The Problem With Calling Us “Outside Agitators” – by Chris Sunderlin
When asked about the community response to the killing of Nyah Mway, the mayor of Utica has repeatedly used a familiar phrase: “outside agitators.”
It’s a convenient explanation. It’s also misleading.
The marches were organized by neighbors. The vigils were led by local clergy. The students asking questions attend school here. The families demanding accountability live here, work here, and raise children here. There was no convoy of professional activists descending on Utica. National and international media coverage followed local outrage, it did not create it.
Labeling community members as influenced by “outside agitators” does more than mischaracterize events. It dismisses the moral agency of the very people a mayor is elected to serve. It suggests that residents could not possibly arrive at concern, grief, or anger on their own.
That rhetoric has a history. It has long been used to delegitimize local civil rights movements by shifting attention away from the underlying grievance. If unrest can be blamed on outsiders, leaders do not have to examine what is happening inside their own institutions.
A confident city does not fear scrutiny. A confident leader does not minimize community voices. When public criticism is reframed as outside interference, it signals detachment, not strength.
But perhaps the mayor is right: there are outside agitators. They are just not the ones we were trained to picture.
They are the civil servants hired from elsewhere, educated in systems that quietly teach that cities like Utica, and the people living in them, are expendable. They are the business owners that brew their beer here, incinerate hops that choke surrounding neighborhoods where they’d never live, and profit off local labor while catering primarily to visitors from outside the city. They are the fast-food chains that extract wealth, feed communities processed garbage, neglect basic responsibilities like shoveling sidewalks, and refuse to pay a living wage.
The outside agitators are here, and they are our ruling class.
Utica does not need rhetorical shields. It needs leadership willing to face hard questions without pretending they came from somewhere else.
The outside agitators are certainly here, they just don’t look like you were trained to picture.
