There’s a lot going on right now, and a lot to discuss; police brutality, systemic racism, decolonising landmarks and school curricula, the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on BAME communities…. but instead, a lot of discussions seems to focus on whether protesting is right or wrong – not just during the pandemic, but in general. I’ve found this frustrating, so here are three of the top criticisms of protesting I’ve seen, and why they aren’t right.
- Why are you doing this now? It’s not the right time.
“When a message is spoken loud and clear and in unison, when formerly there were whispers or collections of disparate rumblings, it is easy to think of people as finally having found their voices, as if those voices had been lost. That they are being heard now, though, is more an indictment of the listener, not the speaker. We the protesters have never been the voiceless. We have been the unheard… It is common since the protests began to hear people who are confused about our tactics ask: why are you doing this? Why are you demanding, now, to be heard?” DeRay McKesson, 2019
Protesting, including rioting, is the last resort from a group that hasn’t been heard any other way – who feel ignored, invalidated and angry. It’s never that one small thing happens to trigger a reaction – it’s a build-up, resulting from a continued failure to address the problem. It only looks like it comes from nowhere because the group wasn’t being listened to before, and that’s exactly why it happens.
The Ferguson Protests of 2014 were triggered by the killing of 18 year old Michael Brown, but set against a history of racism directed towards the black community by the police. Of the town’s 53 police officers, 48 were white, while two thirds of the population were black – and the police were found to be twice as likely to arrest African-Americans than white people at traffic stops. Even their chief of police admitted “Apparently, there has been this undertow that has bubbled to the surface.” There had been complaints about racial tensions between police and black communities in St Louis for at least a decade, with one resident saying that finding someone there who trusted the police was ‘like finding a four leaf clover’, and another describing relations as having been ‘very hostile’ for years.
In London in 2011, the riots were triggered by the killing of Mark Duggan but set against a backdrop of racial tension and social inequality; the use of ‘tactical stop and search’ largely on young black men (black men being 8 times more likely to be searched than their white counterparts) had particularly caused resentment to build up, and Tottenham MP David Lammy stated that “cracks that already existed between the police and the community became deep fissures.” The riots also followed a period of 18 months that saw the banking crisis, the expenses scandal and the phone hacking scandal, which caused a combination of economic hardship and a loss of trust in the establishment and media.
Protests and riots don’t happen in a society that is running well, and they don’t happen suddenly.
- “Protests don’t make any difference.”
The short response to this statement is to agree. No, of course they don’t – on their own. But nobody claimed protests were a lone force; they function as part of a wider movement. It seems to be a common misconception is that when there’s a protest, that’s all that’s happening, but it isn’t. Marches, sit ins, boycotts and riots demand the public and establishment’s attention and apply pressure to the issue, but there are always people working within politics, councils and organisations to change policies and legislations as well.
Movements rarely succeed without both types of activism. Take the fight for women’s suffrage in Britain; Millicent Fawcett in her memoir wrote of the arrests of Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst that they changed ‘the withering contempt of silence’ from the press into a torrent of coverage, and their actions also increased donations to law-abiding suffragist societies, helping to further the cause. The same thing is happening now with Black Lives Matter; the (peaceful, not militant) protests are raising awareness, resulting in a lot of press coverage, which in turn is putting pressure on organisations and companies to tackle racism as well as causing increased donations to anti-racism charities.
Even a speech as iconic as Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ was only able to have the impact it did because it was part of a movement made up of decades of other protests, other speeches, other marches, other activists. It happened as part of the civil rights movement. The crowd was 250,000 strong because of the civil rights movement. It was able to have the impact it did because of the civil rights movement. Protests don’t happen in isolation, they’re part of something bigger.
Saying ‘protests don’t work’ is to think of them as isolated incidents and remove them from the context in which they happen. They add momentum and power to something larger, and their accessibility and passion galvanise people to support causes in a way that the slog of behind the scenes activism, like complex campaigns for legislation changes, just can’t. They support that slog by giving the issue urgency.
When people say protests don’t work it also makes me think of this, which someone said about switching to biodegradable toothbrushes (I don’t know where it came from, if anyone does have a source please let me know):
“It’s just one toothbrush,” said 8 billion people.
One toothbrush is just one toothbrush and one protest, looked at in isolation, is just one protest. But 100 protests is 100 protests. And 1000 is 1000. They add up. You can’t look at an individual act of protest and claim it hasn’t made a difference, because of course it didn’t alone. You could claim shopping locally doesn’t make a difference to the economy too if you just added up one person’s spending; you’ve got to look at the whole picture.
- “This isn’t the right way to make a point”
Firstly, it’s unfair to say it’s ‘not the right way’ to make a point. Protests happen because the issue isn’t being addressed any other way, and it’s the only way to force it to the fore. If protests aren’t the right way to do it, then issues should be addressed before they get to that point.
As well as that, saying something is being done ‘to make a point’ is belittling. Accusing someone of ‘just trying to make a point’ is done in two situations; when you think they’re being petty, or if you’re trying to invalidate their actions. In both cases, it means ‘ignore them.’
For instance, if someone sat down to eat a ham sandwich in a vegan café ‘they’re doing it to make a point’ would translate to ‘they’re just doing it to get a reaction.’ When a teenager adopts some new lifestyle and the parents say, ‘they’re just making a point’ it translates to ‘I’m not giving this ‘phase’ the time of day because they’re doing it for the sake of it.’ It’s saying ‘you’re just doing this to be controversial, and I won’t acknowledge it.’ To make that implication about political protests is to dismiss what can be issues of life and death (case in point; Black Lives Matter) as unimportant and inconvenient.
Describing protestors as ‘making a point’ paints them as childish and petulant, and it’s a line usually trotted out by concern trolls who prefer to avoid addressing the causes of unrest by criticising the actions of protestors, and who rarely have a suggestion for an alternative way to pursue change. Which reminds me of something else Millicent Fawcett said: “an old friend of mine called out to me across the table at a dinner party that after the outrageous conduct of the militants he would never again do anything in support of women’s suffrage. I retorted by asking him what he had done up to that moment.”
That last point is what all people’s complaining about protests comes down to; an unwillingness to address the problem, masked by concern or anger about the act of protesting in itself. Next time someone says it’s not the right time to protest – tell them actually, it’s not the right time to be having a debate about protesting. It’s time to discuss what’s causing the protests.
Sources & reading
Anything I’ve quoted or used directly is hyperlinked in the post as well – other stuff on this list is just good stuff on the same topic.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/12/black-lives-matter-deray-mckesson-ferguson-protests
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/us/the-lasting-power-of-dr-kings-dream-speech.html
https://www.livescience.com/16153-10-significant-political-protests.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52219070
Millicent Fawcett, What I Remember (as quoted in Helen Lewis’ Difficult Women)
Mostly Harmless 