My paper on political consequences of 1960s protests has received a lot of attention recently. I'm very grateful for the interest 🙏🏽 and, when possible, want to respond to some of the thoughtful critiques. 1/
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
cambridge.org/core/journals/…
Below is an excerpt of a brief critique from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Ann Thompson in an interview in Vox. 2/ vox.com/identities/202…
Dylan M.: One concern I’ve heard raised is that protests, particularly violent protests risk triggering a backlash among white voters…How do you weigh that risk against odds that protests will persuade people to take police violence & other underlying concerns seriously? 3/
Heather Ann Thompson: This is an incredibly important strategic question people are thinking about. But to me, it’s not helpful, I think, to think about the rise of backlash as the fault or responsibility of people who spoke out on behalf of justice.… 4/
We’ve somehow gotten this idea that we wouldn’t have had Nixon or law and order if it hadn’t been for the activism of the 1960s. And I just think that’s a fundamental misreading of the historical record.… 5/
The truth of the matter is that it’s precisely because of that level of racial backlash — because of lynching, because of slavery, because of the high prevalence of white backlash — that the 1960s were born in the first place. 6/
Before responding, I want to note that I admire Thompson’s work enormously. I’ve taught her book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, for the last two years in my film and politics class. 7/
It’s been a critical text to help students to see unjust state violence, to understand the profound failures of our criminal justice system, to confront the challenges faced by people who are incarcerated and to empathize with those behind bars. 8/
That said, I also think this response makes at least three important errors that are worth addressing: treating prejudice as immovable, ignoring black agency and treating black leaders, thinkers & activists as monolithic. 9/
First, I address the “immovable prejudice” hypothesis implied by the critique in a separate thread so will just link to some of the evidence against that model of the world, here: 10/
Second, the critique rightly emphasizes the long & oppressive history of white domination. It then argues this history is the central reason for white backlash & therefore, work like mine wrongly ascribes ”responsibility” to ”people who spoke out on behalf of justice.” 11/
As my work notes repeatedly, there is no dispute over the long history of white supremacy and white domination. Even in that context, though, black activists had what I think of as constrained power. 12/
Yes, white domination severely limited black efforts to fight for equality but subjugated people around the world have always found ways to resist, from “slow walking” work to hunger strikes (see Guantanamo or 1981 Irish hunger strikes) to boycotts and protests. 13/
As Thompson’s book shows, even people who are incarcerated under terrible, brutal circumstances have agency to resist domination. Any story that centers white supremacy so totally that black agency is erased from the story is itself ahistorical. 14/
More importantly, erasing black agency replicates a certain kind of profound disregard in which marginal groups are not seen as fully human and capable of independent thought and action even against often overwhelming constraints. 15/
It is precisely because the vast majority of white Americans in the 1950s and 1960s were not working to dismantle Jim Crow and other forms of American Apartheid that black activists chose to force the issue on to the national stage. 16/
If white domination and white backlash are the beginning, middle and end of the story, where do black agents of change fit in the story? 17/
Third, the critique describes “activism of the 1960s” and “people who spoke out on behalf of justice” as monolithic. 18/
Third, the critique describes “activism of the 1960s” and “people who spoke out on behalf of justice” as monolithic. 18/
As Thompson, a professor of history and Afro-American and African Studies, is no doubt aware, throughout the history of the black freedom struggle there has always been substantial variation in the ideas and actions championed by different advocates. 19/
In other words, some black folks who “spoke out on behalf of justice” argued for the strategic use of nonviolent civil disobedience to “dramatize injustice” and build winning political coalitions. 20/
Other black folks ”who spoke out on behalf of justice” argued for armed self-defense against relentless white supremacist repression. In a number of cases, like Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), they were the same people whose ideas changed over time. 21/
By collapsing this variation to a single category of “activism of the 1960s” or ”people who spoke out on behalf of justice,” the critique erases the very active debate about tactics and strategy among black leaders and thinkers. 22/
In the 1960s, folks like Ella Baker and Angela Davis were brilliant activist-thinkers who disagreed in profound ways about how to advance change. My paper tries to put these debates among activist-thinkers at the center of a scholarly debate. 23/
For an empirical social scientist, engaging deeply with these ideas means, in part, evaluating the political consequences of those ideas and considering evidence as to which strategies worked better to advance black interests. 24/
Anything less than taking these activist-thinkers seriously is its own form of misreading history. Ignoring black agency and collapsing anti-racist advocates & activism to an undifferentiated bloc narrows rather than wrestles with the fullness of their humanity. fin/
For anyone interested in a summary of the main findings of my paper “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting,” see this thread:
For a summary of the findings highlighting the central role of the media in shaping public perceptions protests, see this thread:
Finally, as my personal story is itself becoming a part of the discussion of this work, this thread offers a little bit of the back story on the long journey to publication:
