I Can’t Breathe: Braving Tear Gas in a Pandemic

Now some of the millions of people who turned out in the streets to protest the killing of black people by the police with apparent impunity are being suffocated, momentarily, by clouds of gas. Many are protected by little more than cloth masks because, in a pandemic, how do you get respirators? If doctors cannot find them, millions of protesters aren’t going to be able to procure them.

The response to being teargassed follows a typical pattern: shock, outrage, gear up. In the summer of 2019 in Hong Kong, at the beginning of its latest protest wave, when tear gas landed near the crowds, there would often be panic and screaming (a bad way to gulp air!) and confused running (which can be dangerous by itself). Only a few months later, Hong Kong’s frontline protesters showed up clad in standard-issue global protester gear: respirators, helmets, and long sleeves. They also learned the trick beloved by many movements: using heat-resistant gloves to toss canisters back at the police or to dunk them in water. Sometimes they swatted the canisters back at the police with badminton rackets. When the police charged to arrest them, they ran so that they could fight another day, but they almost never ran from the gas.

Extreme soccer fans, used to having rowdy interactions with the police, have also learned to acclimate to the gas and gear up. These fans can become frontline fighters of protest movements, as the so-called ultras (devoted soccer fans) did during the Arab Spring, or as the left-leaning “Çarşı/Beşiktaş soccer club” fans did in Gezi Park protests in 2013. In one remarkable video from those protests, Çarşı soccer fans in their home neighborhood of Beşiktaş, Istanbul, can be seen chanting defiantly in the middle of gas so thick that the police aren’t visible, although it’s possible to make out the protesters’ middle fingers.

In a non-pandemic world, tear gas will disperse marchers for a week or two while they gear up, but it will shock and anger them for years, something I heard from many protesters among the growing global fraternity of the teargassed—such a common experience that I titled my book on 21st-century social movements Twitter and Tear Gas. The indignation and rage that follow the experience can propel people from being casual participants to lifelong activists.

For many people, tear gas is their first interaction with state violence. It’s the first time they’ve been treated like an insect, usually by police geared up like robocops. That warlike stance is a strong escalatory agent in a protest. It’s common sense: Aggression from the police will fuel escalation. This is confirmed by decades of research: Combative and belligerent police action is often pivotal to starting and escalating a cycle of violence. After decades of research, I’ve personally concluded that perhaps the single most effective police action for crowd control would be for the police to show up dressed like humans, not terminators. But crowd control is often not the point of state violence. Its goal is usually to put people in their place, to “dominate,” as the president has called for. Viewed through that lens, it’s no wonder that tear gas is a tool of choice. Tear gas will enrage, but not deter. It will hurt and maim, but not de-escalate.