Protests seen as harming civil rights movement in the '60s—What we can learn from this for climate justice
Protests Seen as Harming Civil Rights Movement in the '60s
I've recently had some conversations about activism and protesting about climate change on Tildes, which made me remember these polls again. I think they are a good historical reminder, and they demonstrate that masses much too often care more about comfort and privilege rather than justice.
These polls also show that you don't need to convince the majority to effect change. In fact, focusing on that might be detrimental to your cause. People who are bothered by your protest, because it disrupts "order", will try to tell you how to effect change while sitting in their own comfort. But this is not important.
Here is the gist of it, with MLK's own words.
"First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
Believing in the timetables created by comformist opinions would be a grave mistake for climate activists. We need more confrontation, more radical acts, and more direct action. We don't need to make friends with the majority to do this. We need to shake things up, and most people don't like that. You can see this by the worsening majority opinion of the Civil Rights movement after they intensified protests. But the activists were right, it was an urgent matter, and they succeeded. So, we don't need to play nice.
For example, after MLK's asssassination people started burning down cities, which resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1968 passing. You can see this in the citations; basically the government feared further escalation, and that's why they had to pass the act. Another example is the suffragettes' bombing and arson campaign in Britain and Ireland, which helped with their cause by putting pressure on people in power.
I'm not giving these examples to say there should or should not be one-to-one copies, but to show that being radically confrontational does work. Radical confrontation and direct action are what we need for climate justice, because time has been running out for a while, and every day past without a radical change makes things much worse. So we should cast off the yoke of mass approval and meekness. We need to embrace the confrontation.
It's an excellent quote and echoes my own frustration with people during the "recent" BLM protests of a few years ago, and the Pro-Palestine protests of today as well as all climate activism.
People will say things like "I support their cause (or I would) but if you're blocking traffic it just makes me against what you're for". There's something disgusting about someone putting their own personal comfort over the plight of protesters. It's proof that they really don't have an opinion about the subject of the protest, or fundamentally misunderstand what a protest is.
It makes me depressed at how sanitized our education of MLK and Gandhi were in school. That they did peaceful and friendly protests so often that the powers that be just got tired of being bad and finally did the right thing, or some nonsense.
It’s also an inherent act of victim blaming when you literally acknowledge that these injustices exist, but then direct your contempt towards the people whose methodology you disagree with and not the people responsible for the sentiment in the first place.
It's an ideological belief that masquarades as a reasonable approach. It's pure conformism. Studying the unofficial versions of societal changes due to activism shows how empty its logic is.
Another critical example that shows how Civil Rights Movement, even MLK himself, wasn't as pacifist as presented by the current status-quo.
Because most protests are parades meant to get attention from the media. Cutting traffic does nothing by itself for human rights, climate, etc. Making someone miss / be late for work, their children school, or worse, a hospital visit does not make said person sympathize with you, no matter how noble your cause is (for you).
(IHMO) a productive protest should only hurt the people you are protesting against, but that requires a much higher degree of organization and possibly keeping it secret from social media platforms.
This is what has me on the fence. Blocking a weekend trip to the mall is one thing and falls strictly under the realm of comfort, but how many employers are going to exercise patience and understanding towards employees who end up late for work, especially if it happens repeatedly?
Depending on the severity of disruption, it's potentially putting peoples' livelihoods at stake. It also arguably has a disproportionately high likelihood of negatively impacting people who are already hurting, with employers on the lower half of the payscale generally giving employees far less leeway on this sort of thing than those on the upper half. So while it's an effective way to get attention it's much much more likely to breed ire towards the protesters than the cause they're protesting for.
This is also complicated by the context of the modern age, in which mass media and politicians will use effective protest as a boogeyman to unite against and earn votes, imperiling the cause in question. So while I see the need for radical action, I'm not sure how that can be enacted without smothering the cause in the process.
This is both a response to you and to @lou's comment that protests often have other goals beyond "mere" policy wins or positive shifts in public support.
I'd give much greater respect to radical protestors and rioters if they showed the least bit of pragmatism toward their nominal goals. Instead, as Lou said, it's about solidifying the social bonds within the protest movement by doing activism correctly. Often times, protests designed to disrupt the ordinary citizen seem like the South Park underpants gnome sketch.
Further, tactics that worked well in the 60s are less effective at disrupting the people who you need to disrupt due to remote work. There's a 10,000-strong BLM protest downtown? The statehouse has been empty since the pandemic, and legislating continues as usual via Zoom. Police kettled them, and the local hooligans decided to use it as cover to spark a riot? Let them have their fun: the policymakers are safe in their home districts, and the protestors will get bored soon enough. The local glazier's union is the only material beneficiary.
If one wants to freak policymakers the FUCK out, take those same 10,000 people and place 25 of them at each of the 4 corners of the city's 100 busiest intersections. No need to block traffic (yet). They're unavoidably visible to all, and the threat that they could shut down traffic is often more potent than actually having roads closed. More importantly, it shows organization & discipline of coordinated resistance.
I wouldn't wanna devalue protests as a whole by qualifying them as insincere, but large protests are the cumulation of a miryad of complex desires and emotions, both personal and collective. So I wouldn't say that protests are not about their express practical goals, but rather that those explicit goals are intertwined with a complex web of unstated motives that may be valuable and worthy themselves.
Like billboards with ads or homeless people, once they become part of the scenery people will likely filter them out.
I really don't have a good solution to this. These open movements are very easy to hijack by rioters, media, and even movement organizers with their own agendas. If the logic behind an action is just an appeal to emotion I get extremely skeptical.
If they're there every day, you're absolutely right. However, they will be noticed if it's no more frequent than a monthly occurrence.
Effecting direct change is certainly one of the most important goals of a protest but it is far from being the only one. Among other purposes, protests serve for a group to measure their numbers, get a grip on their strength, enrich their collective history and narrative, as well as to create and reinforce emotional bonds.
Public protests allow participants to prove their worth through increasingly radical acts, and the sum of everyone's participations may cause a group's hierarchy to shift. Through their displays, protests also serve as recruitment tools.
It may be valuable to keep in mind some less obvious reasons why people protest.
I promise I'm not trying to be uncharitable, but it kinda sounds like such protest movements are more focused on creating an activist class than affecting real policy changes?
Copying from my answer to another comment:
On the other hand, that speech was specifically made in light of a series of nonviolent protests against racial segregation and injustices in Birmingham - protests, sit-ins, marches, and their response. Yet I see this speech being quoted by people trying to justify actual riots, burning down businesses, and marches that have the specific goal of blocking traffic like we now sometimes see. People will incorrectly cite this MLK speech, a great nonviolent activist, to do violent activism - something MLK never did
In The Trumpet of Conscience, a book consisting of lectures MLK gave in late 1967, months before his assassination, he says (p 57-59):
This is fascinating, I've never seen it before. Thank you for posting it.
Do you know who was active at the exact same time as MLK was engaging in non-violent protest? Malcom X, who was providing the ever-present alternative to MLK's pacifism. MLK didn't have to do violent activism for the point to be made that violence was indeed an option.
Ok I never said it wasn't an option but that's good to know
Glad to share. MLK's non-violence is only half the picture of that part of the Civil Rights movement. Without the violent side of the coin in Malcom X, it can seem like MLK was just so darn nice that people changed their minds and gave people more rights. It's better seen as the status quo meeting the movement halfway by conceding to MLK's more reasonable demands because there was Malcom X's more extreme stance everpresent as an alternative.
I know dumping a >1hr video essay is the laziest kind of response, but I watched this video by lonerbox responding to this argument and found it convincing. It says that Malcom X never actually did any violent protest, and was widely disliked by the black community at the time and MLK himself. There isn't really any good evidence that what Malcom X did was effective in speeding up social change, (and your article doesn't even argue that, just that they both had similar goals)
I'm sceptical of this sort of argument, because it ignores the counterfactual aspect. In this post, there's a bunch of different examples of cases where civil rights movements advanced in the presence of violent protests. But what would have happened if the violent protests hadn't occurred? Would the civil rights movement have failed? Would it have taken longer? Would it have gone more quickly? Looking at these isolated incidents, I don't know that I can answer those questions.
To put it another way: given a topic like climate change, I find myself asking what the most effective way of bringing about change really is. Is it violent and destructive protest? Is it symbolic actions like chaining yourself to railings or gluing yourself to streets? Is it letter-writing campaigns? Is it a mix of different levels of these things? To me, direct action isn't legitimised simply because it occurred in aid of good things in the past. I am more interested in knowing whether direct action is a genuinely useful tool to effect the changes that I want to see today.
Andreas Malm calls this the radical flank effect. Among other movements, you see it play out in the civil rights struggle. A more radical affront both protected the pacifists and made them seem more reasonable alternative to the status quo (as mentioned in the post).
I gave a very direct example of this playing out in the 1968 act passing. Here's another one.
Malm summarizes this effect in the following.
Climate justice needs both fronts. The moderates are, naturally, much more in number, but radicals are very effective at pushing the status quo. They are also very effective at direct action.
For example, there are countless examples of sabotage against pipelines working effectively and increasing the costs for their owners, from the Egyptian Revolution to Naxalites in India, and more.
The logic here is to increase the cost of running the business to make it unsustainable or less attractive. There are other examples in the book, too, but the following is extremely striking.
What is surprisingly lacking in climate justice is the absence of a radical front. Given the circumstances and the promises broken, we can't afford to wait for the timetables created by conformist attitudes. The radical front needs to form.
When I was little there were two main "good" people who were often pointed to as examples of good moral people, Gandhi and MLK.
But then when I got older, some people found it very fun to come up to me and let me know about all this terrible stuff about Gandhi online. How he was a racist and a pedophile and abused his wife and all this bad stuff. I didnt really know what to do with that information. Like, I guess fighting to end British occupation was good, but outside of the context of overthrowing colonial rule I shouldnt use Gandhi as a role model.
But there was still MLK to act as a symbol for the idea that its ok to not actively get in fights. I mean, theres also Jesus but Christians kind of have a monopoly on that one.
And now I have a similar feeling. My whole life Ive known of MLK as primarily a guy associated with nonviolence and how that was a good thing. In the last couple years though its been a couple times where someone has shown me this quote about white moderates like its supposed to subvert my understanding of MLK. But if I subvert the one thing I know about the guy, what am I left to think of him? MLK was the guy who advocated nonviolent protest. But also believed that violence is hella tight, actually.
it’s not supposed to subvert your attitude or understanding of MLK. It’s supposed to subvert your own personal attitude towards oppression and its consequences, including how the people affected respond to it. I am not a scholar on MLK so I will not speak authoritatively on what exactly he is saying here but, in my opinion, what he wants you to understand is that if literally all you’re doing with respect to furthering the goals of justice, is literally nothing except for complain when people respond in a manner which you find unproductive or harmful even, then you are part of the problem too.
Maybe the question is why the only morally available choice for oppressed people should be nonviolence? They are, after all, subjected to incredible, systemic violence every day. Isn't insisting on nonviolence as the virtue and violence as the sin a paternalistic oppressive ideological approach, that tells violated people how they should fight back?
Edit: I'm not saying this to shame or blame. I've had these questionings myself, too. I think these are very legitimate questions that strike at the heart of this approach.
If you or someone else feels it is their path in life to use violence to bring about their long term goals, thats fine. I respect that. But I dont feel that this is just arguing for the validity of political violence, but going on to say that people who dont subscribe to political violence are somehow morally deficient by comparison and are prioritizing personal luxury to goodness.
And I disagree with that idea. Nonviolence should be the morally preferable option because violence is bad for everyone involved. I dont care if MLK owned guns, I dont feel bad about not wanting to engage in violence. Sometimes people will decide to use violence anyway and thats fine if they make that choice for themselves.
I'm sorry but this very much conflicts with the initial message. It's very much heavily suggested in it that MLK's perceived condoning of violence implies a fall from grace for him, which is a very adamant negative moralization of the use of violence.
No, I'm not saying that, for two reasons.
First is that I'm not criticizing people who personally don't want to do violent activism. I'm criticizing the fetishization of nonviolence and the underlying assumptions. I'm criticizing people who see nonviolence as the only legitimate way of fighting back.
Second, I'm asking the reader to question their own assumptions about violence. People who are not subjected to systemic violence most often don't realize, when they -directly or indirectly- ask the oppressed people to use only nonviolent means, they are asking them to be okay with being subjected to violence, in the name of some "peaceful" nonviolent virtue. This approach overlooks the plight and urgency of the oppressed, and tells them to follow a supposedly universal virtue, which actually turns out to come from a place of privilege. The privileged can afford to turn a blind eye or downplay systemic violence, the unprivileged cannot.
Believing in this supposed universality would be an ideological trap for the oppressed. It's akin to (but not the same thing as) believing in the "All lives matter" motto. It's a universal declaration, and out of context it's not a bad thing. But in context, while claiming to be a universal value, it's a reaction by the privileged that shows a lack of empathy for the oppressed.
Another example is white people in USA who talk about "not seeing race" as a virtue. It sounds like a good universal to them, but it's actually a very much criticized privilege that shows they have the luxury to not see race. They don't have to think about their or the opposing party's race when the police stops them, for example, or when someone refuses to rent or sell them a house.
I should clarify that these are analogies. I'm not saying that you subscribe these examples, or that they are the exact same thing. They are just similar in the aspect I described.
So, denouncing violent activism completely might be a privilege for some people, e.g. people from developed nations, people who are middle or upper class, people who don't live in a climate hotzone, people who don't live in an island nation, etc. But it's not a privilege for other groups, e.g. people from developing nations, working class people, people who live in hotzones, island nation peoples, etc.
I agree with this. I disagree that it is the only way.
It's been abundantly clear throughout history that no change ever comes when there isn't violence. If there are no stakes, why would those in power cede it? Violence must be inflicted for there to be change. Violence doesn't have to be physical, however. A strike, for example, is a form of violence - it is violence against the production of capital, a violence against shareholders, a violence against profit. In the space of climate justice, physically blocking a pipe from being made or other environment destruction is also a form of violence, against the endless pursuit of profit at the expense of our environment. Depriving those in power of their source of power (wealth is power) is a particularly useful kind of violence that can enact change, we just need to find ways to be more creative with violence directed at the creation of capital.