get frightened when I'm in it. And I suspect that is true for most people. I think that the fear is much greater when we are deciding whether or not to show up than it is once we actually get there. And so in the before, when I feel myself getting afraid, the tactic that I use is to remove myself from the reality of the situation, to treat it as a hypothetical, and say, if “I was presented with this as a hypothetical, given how I think about myself, given who I think I am, and the kind of person that I think I am, how would I predict that I would respond?” When I was in school learning about the Civil Rights Movement, what did I think of myself? Where did I think that I would be as someone with privilege? And if I think about myself that way, what do I have to do in order to be honest with myself, right? What do I have to do for my self conception to be correct?

I was arrested for civil disobedience back in August, and it was such a low-stakes, low-risk activity, again, because I am white and very, very insulated, very privileged. And the night before, I was so nervous about doing it, and that was how I calm myself down, is I ran through it and said, “Okay, if I present myself with this hypothetical, I have the chance to draw a lot of attention to a place where people are being detained without access to food and beds and hygiene products, and so many people in Chicago don't even know that it's happening, not because activists are not trying to tell them, but because white people with big megaphones are not putting themselves on the line, right?” Of course, I would say to myself that I would do that. So I have to do it, even if I feel nervous about it now or scared or whatever else like that— Fear is not an escape hatch to let you maintain your self conception as a good person. Because we don't think of ourselves as [saying] “I would do the right thing, so long as it wasn't scary at all,” right?

carmichael

And it sounds like what you're doing is running through a personal trolley problem, and then appealing to who you are.

COHEN

Yeah, I think a lot about accurate self-conception. I think that we let ourselves off the hook. One of my least popular takes, I think, is that a lot of particularly white people, a lot of people with privilege, wealthy people, I think we could stand to be quite a bit harder on ourselves, to expect a lot more from ourselves. And I think that is a very unpopular take in this moment. There's all of this, we need to be gentle with ourselves. We need to be gentle with ourselves. We do need to be gentle with ourselves and with other people. But that's not the same thing as letting yourself off the hook.

carmichael

The Greg Bovino video was probably psychically satisfying for a lot of people to see. Something I think about, and not only is this dissent in the streets, but this is a content war. ICE has a mandate to record videos. Ryan Broderick wrote about how he was in Minneapolis and he saw an ICE agent holding a gun and a phone at the same time. And your Greg Bovino yelling thing did go viral. And I'm curious, what does dissent look like online, when this is a content war, and also the algorithms are owned by these oligarchs. It's a lot to parse through.

COHEN

It is, and it's a great question. It's where I think a lot of us should be focusing. I think, to be totally honest, one of the things that makes the content war so difficult — It's not just the algorithmic constraints. It's that we are rapidly approaching, and perhaps even in already, a moment where the most effective kind of nonviolent activism is being branded as illegal, up to and including being called domestic terrorism or criminal conspiracy by the government. And so there are a lot of people that are not going to feel comfortable going online and saying, slow down ICE operations in whatever non-violent way you can, right?

I think that the Bovino video is a good example, because it's such a pressure release for people. And I don't think that there's anything inherently wrong about posting pressure releases and making very clear for white people, especially after ICE murdering two white people, that we should recognize that we still are cloaked in very deep protection at all times. But where that becomes an issue is when the kinds of pressure releases that many content creators make are viewed as activism because they are not. And so figuring out where to straddle the line, especially as legitimate activism gets ever closer to being criminalized by the government.

carmichael

One of the things, or the big debates that I've seen is what is and isn't settled fact in this country, in terms of what Trump is able to do, how powerful he actually is, and how much space we actually have to push back. I'm curious your take on that, because you are talking about this increased criminalization. How far do you think we've gone, and how much room do you think we have to navigate and push back and change the facts of this country still?

COHEN

I think we are in a very bad place. I think it has happened much less rapidly than a lot of people care to admit, because there's so much tribalism in the country that the people who see how bad things are much more likely to be Democratic voters, and Democratic voters are much less likely to admit that the policies of Democratic presidents have directly contributed to where we are, as well to the build out of the immigration system to and the kind of carceral nature of it, the extreme funding of ICE, the build out of surveillance and focus on “law and order” that's always been weaponized against, particularly Black people in this country[...] but I do think that there is still tons of room for dislodging us from that path.

The general strike that we're seeing in Minneapolis today is an example of the kinds of tactics that we have not really seen so far, but that are particularly effective. General strikes are so effective in resistance to a deeply unpopular government policy or system. They almost never happen in the United States. And so I think there's so much more room for economic pressure. The people that are calling the shots are overwhelmingly these tech billionaires, who, if they start to actually lose money, will back off. There's all of these economic levers that can be pulled, but I think that getting people to pull them will require an honest understanding of where we are and what we're seeing, and I don't think that we're there yet. Especially in the talking head spaces, so I think that can make people feel more demoralized, because all the people that they see commenting on their various news channels are just denying reality at every turn.

carmichael

So if I'm hearing you correctly, one of the things that we can do is convince people how bad it is?

COHEN

Absolutely, and also do that in conjunction with asking ourselves, okay, if it is this bad, what am I supposed to be doing? What did I think I would be doing?

carmichael

So the question is, and I feel like this was less tactical than honestly talking through some of the larger ecosystem around this, but what does dissent look like right now? And from what I've heard in this conversation, dissent looks like being very honest with yourself. Ask yourself who you think you are, what that person would do in that moment, find people to do it with, and do it.

COHEN

I think that's a fantastic way to distill it down.