Very little was done to tackle the economic underpinnings of that kind of injustice. And certainly there was an unwillingness to tackle white supremacy. So how do we get out of this now? Think about the UN peacekeeping forces as a model as opposed to sending in the military, which only results in more violence and deaths.
How do you weigh that risk against the odds that protest will persuade people to take police violence and other underlying concerns seriously? This is an incredibly important strategic question people are thinking about. To the extent that that stuff was rolled back at all, it was perhaps because the protests of the s had not succeeded in pushing racial injustice back fully , and is not because there had been protests.
That level of backlash has always been there. The white supremacists were on the march and on the move well before anyone showed up in downtown Philadelphia.
They always are. How do antiracist protests like this connect to the history of race riots where whites targeted black communities, as in Tulsa or Red Summer or Colfax? What we have to understand is that the difference between what happens every day and what happened in Greenwood, Oklahoma , is a matter of magnitude but not kind.
We tend to ignore the slow-rolling level of daily aggression and violence against people of color in this country, but we focus on these very dramatic episodes of white racial violence. All of those particularly ugly moments were by punctuated, escalated versions of what was going on every single day to the black and brown residents of this country.
Not protesting at all would not keep white racial violence at bay. Protests keep happening precisely because white supremacy is never sufficiently reined in. And so the people will continue to erupt. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Newton in Oakland, California, on July 22, Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Heather Ann Thompson There seem to be so many similarities. Heather Ann Thompson Again, there are similarities and differences.
This way a protest can mirror the way the general public feels about a given policy. You should leverage social media for the benefits of protests. Social media has changed and is continuously changing our lives. These small actions created a unique sense of global unity, which we should build on when it comes to protests. Creating a campaign, a new group, or even proposing a new overlay for your profile photo are all happening today. These campaigns can go viral and are a great mechanism for creating momentum for your demands for change.
It is clear that our actions on social media can lead to positive change. Protest movements should take the time to create frameworks and mechanisms, to help transform momentum into real positive change in an inclusive, transparent and efficient manner. You should create frameworks for protest participants which work together to approach problems and create inclusive solutions.
These groups gather the concerns of the protesters, sit down to analyse the responses and then develop specific demands and solutions that represent what protesters want. This requires professionalizing a protest movement and will create a reliance on people from professions like law, community organizing and economics, but should be open for any protestor to join. This would enable protest movements to capture varying opinions that enrich the specific solutions being prepared.
The work of these groups would not only pre-empt standard excuses used by governments to avoid change, but would also enable them to project an image of seriousness to the world, an ingredient necessary to secure support for the struggle.
You need to professionalize your approach to communicating the protest internationally. Real-time news reporting pushes events to the forefront at lightning speed but replaces them just as quickly. In the world saw many protests met with violence, for example when US militias policed the streets as a response to Black Lives Matter protests or when police conducted violent acts against protestors in Belarus. We saw these events because protestors themselves provided videos of the violence, but they then quickly disappeared from the world stage of media attention.
Through meticulously documenting protests, altercations and human rights violations—harnessing the power of social media to continue to inform a global audience—protestors can inspire public outrage, support and ultimately policy changes once their voice can no longer be ignored. You must engage with social activists in other countries who are also striving for change. Engaging with international networks composed of social activists who can support your movements and provide you a space to share your experiences, can be very advantageous to your cause.
It is crucial to link up with organizations in your own country which are working towards similar goals, but do not underestimate the value of connecting to other social activists as well. The networking, support and expanded skills resulting from engaging with others can help protests movements put themselves into a position where the authorities are forced to enter a phase of dialogue and hopefully answer the demands given to them. You should make sure to include young people in discussions on citizen action and educate them on protests, policy change and political engagement.
From an early age, people should learn that their voice is important and how they personally can impact politics and policy. The issue is, however, that schools do not sufficiently educate children on how policy works and in failing to do so send them out into the world without the tools to change it.
In the United Kingdom there are Personal, Social, Health and Economic PSHE lessons, but neither the statutory nor the optional subjects include political participation, policy change or citizen action. Yet, as participation is integral to democracy, education on civic and political engagement is essential for creating citizens who understand how to critically participate in a democratic society.
Compulsory civics classes in secondary schools would therefore provide all children with equal tools to make their voice heard. In the absence of this, take any opportunity to educate younger people in your society on the importance of standing up for your principles and the mechanisms available to succeed. You should learn from previous successful protests and research all the non-violent approaches that could be effective. In this way, drawing on lessons from previous non-violent approaches helps protect the life of every individual and allows for strategic tactics to pursue the change you wish to see.
Are they revolutionary or just a series of spectacular eruptions of anger? And are they doomed to fail? As an historian of the French Revolution of , I often ponder the similarities between the five great revolutions of the modern world — the English Revolution , American Revolution , French Revolution , Russian Revolution and Chinese Revolution A key question today is whether the rebellions we are currently witnessing are also revolutionary.
A model of revolution drawn from the five great revolutions can tell us much about why they occur and take particular trajectories. The key characteristics are:. The most likely to become revolutionary is in Iraq, where the regime has shown a willingness to kill its own citizens more than in October alone.
This indicates that any concessions to demonstrators will inevitably be regarded as inadequate. We do not know how the extraordinary rebellion in Hong Kong will end, but it may be very telling that there does not seem to have been significant defection from the police or army to the protest movement.
Read more: Is there hope for a Hong Kong revolution? So, we need to distinguish between major revolutions that transform social and political structures, coups by armed elites and common forms of protest over particular issues.
An example of this is the massive, violent and ultimately successful protests in Ecuador last month that forced the government to cancel an austerity package. The protests in Hong Kong and Catalonia fall into yet another category: they have limited aims for political sovereignty rather than more general objectives. All successful revolutions are characterised by broad alliances at the outset as the deep-seated grievances of a range of social groups coalesce around opposition to the existing regime.
They begin with mass support. For that reason, the Extinction Rebellion will likely only succeed with modest goals of pushing reluctant governments to do more about climate change, rather than its far more ambitious aspirations of.
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