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civil rights movement
Gaza Demands Solidarity From All Oppressed People
The parables of American movements for Black power and Queer visibility are principled in very interconnected foundational truths, truths that organizers must translate to the resistance to the genocide of Palestinian people.
Jun 29, 2024
As the resistance grows in opposition to the genocide and humanitarian crisis in Palestine, movement organizers across the civil rights spectrum must realize that their stories of oppression are inseparable from the systemic massacre of Palestinians.
The suffocation of life in Gaza is in very basic language the weaponization of a power imbalance. Israel and its allies hold physical and financial power that has been used in practice to murder a conservatively estimated 37,765 people. That same template of organized abuse by an imbalance of power tracks to flash points in the movements for Black, Queer, and trans liberation.
In 1969, the infamous riot at the Stonewall Inn set the path for over 50 years of power and progress for the civil liberties and visibility of Queer and trans people. But before the bricks were thrown, Queer establishments across the country were raided at the discretion of local electeds and police departments to suppress the community and further vilify the identity of LGBTQIA persons. Those who held privilege and power wielded that influence to disempower countless vulnerable Queer and trans people. And those raids and homophobic initiatives gave individual offenders the license to commit hate crimes against Queer and trans people.
Any crime against humanity has consequences for all historically marginalized communities.
Like many other moments of dissent, Stonewall’s catalyst for progress was in its genesis inspired by and directed by the movement for Black liberation. In 1960, college students at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, made history in their protest against racial segregation, protests that activated six months of nationwide demonstration. Those policies of segregation under protest were designed to hold and expand the greatest power imbalance in American history, at the insurmountable expense of equity and justice for Black people. And unsurprisingly, just five years later gay rights advocates in Philadelphia modeled the lunch counter protests to oppose the denial of service based on sexual identity.
The parables of American movements for Black power and Queer visibility are principled in very interconnected foundational truths, truths that organizers must translate to the resistance to the genocide of Palestinian people. All people deserve futures without violence. Communities battered by imbalances of power deserve justice. And the entitlement of human dignity is nonnegotiable. These principles transcend Stonewall and the Greensboro sit-ins, and they speak to this moment we are faced with.
The genocide in Gaza is a moment that must foster even greater intersectional activism and solidarity across all oppressed people. First and foremost because of the precious value of human life in Gaza. But also because any crime against humanity has consequences for all historically marginalized communities. Complacency gives violence room to find new spaces to occupy. And just as the organizing power of Black and Queer people find power in a collective, our organized dissent to the execution of innocent people must also be an undivided front.
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On the Importance of Social Protest Before, During, and After Elections
The mobilized tend to stay mobilized, they tend to mobilize others, and their actions may reframe what the elections are about.
Jun 25, 2024
Recent protests at U.S. universities have seized global attention. And now, with summer in full swing, a new protest wave is becoming visible on the horizon at the Republican and Democratic conventions in Milwaukee and Chicago. If those and other expected protests are as large as they’re anticipated to be, how will they affect the elections in November?
Among the many reasons activists organize protests is their desire to focus attention on a cause. Election seasons present opportunities for doing just that. Many people who otherwise do not tune in to policy debates begin to pay particular attention when the Oval Office is at stake.
At the same time, mainstream politicians and campaigns can be wary of election year street protests. Politicians, of course, generally want to avoid becoming the target of protests. More importantly, political operatives dislike volatility. They worry that protests will backfire and their candidate will be blamed for any disturbances of the peace.
Empirical research suggests that those relying on support from aggrieved groups may find it helpful to emphasize nonviolence, but that discouraging protest, in general, may be counterproductive.
Political operatives also employ a “dollars or votes” calculus that tells them not to let energy be wasted on things presumed not to deliver campaign donations or Election Day votes. For these reasons and others, the major parties sometimes pressure the officers of nonprofit organizations, unions, and activists to demobilize protest movements in election years.
Yet while it turns out that street protests do tend to influence elections, they more often do so in unexpected ways.
A 2021 study by John Holbein, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, and Tova Wang examined Black Lives Matter, climate, and gun control protests, as well as protests for and against former U.S. President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2020. Their national study found that counties with more frequent and larger protests tended to see significantly increased registration and turnout among young voters, voters of color, and Democrats.
Taking a longer view, Daniel Gillion and Sarah Soule studied congressional elections over four decades from the 1960s to the 1990s. They concluded that liberal protests tended to benefit left-of-center candidates and that conservative protests tended to benefit right-of-center candidates. A protest on their respective side sometimes led to as much as 6% more votes for a candidate, or 6% less for an opponent, depending on the race.
Why might this be? One answer seems to be that protests impact those motivated to vote and those turned off from politics around election time. Street protests spill over into the polling place. Voting is a relatively low-cost activity compared to joining protests.
Another, perhaps more powerful, effect of street protests has to do with how they change the way people think about what’s at stake. Social scientists have long understood that human beings navigate our world by excluding excess information and by focusing on what really matters. By drawing attention to particular issues, protests can prompt large numbers of people to reconsider what the elections mean to them.
A study of Black civil rights movement protests of the 1960s shows how this kind of election year reframing can work. Omar Wasow found that nonviolent civil rights protests produced marked gains at the polls for liberal candidates, who benefited because people began to pay more attention than they would have otherwise to the question of equality. This was in part because nonviolent protesters were more likely to be portrayed sympathetically in the media. On the other hand, violent protests, which were likely to be described as “riots,” prompted people to think more in terms of a social order frame, benefiting conservative candidates.
This brings us to what might be the most unexpected insight about protests and elections. The protest waves of recent generations are often described as the acts of the alienated. Our own research shows that this is true, but only to a certain extent: Those who organize mass street protests are usually critical of the establishment and wary of being taken advantage of. This means people generally do not instigate protests in order to produce particular election results.
Nonetheless, protests impact elections. The mobilized tend to stay mobilized, they tend to mobilize others, and their actions may reframe what the elections are about. Indeed, longstanding research shows us that the kind of alienation expressed in protest more often leads not to disengagement, but to greater immediate and long-term political involvement.
This is an election year in which protests will continue to occur. At best, the major political parties may be able to influence what protesters do. Empirical research suggests that those relying on support from aggrieved groups may find it helpful to emphasize nonviolence, but that discouraging protest, in general, may be counterproductive. The protests of the excluded and alienated will count on and beyond Election Day.
After all, in this contentious moment, the relative momentum of movements is likely to matter not only in voter turnout but also in the potentially tumultuous events that may follow November 5.
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Does Samuel Alito Have a Point?
Should our country return to a place of godliness? Not if the god in question is wielding a sword, or has his finger on the nuclear button.
Jun 16, 2024
OK, the big question: Should our country—USA! USA!—return to a place of godliness?
Suddenly the nation’s stewpot of controversy started boiling over, thanks to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito being secretly recorded agreeing with a fake conservative at the Supreme Court Historical Society dinner last week.
The fake conservative—progressive filmmaker Lauren Windsor—managed to snag (and record) a conversation with Alito at the event, in which she lamented she could see no way a conservative Christian could make peace with liberals and their focus ought to be on “winning the moral argument.” They had to “keep fighting” and, ka-wham, “return our country to a place of godliness.”
What I fear at the deepest level of my being is the separation of values and state.
Alito agreed with her, acknowledging that “one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working—a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.”
Let’s take a moment, shall we, and step beyond the clichés and paradoxes mixed into the controversy—in particular, the ones that purport to make America great. Perhaps the nation’s primary paradox is “the separation of church and state,” which is both totally sane and necessary and a potentially raw, insulting wound to believers in a loving God.
It’s sane and necessary because North America’s primary religion—the one that claimed European dominion over the land’s Indigenous peoples—had gotten seriously corrupted by power over the centuries, with Jesus morphing from “the good shepherd” to the sword-wielding leader of Imperial Christianity, engaged in an ongoing war against infidels and critics.
At the same time, allegedly pushing religion out of the realm of government raises a question even I have to struggle with. If religion... if God... is the source of our deepest values, doesn’t separation of church and state push those values out of the governmental process as well? From where does a “separated” nation draw its values? Do the true believers actually have a valid point to make?
Well, yes and no.
What I fear at the deepest level of my being is the separation of values and state. This happens, for God’s sake, with or without a separation of church and state.
As I wrote several years ago:
..government goes about its business—wages war, maintains a nuclear arsenal, entertains the American public with air and water shows—free of all unelected interference... except, uh, financial interference, which is always appropriate and always welcome.
In other words, separation of church and state is small potatoes and hardly comes close to addressing the real issues of the day. Church and state, not to mention corporate wealth, are far too full of themselves, and they all need to be contained by values that are immune to the corruption of power.
Power, you might say, turns values into ego: religious ego, state ego. I don’t think it matters much whether it’s one or the other. Should our country return to a place of godliness? Not if the god in question is wielding a sword, or has his finger on the nuclear button.
What I fear isn’t religious belief but religious certainty—at the same level that I fear national certainty, if that certainty dismisses and dehumanizes its proclaimed enemy. Absolute certainty closes not just the mind but the heart.
“Having truth by the beard,” writes Regina Schwartz, “ultimately harbors the danger of incivility toward those who don’t see the truth as we do—the axis of evil, the infidels. This is why a strong secularism must give institutional expression to the ethos that all are welcome in the search for the best beliefs about how to live together...
“It is because that Truth of how best to live together is a mystery, not fully graspable, knowable, manipulable, after all, that we need to approach the dialogue with the other with full respect—to listen, learn, and evaluate,” she says.
We face the unknown—we face the unknowable. This is our fate. Acknowledging this and groping for collective understanding is how we evolve. Closing off the unknown with a sense of absolute certainty is how we shut ourselves down.
“Consider,” as I wrote last year, “the civil rights movement, which was empowered by a large religious base but was in no way limited to that base. The value it advanced—trans-racial oneness, full human equality—was a value emerging in the moment, in defiance of a settled, one might say religious, status quo, which had set strict rules about who mattered and who didn’t. The movement expanded our collective awareness. By embracing it, we evolved.”
Perhaps what matters is not whether we as a nation—as a world—“return” to godliness but, rather, that we continue discovering it.
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