Last week, I wrote about the protests that swept through my hometown of Columbia University and made headlines across the country. I do not believe the participants are motivated by anti-Semitism, but the size, intensity, and duration of their protests have led many Jewish students to believe that they are Jewish. He said he feels besieged because of this. This review turned out to be one of the most polarizing things I've ever written. Part of the reason is that some readers interpreted my position as opposing the student movement as a whole.
I wasn't against the protests at all when they started last fall, but they have escalated significantly since then. After students took over the university's storied Hamilton Hall and police in riot gear made more than 100 arrests, the administration shut down campus, moved all classes online, and we, professors… In response, it recommended that final exams in classes be reduced or abolished. The current climate is as grim as it was when the 2020 spring semester was forced to end with a desolate groan due to the coronavirus.
Rising temperatures aren't the only thing that happened this week. The protests went in the wrong direction. It went in a similar direction to many other activist movements I've seen. It was the same wrong direction the civil rights movement took in the late 1960s.
After the concrete victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some within the movement sought to maintain a focus on legal and institutional change, while others saw a more symbolic confrontation as an opportunity to tell the truth. Conflict arose between people who valued the To power.
This conflict was most evident in what happened to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC began as a grassroots movement of sit-ins and voter registration, but Stokely Carmichael replaced John Lewis, a Selma protest veteran who spoke at the 1966 March on Washington, as the group's leader. Although a charismatic figure in Black Power, his political plans tended to be vague at best. The term “Black Power” often had different meanings depending on who supported it. In essence, it was a slogan, not a program.
This new idea that gestures and performances are themselves forms of action worried the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who called some of the group's demonstrations “an act of rivalry without a constructive purpose.” and an expression of anger. According to historian Taylor Branch,
James Bevell, who collaborated with Martin Luther King Jr., chided fellow activist Hosea Williams for not having a political strategy beyond putting black people “in jail to be on TV”—he instead (using racial slurs). Andrew Young asked some Memphis activists, “How many people did you kill last year?” in response to what he considered a dangerous statement. He proposed converting that militancy into actual policy goals instead.
Have your efforts to focus on performance paid off? List important civil rights victories between 1968 and the election of Barack Obama. It is much more difficult than naming previous victories. Of course, as Dr. King knew, protest requires theater. (In 1965, in a letter to Young during the Selma demonstrations, Dr. King said, “Don't be too kind. It was a mistake not to march today.'' In times of crisis, we… (You have to have a sense of drama.'') But that's dangerously easy. The drama becomes important, and the protests become less about changing the world and more about playing ourselves.
I agree with the campus protesters that the war in Gaza has become an atrocity. While the Hamas massacre was itself an atrocity, Israel had every right to defend itself. But it cannot justify the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, leaving countless more disabled and homeless. I am increasingly disappointed that President Biden does not simply deny Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu further arming him.
But beyond a certain point, we have to ask whether escalating protests are helping to change this situation. The Colombian government agreed to consider proposals on issues such as divestment and shareholder activism, and to create health and education programs in Gaza and the West Bank. But the demonstrators remained undeterred, and some groups apparently became even more furious.
Among the protesters, Columbia University President Minoush Shafik and the Board of Trustees saw the occupation of Hamilton Hall and the visible destruction of property and said, “Well, if students feel so strongly, then… Did anyone really think he would say, “Let's leave?” Israel soon”? The encampment had become old news, and the point seemed to be less about making change and more about expressing anger for its own sake.
The initial protests were an effective way to demonstrate how fervently so many people opposed the war, but it was time for the next step: slow and steady persuasion. This is not a surrender, but a change in tactics aimed at ensuring that activists' work is rewarded. We remember Dr. King most vividly, including his time in prison for participating in protests. But his daily life as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was one of endless, often frustrating negotiations with those in power that ultimately bore fruit. In this, as well as in his march, he and his allies created America as we know it today. Suckling hot oratory about black power may have instilled some pride, but it produced little more than that.
In Achieving Our Nation, Richard Rorty writes about the modern sense in which even self-expression is a form of persuasion. Mark Cooper has written about the left in the George W. Bush era about the dangers of seizing on “rebel posturing” instead of how to “actually figure out how to win elections.”
In a time when the personal has become political, there is always the danger that the quest to heal the world turns into a quest for personal catharsis. By keeping this difference in mind, Colombian protesters will move closer to making the changes they support.
