ive been to a lot of protests in my life and a thing that a lot of people dont understand is that a protest is a threat. its a large group of people saying “we are being nice now, but you must understand that if we stop being nice we have the power to cause you Problems”.
so everyone saying that protests have to be more polite or follow accepted rules is missing the entire point. the point of a protest is not to say “we disagree with you”, they already know that. the point of a protest is to make it clear that if they continue to do things you disagree with, you will burn down their house.
now this wont stop them because theyre stupid and arrogant and believe themselves to be beyond consequence. so here’s the really important thing and that’s that after they do it anyway, you have to burn down their house
I cannot stress this e-fucking-nough. My great-grandmother – hell, most of my whole family – were on the civil rights marches. The fact they had to be so peaceful was because everything done during those protests was breaking the law. None of it was legal, none of it was nice.
She told me this:
“Understand – to many white people in the US, seeing that many Black people gathered together in one place would have been shocking. It’s easy to bully a family in a town. A bit harder, but bullying a community is still possible. But over a million Black people marching upon the Capital would have had the same effect on every single White person watching. They would know what Black people were REALLY saying behind the hymns and the march.
‘Imagine what would happen if we were angry.’
“White people were terrified of those marches. And there were supposed to be afraid. Of course they were gonna push back – they have the guns, they can make up new laws on the fly. They have all the power in the world, literally – and still, nothing scared them more than a million Black people on the march. Protests stopped working when White people were no longer afraid.”