Opinion: What is a peaceful protest?
Maybe it’s how I’m feeling at the moment, but I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a peaceful protest. Isn’t the point of a protest to be disobedient and go against the perceived peace of those being protested against?
The reason why I do not believe peaceful protests exist is because most of the time, the entity making the distinction between “peaceful” and “non-peaceful” protests is not the one doing the act of protesting. The entity making the distinction is always the subject of protest.
The terms and conditions regarding what is peaceful and what is not depends on the comfortability of the entity being targeted against. What is defined as a peaceful or non-peaceful protest? Is it whether or not murder takes place? Whose murder? Is it whether or not property is damaged? Whose property? Is it the time or place of the protest? Is it the messaging? Either way, the conditions over what is peaceful and what is not depend on whether or not the targets of protest are comfortable or not. In short, if the entity targeted feels uncomfortable, it’s a “riot” or it’s “violent” and “non-peaceful”, but if it feels like it can tolerate the level of protest or have an upper hand, it’s a “peaceful demonstration” or a “gathering”.
To that end, there’s almost always an inconsistency with how the target entity perceives protest against itself. A common denominator seen in not only racial justice protests, but sexuality justice, gender justice, and labor justice movements, is that the targeted entity or the “oppressor” will likely be equally as hostile to any form of protest, no matter how big or small, “peaceful” or “non-peaceful”.
Take our nation’s ongoing struggle against police brutality. At the moment, many people feel like the protests are either uncalled for or excessive because there is a degree of violence associated with it. While certainly not all, many of those people are white. They continuously call for a less aggressive, less militant approach to protesting, something along the lines of the non-violent protests championed by (apparently) every white person’s favorite black activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mind you, this is the very same man who white people lambasted for years because they felt like his approach to protesting segregation threatened their position on the racial hierarchy. This is the very same man who white people rioted against, time and time again. This is the very same man who was wiretapped by the FBI for years because he was believed to have ties to the Communist Party. This is the very same man who a white man assassinated because he, and many others, felt like black people were asking for too much and their fellow white peers were being “race traitors” and turning into “n****r-lovers”.
King was the face of the very movement that inspired droves of white people to:
- Throw tomatoes at a six-year-old Ruby Bridges trying to go to school.
- Mob and harass black students like Dorothy Counts (N. Carolina) and the boys and girls of the Little Rock Nine (Arkansas) as they integrated all-white schools.
- Harass and dump food on protestors who sat-in at lunch counters across the country.
- Force a 54-year-old George McLaurin to sit in an adjacent room from the other white students in the same lecture at the University of Oklahoma.
- Use one’s platform as governor to physically stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama to bar Vivian Malone and James Hood from officially enrolling.
- Vandalize private property by burning crosses on the lawns of black people, if they didn’t decide to take it a step further by burning their house to the ground.
- Literally drag black people (men, women, children, whomever) to the ground and beat them up for exercising their rights as citizens or just breathing fresh air.
- Burn, loot, and desecrate black-owned business.
- Burn, loot, and bomb buses full of Freedom Riders, black or white.
- Lynch and burn thousands of black people for ludicrous “crimes”, not thinking twice about sparing children (e.g. Emmett Till).
- Violently kidnapping black people from their homes to use for political or social bait.
…just to name a few.
So, when white people today call for more civil ways of protesting, they seem to remember the non-violent methods of protesting that black people used back then, but completely and intentionally ignore the ruthlessly violent and oppressive methods white people used to enforce white supremacy in response to such “peace” as we call it today.
Now that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is “in vogue” for many white people, they forget all of the trials and tribulations they put him and his followers through, despite them being the “peaceful” version of more militant black movements like those associated with Malcolm X.
Even back then, no matter if you were violent or non-violent, “peaceful” or “non-peaceful”, you were still wrong in the eyes of the targeted entity. Fast forward to our present day.
Within the past decade, we’ve seen a wide variety of different forms of protest. Whether it’s by taking a knee during the national anthem, marching through the streets with picket signs, wearing all black in honor of an incident, releasing Grammy and/or Pulitzer Prize-winning concept albums dedicated to black life in America, taking place in a sit-in at your school or university, boycotting businesses that “miss the mark” over and over again, writing emails, or rioting in the streets and burning down buildings and police vehicles, we’ve seen it all. But time and time again, it’s never enough.
When Colin Kaepernick knelt on the field, many complained that it wasn’t the right time or place to protest in such a manner. The President, himself, took the issue up and lambasted Kaepernick and other NFL players who knelt. When LeBron spoke out against the President, Laura Ingraham told him to “shut up and dribble”. When Kendrick Lamar released his Pulitzer Prize-winning album DNA, he included a clip of Fox News hosts who disapproved of not only his choice of words describing the police, but of rap music as a whole and its effect on black people. When black person after black person gets gunned down by white police officers and protestors take to the streets in a more aggressive manner than before, people have an issue with the violence and wish to resort to the non-violence that they also criticized not too long ago. When students decide to protest racism at their own university by sitting-in, giving a list of demands, and staging a protest free of violence, they are deemed “disruptive” to the academic success of the other students and compared to “China’s notorious ‘Cultural Revolution’ in the 1960s” because they have a “lack of respect for authority”.
It’s never good enough. It will never be good enough. The people claiming that the protests today are “too much” and that they should be more “peaceful” don’t actually care about the nature of the protests. It’s not about how you protest, it’s about what your protesting about and who you’re protesting against. If they did care about the nature of the protests, they would’ve accepted Kaepernick’s kneeling. They would’ve shown support for basketball players wearing t-shirts in solidarity on the court. They would’ve praised Lamar’s album(s). They would’ve accepted the non-violent pleas of students for change at their schools. They would’ve praised Martin Luther King’s approaches. They would’ve praised the non-violent efforts of the pioneering students integrating schools. They’ve would’ve praised black people for fighting in every American war and wanted to fight alongside them, not in segregated forces.
But, no.
No matter the degree of protest, people will always find something to complain about. That’s why I don’t buy the “peaceful” or “non-peaceful” argument, especially coming from white people. Not only do you not make the terms for protesting in this case, but even when people were relatively peaceful, you still complained and fought against their efforts, often with brutality, disrespect, and ruthlessness.
How can you expect someone to be nice to you and try to work with you (despite your disrespect to their existence), you spit in their face and push them to the ground over and over again, they get tired of being pushed around and revolt against you, and you then say “Why can’t you go back to the way you were before?”
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