Behind the mask: Why the new US campus protestors cover their faces

The first thing you see are the masks — the N-95s, the surgical masks, the patterned cloth masks, the bandanas — which largely vanished from American life over the last two years but are a defining feature of America’s swelling left-wing protest culture.

Faculty members at New York University link arms to protect a “Gaza solidarity encampment,” most of them wearing face masks. Activists block travel across the Golden Gate Bridge, all of them in masks. Members of the March on DNC 2024 coalition show up to their Chicago press conference in face masks, removing them only when it’s their turn to speak.

Nearly one year after the official end of the federal COVID-19 emergency declaration, the regular use of face masks for non-immunocompromised people has faded from American life. Outdoor masking, mandated in many states during the peak of the pandemic, became even rarer after a 2022 CDC advisory scaled it back.

But that gradual return to barefaced life never reached left-leaning protests, where face masks are widely used and encouraged.

Part of the reason, say organizers, remains an attempt to make a point about exposure to COVID-19 and other health risks, which some in the left-wing protest movements believe remain dire. And part is the threat of a different kind of exposure — from being captured by facial recognition technology or becoming doxxed (their personal information being shared online) by counter-protesters.

“To us, the optics are communicating that we deny the Biden administration’s narrative about COVID — that it’s no longer a big deal,” said Olan Mijana, a spokesman for the March on DNC 2024 coalition. “It’s about collective safety, and it’s also about connecting this COVID neglect to the very issues that we’re marching on the DNC for.”

The return to masking has confused and irritated critics. “Notice the horde standing behind their masks,” wrote a counter-protester this week, next to footage of his non-masked wife standing walking into a Yale University pro-ceasefire protest.

“No masks on campus!” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the president of the Anti-Defamation League, in a video posted after he surveyed protests at Columbia University. “This isn’t Fallujah. This is Morningside Heights.”

Before the pandemic, this level of masking wasn’t common — or legal. For more than 150 years, New York prohibited masks in public places; other states adopted similar laws, which made it easier to break up Ku Klux Klan gatherings and aided prosecutors as they built cases.

Thirteen years ago, when the NYPD broke up Occupy Wall Street protests, some of the activists there were charged under the anti-mask law. At the start of the Trump presidency, face masks at protests were identified with “black bloc” tactics that anonymized anarchists; in 2017, some left-wing counter-protesters of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville faced felony charges for violating anti-mask laws.

“You saw the mentality around masking shift after the street-level clashes around Trump’s election,” said Sean Summers, a reporter with Unicorn Riot, a nonprofit news organization that tracks the far right. “People started to see far right figures coming out with full body armor, and livestreamers working to capture people’s identities. In some cases, that translated into people being doxxed.”

Anti-mask laws complicated that response, but many were felled by the pandemic, which also saw millions of Americans become engaged in public protests against police brutality. In May 2020, after New York began mandating face coverings in public places, Attorney Gen. Letitia James convinced the state legislature to repeal it. First Amendment activists took note and began encouraging protesters to use face covering as a defensive measure against unwanted attention, helping to spread the practice beyond the fringes of the left.

“Before the pandemic, it used to be illegal to protest in masks in many places. You weren’t allowed to cover your face,” said Ría Thompson-Washington, a progressive organizer and attorney, in a September 2023 National Lawyers Guild training video. “Being able to mask is not only a safety consideration, but it’s a consideration to protect your anonymity.”

A college student who’s spending part of finals week at a Gaza Solidarity camp has never known a world without social media. A senior, who arrived on campus in the fall of 2020, was mandated to wear a mask; the 150-year regime of anti-mask laws died before they got there.

The anonymity of these protests, and of other pro-Gaza protests around the country, grew out of that reality — and out of the worry that being identified could ruin their lives. Those fears were exacerbated last year after a top law firm rescinded job offers to Ivy League students who signed onto a statement holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the 10/7 attack, while other business leaders pledged to do the same.

Fear of reprisal has colored the protests, and made them cautious about identifying themselves. Reporters from national news outlets, even friendly ones, have recorded their annoyance at how hard it’s been to get the name and full story of someone participating in direct action. (Students who’ve participated in news stories, like Rep. Ilhan Omar’s daughter, Barnard student Isra Hrisi, are rare and usually have the full support of family members.)

As these students graduate and become active in politics and government, you can already see the same expectations and norms filtering upward. White House and Capitol Hill staffers organizing against the war have not only worn masks at their protests, but signed onto anonymous letters in support of their cause, annoying older political veterans who argue they should either keep complaints in-house or resign in protest. The semiotics that used to be associated with anarchists, whose masks stood out at rallies, are now popular with activists participating in non-violent civil disobedience.

In 2017 and 2018, some Republican legislators introduced state and federal legislation to increase penalties on masked protesters. It largely failed, and there is no effort to bring it back yet, but the sentiment is still there.

“Masked protestors undermine their accountability,” Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, a co-sponsor of the federal Unmask Antifa Act, told Semafor in a statement. When protesters wear masks, he added, it “enables them to commit acts of vandalism, assault and destruction of property without fear of identification or consequences for their illegal and violent behavior.”

• In The Columbia Spectator, Gabriella Gregor Splaver photographs the protesters, protests, and aftermath.
• In The Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch praises the student journalists covering campus protests: “The reporters at the Spectator, using their on-scene access and doing some shoe-leather reporting, produced a piece that analyzed the alleged incidents, where they occurred and, where possible, who was involved.”
• In The Washington Post, Pranshu Verma followed what happened to people who ripped down posters of Hamas hostages and were caught on camera without masks: “Nearly three dozen people… have been fired or suspended from their jobs after being featured by StopAntisemitism,” a pro-Israel organization and X account.