What separates successful protest movements from unsuccessful?

[adaher]

I’d argue that successful protest movements have these features:

1. A sympathetic group that is mistreated
2. Demands that are entirely achievable through direct means, such as changes to laws.
3. Protest tactics that do not turn off the median voter
4. Protests are related to the grievance. If you are mad at private businesses, you protest the offending private businesses. If you are mad at a certain level of government, you protest that government.
5. An inclusive mindset, all who agree with them are welcome
6. A willingness to engage in dialogue with people of good faith.

I’d argue that unsuccessful movements have these features:

1. Primarily a concern of the wealthy and elite, although they can get a few regular people into the streets now and then. But the majority of news coverage involves things like famous people talking about the issue
2. Demands that are unachievable by any means, either because they are just too radical, unworkable, or too vague.
3. Protest tactics that piss everyone off, even many of their supporters
4. Protesting random things that have nothing to do with your grievance just because they are close at hand.
5. A mindset of exclusion, if you’re not part of the club, we don’t want you
6. No debate will be tolerated, either with on the fence moderates, or even within the movement. All decisions will be made by the leadership and everyone must toe the line

and I’d add:

7. “We’re just trying to bring attention to this issue!” If so, that tends to work 90% of the time, but it never really brings about change.

So how does BLM and the NFL players’ kneeling fit into this? In regards to police brutality, we all agree that police brutality is bad, and it’s also against the law. So since we all agree on that, what are we supposed to do about it? There’s nothing in there for the public to grab onto. Also, the national anthem has no relation to police brutality, which is a local issue. And finally, when you mention this stuff, people like me get told that we’re not supposed to tell the oppressed how to protest. The self-involvement of modern protest movements has been extensively written about. It seems that we’re supposed to understand their feelings, which we’re also told we never can, rather than advocate for real change that can satisfy their concerns.

These attributes are not what make for a successful movement.

[Clothahump]

@adaher

In regards to police brutality, we all agree that police brutality is bad, and it’s also against the law. So since we all agree on that, what are we supposed to do about it?

The problem is that police “brutality” is not an issue. It’s manufactured outrage. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen; in any group of people, you will always have the few under the left end of the bell curve who screw thing up for the rest.

But let’s take a plausible scenario and see what happens: high speed chase comes to an end, driver bails out with something in his hand, officer shoots him.

Case 1: White officer, black driver. There will be screaming and outrage. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson will get involved because they can make some money. The media will racebait for all its worth because they can make money off of it. When the officer is no-billed by a grand jury, riots erupt.

Case 2: Black officer and/or white driver. Crickets. When the officer is no-billed by a grand jury, more crickets.

[Clothahump]

Missed the edit window.

For all the rhetoric about how it’s open season on black men from white cops, reality is quite different.

Among a sample of 2,699 fatal police killings between 2013 and 2015, the study found that the odds of a black suspect being killed by a black police officer were consistently greater than the odds of a black suspect getting killed by a white officer.

“When either the violent crime rate or the demographics of a city are accounted for, we find that white police officers are not significantly more likely to kill a black suspect,” wrote co-authors John R. Lott Jr. and Carlisle E. Moody of the Crime Prevention Research Center.

As reported here.

[Banquet_Bear]

@adaher

So how does BLM and the NFL players’ kneeling fit into this? In regards to police brutality, we all agree that police brutality is bad,

…but we don’t all agree that “police brutality is bad.”

Here is the President of the United States of America championing police brutality.

And he did it to resounding applause. Your premise doesn’t hold true.

and it’s also against the law.

Its “against the law” in name only. In practice: police often “get away with it”, whether its done under the protection of the “blue wall of silence” or by indifference from juries or by district attorneys turning a “blind eye”.

So since we all agree on that,

And this is where your premise falls over: where you fail to understand what the point of all of this is.

We don’t all agree on that. That is what the protests are all about.

what are we supposed to do about it? There’s nothing in there for the public to grab onto.

Correction: there is nothing for **you **to grab onto…because you fail to fundamentally understand what the protests are all about.

Also, the national anthem has no relation to police brutality, which is a local issue.

It isn’t a local issue.

And finally, when you mention this stuff, people like me get told that we’re not supposed to tell the oppressed how to protest. The self-involvement of modern protest movements has been extensively written about. It seems that we’re supposed to understand their feelings, which we’re also told we never can, rather than advocate for real change that can satisfy their concerns.

Let me be the first to tell you that you are welcome to “tell the oppressed” anything you like. You want to lecture them “how to protest?” Feel free.

But don’t expect them to listen. Especially if you have nothing to say.

These attributes are not what make for a successful movement.

The alternatives are not pretty. The alternatives include “not doing anything”: allowing the status quo to continue and (under the current administration) to escalate. For more black people to die needlessly because the US system of policing is needlessly fragmented and training on how to de-escalate is not consistent or even taught. Where soldiers in a warzone have stricter terms of engagement than an officer walking the streets. The alternatives include “not protesting peacefully.” Where “bending the knee” is replaced by constant rioting on the streets.

People are protesting because they think that people are suffering and dying needlessly at the hands of the state. People are protesting because they think that things have to change. Whether or not **you **happen to think they will ultimately be successful or not is irrelevant.

Because the reality is that what we have here is a sympathetic group of people that is being mistreated. And this group has demands that are entirely achievable through direct means. And they are protesting in a manner that shouldn’t turn off a reasonable “median voter.” And the protests are related to the grievance. (And if you don’t believe that these protests are related to the grievance, then I would reccomend that you watch Ava DuVernay’s documentary the 13th. You might not agree with it: but it will at least explain “the relation.”) The protests are inclusive. And they are willing to engage in dialogue with people in good faith.

Black Lives Matter is most certainly not a “concern of just the wealthy and the elite.” The demands are not unachievable, as the rest of the western world of policing have proven. Every protest action in the history of the world have pissed someone off. And people aren’t just protesting “random things.” I’ve watched people of all ages, colours, genders, hand in hand supporting BLM and I’m not seeing the exclusion you feel. And there is plenty of room for debate. We are here, debating, are we not?

All of the “requirements” for a successful protest movement (according to you) are in place. As for what “provides for an unsuccessful protest”: applying arbitrary criteria that “matches” what the NFL is doing is kinda like saying “the Earth is flat because it looks and feels flat.”

But hey, maybe I’m wrong. How about we look at the criteria you’ve set up and see how we can apply it to the current protest.

“A sympathetic group that is mistreated.”

You don’t think black people are sympathetic? Is that because they are black?

[begbert2]

1. A sympathetic group that is mistreated [is the group doing the protesting]
   With the unstated caveat (which I deduced from your ‘fail’ list), this condition is not met. The mistreated group is sympathetic, but the players aren’t really connected to the victims.

2. Demands that are entirely achievable through direct means, such as changes to laws.
   I’m not aware that the protesting players are laying out a solution plan. (If they did lay one out it would be pretty radical, too - we need to somehow break the systemic tendency to handwave away crimes by cops.)

3. Protest tactics that do not turn off the median voter
   Yes. This, they accomplish.

4. Protests are related to the grievance. If you are mad at private businesses, you protest the offending private businesses. If you are mad at a certain level of government, you protest that government.
   Yep. If anybody’s going to fix this it’s the guys represented by the flag and anthem.

5. An inclusive mindset, all who agree with them are welcome
   Yes, as best I can tell. Admittedly some people have a lessened ability to kneel on the sidelines of football fields during major games, but that’s not the players’ fault.

6. A willingness to engage in dialogue with people of good faith.
   As best I can tell, yes.
   Unfortunately, this particular protest suffers pretty badly from 7. And from the fact that it’s mostly morphed from “It sucks that cops shoot black people so readily” to “Trump sucks!”

[iiandyiiii]

The race of the officer is irrelevant, and has been for various incidents – protesters have been just as angry when a black officer unjustly kills someone as for a white officer. If there’s implicit bias in the system of law enforcement against black suspects, it could affect black officers just as much as white officers.

[adaher]

To clarify, I did not mean to imply that the recent BLM and NFL protests met all the attributes for unsuccessful protest movements. There are some attributes that do predict success, but more important ones that do not, such as #7. Movements without ideas for change are just blowing off steam.

[Gatopescado]

Time.

[tim314]

I’m a bit skeptical of your number threes: “Protest tactics that do not turn off the median voter” vs. “Protest tactics that piss everyone off, even many of their supporters”.

In fact, I was just reading this article earlier today, which notes the following:

@fivethirtyeight

Marches for civil rights during the 1960s were generally seen negatively at the time. As the Washington Post noted last year, most Americans didn’t approve of the Freedom Riders, the March on Washington in 1963 or other similar protests. In fact, many Americans thought that these protests would hurt the advancement of civil rights. In addition, many Americans held mixed-to-negative views of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. In a 1966 Gallup survey, 63 percent of Americans gave King a negative score on a scale from -5 to +5. Now, the civil rights marches are viewed as major successes, and just 4 percent of Americans rated King negatively on that same scale in a 2011 Gallup poll.

[Banquet_Bear]

@adaher

To clarify, I did not mean to imply that the recent BLM and NFL protests met all the attributes for unsuccessful protest movements. There are some attributes that do predict success, but more important ones that do not, such as #7. Movements without ideas for change are just blowing off steam.

“We’re just trying to bring attention to this issue!” is your benchmark?

…can you name a protest that didn’t have as one of its goals to bring attention to the issue? Isn’t that what protest is all about?

[adaher]

If that’s ALL that it’s about, then it will massively succeed in bringing attention to the issue, until we are distracted by the next interesting thing to come along.

[adaher]

@tim314

I’m a bit skeptical of your number threes: “Protest tactics that do not turn off the median voter” vs. “Protest tactics that piss everyone off, even many of their supporters”.

In fact, I was just reading this article earlier today, which notes the following:

And yet there were other protest movements from that period, both civil rights and otherwise, which were not very successful and actually probably counterproductive. Did the Black Panthers help the cause? Given that they are still negatively viewed even in 2017, probably not. Only the most mainstream of the civil rights marches are positively regarded today. If the civil rights movement had been primarily about the Panthers and Malcolm X, Jim Crow would have lasted a lot longer.

Protesting the national anthem isn’t going to make Americans support police brutality so much as it’s become all about the anthem and I’m not seeing much discussion of the issue they are supposedly trying to bring attention to.

[Silver_lining]

If you want a successful protest one thing you should never do is degrade another person’s religion or values. To many people, the flag and the national anthem have personal meanings.

Disrupting this as the primary platform for the NFL message was the worst thing they could do.

Had the players used social media to meet with police brutality victims that were innocent, donated money, and worked with the cops and the community, I think they could have done some good and have supporters who are now anti their message.

But the movement poster boy Colin Kaepernick is a jock, not a leader or history major. He promoted and defended a man like Fidel Castro, a man known for oppressing human rights and using his military and police force for brutality as the norm

[Gyrate]

@Silver_lining

If you want a successful protest one thing you should never do is degrade another person’s religion or values. To many people, the flag and the national anthem have personal meanings.

They have personal meanings to the protesters too. That’s kind of the point.

Disrupting this as the primary platform for the NFL message was the worst thing they could do.

Really? The worst thing they could do?

Had the players used social media to meet with police brutality victims that were innocent,

Since quite a lot of the victims are dead, it would be hard to meet with them.

donated money

Kaepernick has donated something like $800,000 of his own money.

and worked with the cops and the community,

They do where the police are receptive. The problem is that many police aren’t. Hence the protests.

I think they could have done some good and have supporters who are now anti their message.

I disagree - there will always be those who will either deliberately misrepresent (or repeat others’ deliberate misrepresentations of) the purpose of the protests, or who will resort to ad hominem attacks in order to avoid having to address a legitimate cause for protest, no matter what form the protest takes or the merit in it.

But the movement poster boy Colin Kaepernick is a jock, not a leader or history major. He promoted and defended a man like Fidel Castro, a man known for oppressing human rights and using his military and police force for brutality as the norm

Case in point.

[HumbleThinker]

@Silver_lining

If you want a successful protest one thing you should never do is degrade another person’s religion or values. To many people, the flag and the national anthem have personal meanings.

Disrupting this as the primary platform for the NFL message was the worst thing they could do.

Had the players used social media to meet with police brutality victims that were innocent, donated money, and worked with the cops and the community, I think they could have done some good and have supporters who are now anti their message.

But the movement poster boy Colin Kaepernick is a jock, not a leader or history major. He promoted and defended a man like Fidel Castro, a man known for oppressing human rights and using his military and police force for brutality as the norm

If people actually cared about disrespect for the flag, they’d do what they needed to do to get people to stop disrespecting it. Given that many of the people who do complain about supposed disrespect are not doing anything that would lead to the protesters not disrespecting, and in some cases actively speak/work against the protesters’ cause, I don’t see many if any people actually caring about disrespect of the flag. What I see is disrespect for the flag being used as an excuse to not do anything about the injustices that are being protested. This is ironically a much bigger disrespect of the flag.

[Banquet_Bear]

@adaher

If that’s ALL that it’s about, then it will massively succeed in bringing attention to the issue, until we are distracted by the next interesting thing to come along.

…so if the alleged goal of the protest was **only **to bring attention to an issue, and the protest massively succeeds in bringing attention to the issue, doesn’t that mean the protest was a success?

[Urbanredneck]

I also think NFL players overestimate their influence.

Among liberals, most already hate football so little influence there.

[begbert2]

@Urbanredneck

Among liberals, most already hate football so little influence there.

I know, right? It’s kind of like how all conservatives love shooting people.

[Wesley_Clark]

@Urbanredneck

I also think NFL players overestimate their influence.

Among liberals, most already hate football so little influence there.

The NFL is pretty non-partisan as far as sports go. Nascar is more conservative in their fanbase and the NBA is more liberal.

How Every NFL Team’s Fans Lean Politically

Your Politics Are Indicative Of Which Sports You Like

[adaher]

@Banquet_Bear

…so if the alleged goal of the protest was **only **to bring attention to an issue, and the protest massively succeeds in bringing attention to the issue, doesn’t that mean the protest was a success?

Wellllllll, this one is hard to judge because I get the impression that 90% of the players wanted nothing to do with any of this until Donald Trump opened his mouth. That forced them to pick a side.

So it’s hard to say what exactly the goal is, since it probably is different depending on which player you talk to.

Bringing attention to police brutality-maybe, except that it’s overshadowed by the discussion of Trump, the anthem, and what constitutes respect or disrespect. I’m seeing 10 posts on technical rules for the flag and the anthem for every one I’m seeing on police brutality on social media. So, fail? Not sure. I’m sure that wasn’t what Kapernick intended when he started this

Fighting back against Donald Trump- fail. Trump’s going to win this battle politically and it won’t even be close. He manipulated the players and is cackling madly at the revenge he’s getting on the NFL. He’s costing them a lot more than the $1 he got in 1986.

Defusing the situation, which I would bet is what the NFL and most of its players want? Remains to be seen.

Actually, the one good thing I see coming out of this is more discussion of my pet issue this year, firing people for political opinions. For the first time we’re seeing polling on this question and most Americans are opposed to firing workers for their political opinions. And this is a case where the players are expressing such opinions on the job, not off duty. So maybe I’ll get some of the change I’m looking for in that regard.