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In my current research on backlashes, I am flagging comments like this, which attribute agency to the group targeted by backlashers. I think we need to do more to study the motives, actions, and perspectives of those who actually participate in backlashes. /1 
Rather than assuming a reflexive response by backlash participants, who were supposedly “stimulated” to act (by the Civil Rights movement or, in this case, immigration), let’s grant them agency as we would activists in any other social movement./2
Such an approach, in which backlashes are “sparked” by campaigns for social justice or by immigration, are often inadvertently structured in such a way as to blame the victim. /3
The assumption that backlash participants are reflexive (because they are automatically set off-“stimulated”-by the group they target), does a disservice to all sides: it blames the people victimized by backlashes and suggests that the motives of backlashers are self-evident./4
Scholarship on most social movements would be considered inadequate if it followed this model of causation. If a study of the Civil Rights movement observed that racism stimulated the movement, most of us would say that this is an inadequate explanation. /5
We would want to know about the specific circumstances, the efforts of activists to mobilize their peers, the nature of their demands, the quality of leadership, and so on. This, in fact, is how most history of the African American freedom struggle is written. /6
I think most scholars would be dissatisfied with an analysis that said that racists sparked the Civil Rights movement. We’d want to know the specifics of how people built a movement, which never happens automatically no matter how egregious the racism. /7
In short, like everything else, backlashes have a history. Let’s study that history as we would any other social movement. /8
