America sits in front of a mirror. Just below the mirror are images from important magazines and newspapers, images that represent how America wants to be seen. But those images bear little resemblance to the creature that looks back at her from that mirror. The face in the mirror is unrecognizable, angry, and unpleasant. What America sees in that mirror mocks her, it undulates and convulses with a passion that embarrasses her. And so America picks up a knife, and positions the blade at the bridge of her nose….
Anyway, let's talk about protests.
Many college students at universities across America view Israel's actions in Gaza after the Oct 7th surprise attack to have long passed the point of proportionate response and can now be credibly called an act of genocide. Because they believe Israel is committing genocide, they are currently staging protests to pressure school administrators into financially divesting from the state of Israel and/or any companies profiting from aiding the IDF war machine. Many of these protests involve long-term encampments on public outdoor spaces within their school grounds. These protests tend to be disruptively loud, with constant chanting, drum circles, and speeches.
Some of the slogans chanted by students are understood by some to be hurtful at best and at worst, blatant antisemitism that causes their Jewish classmates to feel unsafe. However, there are Jewish students involved with the protests as well, many of these were organized in coordination with organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace which maintain student-led chapters on campus. While some may insist that pro-Palestinian Jewish voices are a tiny minority, several of the university protests held Passover seder for both Jewish and non-Jewish attendants.
College Administrators have taken to requesting police forcibly disperse these protests, resulting in thousands of arrests and physical violence inflicted on the students they are supposed to care for, as well as some of their faculty.
Above is my attempt to describe the student-led pro-Palestine protest movements and the discourse around them as plainly and fairly as I can. It may not be completely fair, because I have a perspective and that’s hopefully what you are reading this piece for. I wanted to take a stab at objectively and succinctly describing what is happening on college campuses because when you compare the reality to how pundits, politicians, and the media are talking about them, something very troubling becomes apparent.
America hates the concept of protest.
Thou perhaps protest too much?
The cause for concern over mainstream America’s seeming contempt for the act of protest and the nature of protest movements should be apparent to anyone belonging to a demographic for whom their current freedom and place in American culture is largely dependent on past protest movements. Those demographics continue to rely on protest today and as long systemic inequities borne from our supremacist/patriarchal past endure, they will rely on protest well into the future.
For anyone else wondering why people feel the need to chant unpopular slogans, block traffic, subject themselves to police violence, and perhaps worse of all, inspire countless articles at the New York Times and The Atlantic…then allow me to reacquaint you with your grade school history class. You might recall that in our national mythology, the birth of America is largely credited to a protest. And not a peaceful protest where permits were acquired and people made their concerns known politely and non-disruptively, but rather a riot signified by vandalism and the wanton destruction of private property. A riot organized by a subversive and violent group of dissidents. We know it now as the Boston Tea Party.
The Boston Tea Party was not a singular act of violent protest within a larger stoic movement for American independence. Salem witch prosecutor and vaccine enthusiast Cotton Mather and his brother Increase led a full-on revolt against the Dominionist government of New England in 1689. Almost a century later, while Benjamin Franklin was making reasoned petitions to Parliament against the Crown tightening its control over the American colonies and the imposition of taxes to pay for English soldiers stationed there, a riot broke out in 1768 when British authorities attempted to seize merchant ship Liberty from its owner, noted signature haver John Handcock. The riot culminated in the burning of a British naval ship attempting to tow the liberty away from the harbor, that naval ship was named (and I shit thee not) the HMS Romney.
The people behind the Boston Tea Party in 1773 were called the Sons of Liberty and they functioned much more like a terrorist organization than an organized protest movement. Before the Tea Party, they gained infamy in 1765 for a campaign of mob terror directed at a man named Andrew Oliver who was to take the position of administering Britain’s controversial Stamp Act in Massachusetts. They paraded an effigy of Oliver around town, destroyed buildings associated with him, ransacked his house, and threatened him with death. Oliver would survive this prolonged offensive against him and went on to become lieutenant governor of the state. When he finally died in 1774, the Sons of Liberty threatened those who would attend his funeral. They showed up to jeer and heckle at mourners and cheered when his body was lowered into the ground.
It’s not controversial to note that the process of American Independence was violent. After all, it ended in a revolutionary war. But the version that many Americans seem to carry with them, suggests that American colonists endured English fuckery with a reserved dignity until things came to a head at a Boston harbor and the first shot was fired at Lexington and Concord. The reality of the American Revolution is the reality of all successful protest movements. It included both the input of educated and erudite statesmen pushing for a peaceful political resolution to the tension between entrenched power and the people subjected to it and the actions of terrorist fuckboys who wanted to preach fire and brimstone while burning down whatever they could until they got what they wanted.
Yea but see that was different……
Our American view of protest is that good protest only happens in the past. It is in the past that narratives of struggle against injustice can be safely stripped of their context and inherent violence. Where protestors can be reconstructed as uncomplicated warriors of unimpeachable virtue, and the act of protest was always conducted with the principle goal of clear communication and reconciliation. And in those moments where the outcome was settled with bloody war instead of beer summits, we can view violent resistance as a defensive reaction to oppressive forces (which have been safely relegated to the past) instead of a natural consequence of the cycle of violence.
“Dissent is essential for democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder”, President Joe Biden seductively whispered into a microphone at the White House, while fundamentally lying about what dissent has always looked like.
For the British throughout the 1700s, order meant home office control over the American colonies and the right to tax them to support their empire. In 1787, order meant forcing poor farmers to pay for the Revolutionary War instead of the landowning elite who financially benefited from independence from England. For hundreds of years after, order meant the continued enslavement of African Americans, the disenfranchisement of women, and racial quotas on immigration. During the Industrial Revolution, order meant the right of bosses and business owners to abuse and exploit their workers. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, order meant the continued marginalization of minorities, women, and non-conforming sexual expression, along with wars of imperial aggression against the global south.
The point is that order is always the first line of defense against dissent, it is precisely the current political and social order that gives rise to dissent. Dissent that conforms to the contours of order is dissent that can be safely metabolized by entrenched structures of power. Disorder and disruption are the entire point of protest because order and business as usual are the things protest is meant to address.
The simple fact is that history does not comport with this idea of “good” protest and “bad” protest. All of the protest movements we currently revere safely from our perch of historical distortion were unpopular at the time. They were always widely viewed as disruptive and disorderly. This is not lost on the students protesting from their college campuses as they employ tactics and make use of locations that echo past protest efforts against the Jim Crow South, Apartheid, and the Vietnam War.
The response to this has been a stream of op-ed consciousness from centrist writers, struggling to present a coherent case as to why we cannot view current protests over police violence and the genocide in Gaza with the same reverential lens we reserve for the sanitized protest movements of old. This is perhaps best exemplified by friend of the blog John McWhorter in a recent NYT piece criticizing the protestors outside his classroom window at Columbia:
“When I was at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, the protests were against investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. There were similarities with the Columbia protests now: A large group of students established an encampment site right in front of the Rutgers student center on College Avenue, where dozens slept every night for several weeks. Among the largely white crowd, participation was a badge of civic commitment. There was chanting, along with the street theater inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, to effective protest; one guy even lay down in the middle of College Avenue to block traffic, taking a page from the Vietnam protests.
I don’t recall South Africans on campus feeling personally targeted, but the bigger difference was that though the protesters sought to make their point at high volume, over a long period and sometimes even rudely, they did not seek to all but shut down campus life.”
Unlike McWhorter, I did not attend Rutgers University in the mid-80s, I was too busy being born. But I do know that by the mid-80s anti-apartheid sentiment was fairly mainstream. In 1989 the big-budget sequel to the hit action movie Lethal Weapon featured representatives of the South African apartheid regime as villains and very famously revoked their diplomatic immunity. In 1985 the president of Rutgers, Edward J. Bloustein, along with the mayor of Atlantic City and several other local officials were arrested for blocking the entrance to a South African embassy. In fact, students were arrested all over the country for sit-ins and disruptions aimed at forcing their colleges to divest their financial ties to the South African government.
The cognitive dissonance in McWhorter's recollection, where a student blocking traffic on the main road cutting through campus somehow doesn’t represent an attempt to shut down campus life, is ….considerable. However, it’s a dissonance that is as easily explainable as it is glaringly obvious. McWhorter agreed with the subject of anti-South African apartheid protests, he doesn’t agree with the subject of anti-Israeli apartheid protests. For whatever reason, he is unwilling or unable to argue against the substance or the goals of what pro-Palestine student protestors are calling for, so his criticism of their cause is limited to the act of protest itself. Which is deeply silly, but also very dangerous for the maintenance of a free and democratic society.
What’s in a Protest?
It's very important to understand that the protests organized on college campuses have been largely peaceful. The response by authorities and centrist/conservative pundits has mainly focused on finding justifications for using violent force to crush these protests. At Columbia where all this began, New York City Mayor Eric Adams invoked the familiar specter of “outside agitators”, presumably professional rabble-rousers who have infiltrated campuses in order to manipulate impressionable students into political action. The NYPD has presented confiscated bike locks and textbooks about the history of terrorism as evidence that these encampments are hotbeds of ideological radicalization. These outside agitators, mostly unnamed, have been linked to other protest movements such as the original Occupy Wall Street and the current protests against Atlanta’s Cop City. As if solidarity between political causes is cause for suspicion.
Warriors for liberal enlightenment values like famous linguist Steven Pinker have worked tirelessly to redefine the meaning of free speech to exclude the inherently violent acts of “tenting” and chanting slogans, but include whichever peddlers of race science feel the need to explain why Black people are naturally intellectually inferior. For Pinker, the purpose of attending college is to have access to bucolic green spaces:
“Why do students want to attend a university in the first place, rather than stay home and watch lectures on YouTube? Among other reasons, universities offer welcoming green spaces, which encourage casual social interactions and benefit the neighboring community. They provide opportunities for faculty and students to engage face-to-face in classrooms and dining halls. They host ceremonies that bind the community and recognize hard-won accomplishments.”
The phrase “among other reasons” is doing a bit of heavy lifting for Pinker's point here, as those other reasons could just as easily include the opportunity to gain real-world experience participating in mass political action. An opportunity that I would imagine a defender of liberalism should value in higher education.
For his part, the aforementioned McWhorter would like us to reconsider supporting the protest by imagining if they were in service to a completely different issue:
“What I do know is that even the most peaceful of protests would be treated as outrages if they were interpreted as, say, anti-Black, even if the message were coded, as in a bunch of people quietly holding up MAGA signs or wearing T-shirts saying ‘All lives matter.’ “
They very well might be treated as outrageous, but personally, I fail to see the relevance here. People are outraged by mass political support for causes they feel are objectionable and well…outrageous. Given McWhorter’s documented stances on freedom of expression and political diversity on campus, I don’t think he means to imply that students shouldn’t participate in political action that others feel is outrageous, or that school administrators should disallow action that makes others uncomfortable. But then again, McWhorter has found the intellectual wiggle room to both bemoan the concept of safe spaces in school, while also complaining that Israeli students in his class may be subjected to hearing chants accusing their state of committing genocide, so anything is possible here.
It’s worth unpacking McWhorter’s hypothetical a bit more though, as it speaks to a genuine anxiety about protest movements; that a protest for the wrong reasons may be successful in its goals. If we recognize that mass protest is a valuable and sometimes effective political tool, shouldn’t we fear its use in the wrong hands? If we support the right for people we agree with to disrupt and antagonize others in order to make changes in our socio/political reality, how can we oppose white supremacists blocking the entrances to schools where Black students are trying to integrate classrooms or transphobic parents hijacking school board meetings with violent threats.
These are good questions. I mean, these aren’t good questions when raised disingenuously by people like McWhorter, but on the whole, it's a worthwhile thing to consider. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a good answer to provide. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution that allows for effective (read: disruptive) protest while also precluding the possibility that people whose ideas we find abhorrent will use those tactics.
The far-right has long made use of this dialectic between “good” and “bad” protest to stage rallies specifically for the purpose of drawing left-wing counter-protesters into physical altercations. These altercations provide a dual purpose of giving fascists the opportunity to join the cult of action through fist fights with the enemy and providing space to appeal to the media that it’s the left who are actually intolerant and violent.
Here’s the thing, liberals love politically disarming themselves in the hopes that the far right won’t be able to use whatever tactic against them. That’s not a luxury that marginalized people have. Especially when the particular marginalization in question is an active genocide. It’s worth noting that conservative protest is almost always a reaction to the perceived success of progressive protest. Conservatives don’t typically protest against the status quo, since the status quo is what they are trying to conserve. Even when positioned as a protest against entrenched liberal power, the demands of conservative protest aren’t forward-looking in nature. They aren’t asking for anything to change for the better, or to prevent preventable harm. What they are asking for is a return to a previous status quo that had been upended through mass progressive protest.
Perhaps this is why conservative protest tends to rely on financial and organizational support from wealthy elites to build any sort of momentum. These conservative protests, better described as organized backlash, are built upon a foundation of aerosolized grievance against modernity. Ideas that feel real and imperative but disperse into vapor at the slightest interrogation. Recently stories about the trucker convoy organized to repel migrant invasions at the border (only to find that there was no invasion) and the conservative mother who got elected to her school board to fight indoctrination and grooming in classrooms (only to find there was no indoctrination and grooming in classrooms) illustrate how protest based on bad ideas is kind of like water in that it tends to find its own level.
This is not to say that decent people shouldn’t be concerned about protest in service of bad ideas, but rather that these bad ideas are best handled with counter-protest and a healthy dose of reality, instead of the impulse to crush all inconvenient dissent. What people like McWhorter and Pinker, in their safe space of historical revisionism, don’t like to consider is that good ideas are seldom adopted through the singular strength of intellectual discourse. Especially when those good ideas run counter to the norms and preferences of those in power.
In part two we are going to talk about some of the aspects of these campus protests that aren’t getting all that much coverage in the media, as well as explain exactly why America’s anti-protest ethos is more dangerous than students occupying a campus building.
Solidarity Forever.
yes and yes...... why don't people understand that protest has no bite or strength if it doesn't disrupt/interrupt the normal status of things. it has to get in the way to catch attention. we occupied buildings in a much more thorough way in 1968/9, our parents were furious, some people got arrested, it was all part of a much huger movement against the war. i do wonder how this movement will evolve as campuses shut down, but that's not your concern here. that was a mass movement and i don't think a mass movement would form in this country around this issue. then are there other forms of protest available to us, lacking massive mobilization? but there is the issue of the tangled web of feelings americans carry about israel that make this current struggle murky for many people