The Comfort of Protest: No Kings, White Safety, and the Politics of Selective Outrage.

The Comfort of Protest: No Kings, White Safety, and the Politics of Selective Outrage.

by Naomi Ward

The No Kings protests have drawn millions into the streets across the United States, and the images are, by any measure, visually impressive. Crowds stretching for blocks. Handmade signs. Inflatable kings and righteous chants. But spectacle is not analysis, and size is not the same as substance. When we ask not merely who is in the streets but what they are demanding and, more precisely, what they were silent about before they arrived, a very different picture emerges. For the vast majority of white participants, the No Kings movement is fundamentally about restoring the comfortable version of American authoritarianism: the one that keeps its boot on Black and Brown throats quietly, bureaucratically, without making white liberals feel implicated. This is not a small distinction. It is, in fact, the entire argument.

ICE has been killing, caging, and disappearing Black and Brown people for decades. The machinery of immigration enforcement did not materialize with this administration. It was built methodically, expanded enthusiastically, and funded bipartisanly across administrations that many of today’s protesters voted for with pride and defended with vigor. When ICE agents conducted raids that tore families apart in predominantly Black and Latino communities, there were no eight. million person mobilizations. When immigrants died in detention under conditions that any honest observer would call torture, the liberal center offered think pieces, not bodies in the street.

Where were these millions when the deportation machine was grinding through communities of color under every administration? Where was this energy when Black and Brown immigrants were being executed by immigration agents in the streets? The cruelty did not begin with the current moment. The violence was always there. The difference is that now it is loud. Now it is aesthetically offensive. Now it has interrupted the particular social contract that white liberals depend upon: the one in which state violence remains legible only to its targets. That is not resistance. That is white discomfort. White discomfort, however loudly it marches, is not the same as solidarity.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational work on intersectionality offers us the analytical tools to see exactly what is happening here. Coalitions built on the comfort and priorities of the dominant group will, without exception, abandon the most marginalized members the moment that comfort is restored. The coalition does not dissolve dramatically. It simply stops showing up. It finds reasons why the next fight is too radical, too divisive, too much. It retreats to the electoral politics of lesser evils and congratulates itself for its pragmatism.

That is precisely what the No Kings movement, in its dominant register, is demanding: not the abolition of the carceral state, not an end to immigration enforcement as a system, but a restoration of a kinder, gentler oppression. One with better manners. One that does not force its participants to confront their own complicity. One that does not interrupt brunch, or property values, or the quiet comfort of believing oneself to be on the right side of history without being required to sacrifice anything for it. The demand, stripped of its theatrical elements, is not freedom. It is decorum.

What the dominant strand of No Kings protest politics is actually asking for is white safety: the safety to inhabit a democracy that is violent only toward people whose suffering remains comfortably invisible. It is the politics of restoring the veil, in the Du Boisian sense; the management of perception rather than the transformation of conditions.

This is why the movement’s framing centers kingship and fascism as abstract threats to “democracy” rather than the concrete, material devastation that has been visited upon Black and Brown communities as a feature, not a bug, of that same democracy. When the demand is “no kings” but not “no ICE,” when it is “democracy” but not “abolition,” when the invocation of “we the people” carries the same silent asterisk it always has, we are not witnessing a challenge to the structure of American state violence. We are witnessing a negotiation about its aesthetics. That is not solidarity. That is a rebrand.

To be clear: the distinction being drawn here is not between protest and non-protest, nor is it an argument for inaction. It is an argument about whose safety animates a movement and what that tells us about where the movement will go when the immediate threat to white comfort recedes.

Genuine solidarity with the communities most devastated by ICE enforcement, by the carceral state, by the long unbroken history of state sanctioned anti-Black and anti-Brown violence would require white protesters to remain in the streets when the optics no longer demand it. It would require supporting the abolition of the enforcement architecture rather than merely its tone. It would require centering the demands of those who have never had the luxury of not noticing, rather than those who arrived late and loudly to a crisis that was never really new.

Until that reckoning happens, the No Kings protests will remain what they largely are: a massive, well photographed, politically legible expression of white Americans’ desire to return to a world in which the violence of the state is once again someone else’s problem.