In China, crowds of people line the streets. They are holding blank sheets of paper. There's nothing special about the paper; it's ordinary A4 letter size. The police know what they mean. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party know what it means. The world knows what it mean.
In November, protests erupted in China and Iran over COVID-19 lockdowns.
- In Iran, women stood in the street and put up their ponytails in defiance of the morality police, who they held responsible for the September death of Mahsa Amini. In Qatar, their brothers on the national soccer team stood silent as their own anthem played at the World Cup. In Russia, a woman with a blank poster board is hauled out of Red Square.
In the U.S., our protests are mostly straightforward and noisy, though the state still takes and breaks the bodies of too many
- In the wake of the Iran team’s silent anthem protest, an Iranian journalist asked US soccer captain Tyler Adams how he could play for a country that discriminates against black people like him.
- The response was that “we’re continuing to make progress every day."
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