<story><title>Is There Any Point to Protesting?</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/is-there-any-point-to-protesting</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paganel</author><text>It depends on how you protest and who does the protesting. The lame-ass protests you see happening in most of the United States are ineffectual because they don&amp;#x27;t threaten those in power, because they&amp;#x27;re either holiday-looking marches or they&amp;#x27;re staged by students&amp;#x2F;young people, who are easy to ignore.&lt;p&gt;The only way you can change something by protesting is by projecting power. You do that either by the way you do the protesting, i.e. by actively engaging the police forces in trying to reach the seats of power (Parliament, Government&amp;#x27;s buildings) or by taking up in the streets the people who have the most power come election day, i.e. lots and lots of middle class people.&lt;p&gt;Movements like BLM  are ineffectual when protesting because they do neither of the 2 things I mentioned above: they don&amp;#x27;t actively engage the powers in Washington and they are not joined by lots and lots of middle class people. As such, they&amp;#x27;ll remain ineffectual as long as nothing changes.&lt;p&gt;Source: me, a guy living in Eastern Europe who has grown-up by watching protests toppling Governments and who has actively joined those kind of protests once I grew up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>will_brown</author><text>Well the article mentions one of my favorite protests, the Montgomery bus protests&amp;#x2F;boycott, that was ultimately started by Rosa Parks, history may remember her as some grand civil rights leader, but that wasn&amp;#x27;t her intent she was just a tired black woman going home from work who refused to give up her seat to a white person.  That was a successful protest&amp;#x2F;boycott without a bunch of middle class people or engaging Washington.&lt;p&gt;The majority of the article is about the Vietnam War, but do a search and you won&amp;#x27;t find either Muhammad Ali or even the word &amp;quot;draft&amp;quot;.  Muhammad Ali was an outspoken, black, Muslim who refused the draft, again history might pretend he had the love and support of the people, but he didn&amp;#x27;t at least at the time.  The War still had the full support of the American people, and Ali was persecuted, striped of his championship title&amp;#x2F;livelihood, labeled Anti-American in the media, he was also prosecuted by the Government, and convicted of draft dodging and sentenced to 5 years of prison.  But he continued to fight, the Country began shifting its attitude about the War and the draft, and Ali prevailed in the Courts.&lt;p&gt;Obviously Ali wasn&amp;#x27;t alone, just look at some of the most famous 1st Amendment cases at the time.  The Government prosecuting a guy for wearing a jacket that read &amp;quot;Fuck the Draft&amp;quot; in a Courtroom trying to chill his speech, eventually the Supreme Court agreed that was protected speech.  Or the Government prosecuting protesters for burning their draft cards, ultimately they lost and the Supreme Court ruled burning draft cards is not protected speech.  All these anti-war protests were done majorly by students, granted to your point their message and goal was much clearer than protests of today. Never mind the individual wins and loses, they were done by students, not middle class, and still they won overall because there hasn&amp;#x27;t been a draft in the US since, because its become politically untenable.  Students, racial minorities, religious minorities...not the middle class.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is There Any Point to Protesting?</title><url>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/is-there-any-point-to-protesting</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paganel</author><text>It depends on how you protest and who does the protesting. The lame-ass protests you see happening in most of the United States are ineffectual because they don&amp;#x27;t threaten those in power, because they&amp;#x27;re either holiday-looking marches or they&amp;#x27;re staged by students&amp;#x2F;young people, who are easy to ignore.&lt;p&gt;The only way you can change something by protesting is by projecting power. You do that either by the way you do the protesting, i.e. by actively engaging the police forces in trying to reach the seats of power (Parliament, Government&amp;#x27;s buildings) or by taking up in the streets the people who have the most power come election day, i.e. lots and lots of middle class people.&lt;p&gt;Movements like BLM  are ineffectual when protesting because they do neither of the 2 things I mentioned above: they don&amp;#x27;t actively engage the powers in Washington and they are not joined by lots and lots of middle class people. As such, they&amp;#x27;ll remain ineffectual as long as nothing changes.&lt;p&gt;Source: me, a guy living in Eastern Europe who has grown-up by watching protests toppling Governments and who has actively joined those kind of protests once I grew up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ismail-s</author><text>BLM entered the social conscience of plenty of people, and managed to influence discussions in the media, even in some countries outside the US. That in itself is a pretty strong form of power.</text></comment>