Tag: protests

Tactical Advantages of Nonviolence

Tactical Advantages of Nonviolence

Posted on by jabittan
The Black Lives Matter movement has been set back in recent years by the use of violence. In 2020, Black Lives Matter protests and protests against police brutality directed toward minorities (black people in particular) erupted across the United States with violence being caught on camera. Protesters and police alike hurt their own stated messages and positions through the use of violence during protests.
 
 
Nonviolent protests sound like a good approach simply because they fall within positive moral frameworks. But the reality of nonviolent movements is that they provide a tactical advantage. Steven Pinker writes about this tactical advantage, and its deliberate use, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. He writes, “a taboo on violence, [Martin Luther] King inferred, prevents a movement from being corrupted by thugs and firebrands who are drawn to adventure and mayhem. … By removing any pretext for legitimate retaliation by the enemy, it stays on the positive side of the moral ledger in the eyes of third parties, while luring the enemy onto the negative side.”
 
 
This is where both police brutality protesters and the police themselves failed in the summer of 2020. The police were being criticized for being unreasonably violent in their tactics and approach toward policing black people. Displays of force caught on camera during protests reinforced this image. Using violence against protesters put the police on the negative side and put protestors on the positive side.
 
 
However, looting during the protests, along with vandalism and the destruction of both public and private property, made the protesters themselves look bad. Protestors also employed violence against the police at some points, defeating the message they were trying to present. Outside of BLM protests in 2020, the violent storming of the capital on January 6th by angry Trump supporters demonstrates how the use of violence can shock the public and destroy credibility.
 
 
Being nonviolent is not just a good moral position to take. It is a tactical advantage in protests and grass roots movements. Violence is harmful and counter productive to the purpose of a protest or movement, while nonviolence is a strategic aid.
Is Violence a Necessary Component of Social Change?

Is Violence a Necessary Component of Social Change?

Posted on by jabittan
I just finished William C. Kashatus’s biography of William Still, an African American abolitionist from Philadelphia who was a key figure as part of the Underground Rail Road. Something very surprising from the book was that Philadelphia had segregated streetcars in the 1860s that the city’s black population fought against. A full century before blacks fought to desegregate busses in the American South, Philadelphia was experiencing a fight for equality on public/private transit systems. In both cases, in the 1860’s and 1960’s, the social movements for racial equality focused on transit lead to violent protests. Couple the violence from those movements with the violence from recent Black Lives Matter protests and it seems fair to ask, can social change be achieved without violence?
 
 
I don’t want to focus only on black protests turning violent. An irrational mob of primarily white people attacked the National Capital on January 6th, 2020 after Donald Trump lost his re-election bid. The group was fighting for social change (not a social change that I would support – they wanted to reinstate a racist, moronic, demagogue as president against the principals of our democracy). Had the group succeeded we would have experienced a tectonic shift in our social and political system. This is in line with a theory that Yuval Noah Harari presents in his book Sapiens. He writes, “just as geologists expect that tectonic movements will result in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, so might we expect that drastic social movements will result in bloody outbursts of violence.” The idea is that any major social change will involve violence. Whether it is an attempt to overthrow the American electoral system or to desegregate public transit, violence seems to be part of the system.
 
 
But is this accurate or just a misleading perception? I would argue, and despite the quote above I think Harari would support this argument, that violence is not actually a necessary component of major social change. Our perception of increasing violence is likely just due to biases in our thinking. We don’t consider the changes that have occurred without violence because they are not memorable and don’t receive the same media attention. Social changes attached to violence are much more memorable and much more likely to get news coverage and attention than social changes that are not accompanied by violence. 
 
 
In the last decade in the United States there have been three major social changes that I can think of that haven’t involved any violence but could dramatically change our culture. I can even imagine a world where violence was employed in an attempt to reach the outcomes we have reached without violence. These three issues are gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and reductions in teen pregnancies and sex.
 
 
In a decade, the United States went from violence and vitriol around gay marriage to celebrating or passively accepting gay marriage. There has been violence against many individuals, but no major explosions of violence by pro- or anti-gay marriage advocates. Views simply shifted very quickly among the population in a short period of time.
 
 
The same has happened for marijuana legalization. A drug that has been unreasonably attacked and tied to racial fear and discrimination is gaining popularity and becoming decriminalized across the country. In a short span, the drug has gone from being a pure evil to something Snoop Dogg and Martha Stuart can discuss live on TV (I don’t know if they have discussed marijuana live on TV, but they do have a business partnership).
 
 
Teen pregnancies are also decreasing, as are rates of  teen sex. It isn’t obvious that these changes in teenage sexual behavior are taking place, and it isn’t clear why. In the past, teen sex has been harshly regulated and fought against, with young teen girls in particular facing sharp penalties which could include violence against their minds and bodies. Today, teen sex and pregnancy rates are declining while violence employed against young people is also declining (I know some young boys and girls experience sexual violence and physical violence related to sex, but there is no nationwide campaign of violence against teen sex) and many schools are being legally prevented from using violence as a punishment for children.
 
 
As Harari also writes in Sapiens, “the tectonic plates of history are moving at a frantic pace, but the volcanoes are mostly silent. The new elastic order seems to be able to contain and even initiate radical structural changes without collapsing into violent conflict.” Certainly violence has not disappeared, but it is striking to note that less violence has been employed for some major social changes in the United States in the last few years. This is a positive trend, and one we can all hope continues into the future. The riots of January 6th and the violence that erupted around protests against racial injustice in 2020 may be more of an outlier moving forward than the rule.
Police and Violence

The Connection Between Police and Violence

Posted on by jabittan
A few weeks back the United States saw huge protests against police violence and use of force by law enforcement officers. That violence and use of force falls disproportionately on minority populations who have been evicted and incarcerated at rates beyond what one would expect given the demographic breakdown of the United States population. Amidst protests of police brutality, in several dramatic and high profile instances, what the United States saw was extreme police aggression toward protesters, bystanders, and media reporters that seemed to confirm the idea that police use of force was out of control and in need of reform.

 

Following the protests, there were questions about whether police presence at protests actually incited more violence than it prevented. People asked if police needed to show up in riot gear at Black Lives Matter protests, and what would happen to the police and during protests if police forces had not shown up with riot gear.  Many argued that the police themselves sparked the violence that they responded to with force – in effect, the argument suggests that police showing up prepared for violence furthered the violence.

 

The idea that police enforcement lead to an increase in violence is one that I came across about a year ago while reading Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream. In the book, Hari argues that greater drug enforcement and more police action against drug users and dealers leads to more crime, not less. He writes, “Professor John Miron of Harvard University has studied the murder statistics and found that statistical analysis shows consistently that higher [police] enforcement [against drug dealers] is associated with higher homicide, even controlling for other factors. This effect is confirmed in many other studies.”

 

Arresting drug dealers and gang members doesn’t reduce the demand for drugs in a given region. Arresting low level drug dealers and gangsters doesn’t lead to much other than an arrest record for the individual, making it hard for them to find legitimate work, leaving drug dealing as one of the few lucrative opportunities available. Arresting a high level drug dealer or gangster creates instability. If you remove a leader in the drug trade, then a power vacuum exists. Competing gang members will vie for the top spot, and might also have to face off against rival gangs to defend their turf. Arrests and enforcement end up creating instability and more violence than they solve. This is part of why homicides increase after a gang member is arrested.

 

Similar to police forces that respond to protests with riot gear, and contribute to the likelihood of people actually rioting, police who arrest gang members and drug dealers actually create more violence and murder, not less. At a time when we are questioning the role and effectiveness of our police services, we should think about whether their actions achieve their intended goals, or whether their actions create a cycle that leads to more police enforcement. If responding in force creates situations for violence violence, then our police should not respond forcefully before it is necessary. If enforcing drug laws creates more violence, then we should ask whether we should be doing something else with our law enforcement.

 

Our police can be what we need them to be and what we ask them to be. The last few decades, what we have asked them to be is a quasi-militant force. The focus was not saving all lives, but on showing force and dominance. It is fair to ask if this is the goal we really want for the police, or if we want them to actually contribute to more safety and less violence for all lives in our communities.

Some Thoughts from MLK

Posted on by jabittan
In his book, United, Senator Cory Booker speaks about social activism and racial tensions in the United States. He shares some thoughts from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that helped him make sense of the difficult state of race relations in the United States. A passage from Booker with influence from King Jr. reads, ““It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary decent housing conditions. He condemned riots and violence as “socially destructive and self-defeating,” creating more problems than they solve. But he also called riots “the language of the unheard.””

The Civil Rights Movement is looked back at with fondness from both white and black people in the United States today. We have somewhat romanticized the time period, elevating figures like Dr. King Jr. and remembering demonstrations as solely peaceful. In our minds, freedoms were quickly forthcoming and there were no violent riots and protesters had a clear message and simple demands for fairness.

I have not studied the Civil Rights Movement in depth, but I have a sense that this idealized notion of the movement does not match the reality of the time. We want to look back and believe that all demonstrations were non-violent from the start, but I’m not sure that is the case. This is important because how we look back on that period of time shapes the perceptions we build regarding racial minorities today.

In 2017 there seems to be less of a racially charged atmosphere than existed in 2015 when multiple black men died in police interactions as a result of police officer discretions and interpretations of the situation. The response has been demonstrations, calls for greater recognition of institutional racism, and in some instances riots. What I have seen from our society is a lack of understanding of how we should respond when racial minorities call for action, demonstrate, or even riot. I agree with Dr. King that riots become devolutionary and take the focus off of the issue originally being pursued and limit the discussion that we should be having regarding race relations in the United States, and at the same time I agree with the last part of the quote that Booker shared, that riots are the voice of the unheard. I have seen many marches and demonstrations at the University I attend and across the country, but non of the non-violent demonstrations seem to get much attention, and most often the responses I hear from white people are dubious of the claims of solved racial disparities in our society.

Turning to riots and violence seems like a logical response for a group that has been ignored and criticized when demanding acknowledgement of injustice. I think we ought to ask ourselves not just whether we think a group has a right to demonstrate or riot, but how a group should behave when they perceive that they are being victimized. We all love a peaceful protest, but at what point does a group demand more and allow frustrations to bubble over in the hopes that a message is truly communicated or at least addressed?