While it’s not the tactic I would advise, I’d like to remind everyone that people aren’t kneeling during the national anthem because they don’t like the singing or the lyrics. They aren’t doing it because they think our flag is ugly. Their point is not to show disrespect or disapproval of either. They’re kneeling to draw attention to the fact that people of color get shot or choked or tased to death by the police at an alarming rate in this country and that the shooters and chokers are almost never found to have committed a sanctionable offense, let alone a crime.
So, when the president says that the protesters are sons of bitches who should be fired for their disloyalty, that’s not just a calculated way to benefit politically, it’s primarily a way to avoid acknowledging the whole point.
That it is so easy to divert attention from the whole point and to benefit politically while doing so is a good argument against the protest tactic, and I might offer some alternatives that would be more effective. But I’d never dismiss the sentiment behind it. I’d never call someone a son of a bitch because they think it’s wrong that so many young men of color are losing their lives without any form of due process, or because he or she is outraged that it’s nearly impossible for a cop to be punished or prosecuted for taking a life no matter how strong the evidence is against them.
This isn’t really even a protest against the police. Not really. It’s only a protest against the police if the police collectively take the attitude that killing black and brown people with near impunity is not only a solid policy but their God-given right. If they believe bad shootings and wrongful deaths are no big deal, then obviously the kneeling becomes a protest against the police in general. But that’s their choice to react that way and turn the people against them. If they want to respond to people begging for black lives to matter by insisting that all this criticism is a way of arguing the blue lives don’t, then they’ve brought broad moral condemnation on themselves. No one forced them to misunderstand or pretend to misunderstand, or to take sides against the people who criticize the bad cops in their ranks.
The president is a born asshole seeking to lead every born asshole in the country. If you take his side on this, you’re joining a truly deplorable army. You can disagree with the tactic of kneeling during the anthem without joining an army of born assholes.
Ridiculous that the national anthem figures in any public non-political event. US employees don’t have to rise and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of their work hours. Movie theater customers aren’t subjected to the national anthem before a film begins to play.
Orchestra concerts aren’t patriotic. Stop opening them with the national anthem.
I started attending symphony orchestra concerts at the tender age of 5 (children’s concerts) and have continued all my life. I have never heard the national anthem played by a major orchestra. The only political thing I’ve ever seen at a concert was George Szell (conductor of the world class Cleveland Orchestra) asking for a moment of silence after the murders at Kent State.
Try the Hollywood Bowl – He did manage to nudge the L.A. Phil in a venturesome repertory direction, although he never initiated his plan for novel star-spangled arrangements by contemporary composers of the national anthem, which is traditionally played before every orchestra concert. – and while it might have changed, preceded SF Symphony concerts and possibly the ballet as well.
I spent more hours of my childhood than I’d care to remember in Symphony Hall in Boston, and I can’t recall a single time the anthem was played. I don’t think they even played it at the Boston Pops concerts.
And I frankly resent it when it’s played at anything other than a parade or patriotic event. I also hate flag pins and the various smugly patriotic bumper stickers yahoos love so much.
I love my country very much, so much I don’t demean it with pins and buttons and forced anthems. If someone needs all those trinkets to prove their patriotic, then they don’t understand what patriotism is.
And the anthem has no place at football and baseball games. Those are not patriotic events. They’re fucking sports events.
Sports events are to me just another form of entertainment. I enjoy baseball a lot, but ultimately it is just a way for me as an audience member to pass some time. If viewed as entertainment, playing the National Anthem at a sporting event makes as much sense as playing the National Anthem at a Miley Cyrus concert or Coachella. Ridiculous.
I kind of like it. I can’t explain why, or defend it. Especially with baseball, it always seems weirdly appropriate: my country identifying itself with its silly, but legendary, traditions.
It’s not like it’s a religious ceremony, which I would find offensive and objectionable.
If somebody wants to make an argument about how the national anthem before a ball game is inappropriate, I won’t be able to refute it. But I just like it.
I’m not certain why ball games begin with the national anthem, but it’s a tradition, and I don’t mind it. Wouldn’t miss it, either, if it ceased.
When you boast of being patriotic and your are basically nationalistic, the subtleties of protest fly right over your head. Everything said against an inequity or imbalance is perceived as a slam against the country itself and not as a single issue to be addressed.
Trump knows his base, and they are red, white, and blue to their core. They perceive the calls to dismantle Civil War statues in the same vein as the football players protesting: to them is’s a slap in the face by minorities and non-loyal Liberals.
Trump is playing a stupid, dangerous game, and his harsh language is appalling. He called them sons of bitches! A president, calling citizens who have every right to protest by ugly names and calling for them to be fired! I was dumbstruck.
We just have to keep making stands against these monsters. They will be proven wrong and we can’t let them promote more violence and hate.
However it started, or however you thought it should be in terms of “tactfully useful”, I’m not going to be the one to tell those who are oppressed that they’re doing it wrong. Maybe even if I think they are, I won’t present or lecture such an alternative, but put it into practice to show and prove its effectiveness.
Of course, I don’t agree that this tactic has been bad to raise an issue of importance to the national consciousness. The truth is that the reactionaries and their accommodating fellow travelers would simply change the conversation if the tactic is changed. Take Black Lives Matter. First they ignored it, or tried to. But now that it has been forced and seeped into the conversation, people had to tell themselves “all lives matter” to make themselves feel better. An issue having NOTHING to do with the fucking flag, and they still appropriated it for their reactionary ends.
Or illegal immigration. First it’s “they’re illegal!” But notice how Trump shifted that conversation to now we are talking about bans. Even the most sympathetic of all undocumented persons — “DREAMERS” — the restrictionists like Miller and Bannon won’t budge. Because it’s not about “illegal” but the fundamental make-up of the country.
I stand with Kaep, Bennett, and Black Lives Matter and always have the start. Maybe these people should listen to what the protestors are saying rather than demanding they stand and shut up.
Notice, I didn’t offer alternatives although I have some. My point is not to critique, only to acknowledge that my cold hard assessment is that this protest has so far been counterproductive.
I’ll give you something anecdotal.
In October, during the height of the Access Hollywood controversy, I took a long car ride through some rural counties of Pennsylvania. Some were traditionally red, others traditionally blue (we used to have rural blue counties here as recently as 2012).
I had been reading that I would find Trump signs everywhere, but I didn’t. To see that, I needed to go a little further west into Appalachia. What I saw astonished me. Unlike in 2008 and 2012 when political signs for both parties were everywhere, almost the only places I saw them were on public property, like highway dividers or intersections. There were some Trump signs, but far fewer than there had been for McCain or Romney. What I saw in one well-kept yard after another, for a distance of maybe 70 miles, were signs saying “I support the local police.”
I got a cold chill when I saw this because I knew what it meant. Kaepernick had caused a massive cultural backlash that was uniting these communities in a way the presidential candidates were not. A lot of people were disgusted enough by Trump’s pussy-grabbing and other antics that they didn’t want a Trump sign in their yard, but they had no problem putting the police sign up. Technically, it wasn’t political at all in any kind of partisan way. In fact, given the communities I had driven through, a lot of those signs were surely in the front yards of lifelong and recent Democrats.
But I’ll bet you almost anything that Trump got almost every damn one of those votes. And that’s what I saw when I went and looked at the Pennsylvania returns. Communities that had given Obama 45% of the vote would up giving Clinton less than 30% or even 20% of the vote. Just a massive, decisive turn away from the party. And the only real visible sign it was coming was these police signs everywhere.
And they were everywhere, almost as if there was massive peer pressure to put them up.
What was odd about it wasn’t just that I’d never seen anything like it before but that these communities often no police force at all or maybe a small force with two squad cars. They hadn’t had any shootings or protests or controversy. No one was actually criticizing or attacking their local police officers. Yet, they adopted this as a kind of collective communal cause.
And it was all coming from the NFL. As I’ve said, this was happening in communities that are traditionally Democratic. You can’t put it all on Fox News. These folks watch the Eagles and the Steelers, and they listen to sports radio, and they were taking a stand. And they were taking against Hillary Clinton.
I don’t know to measure something like that, but I know it hurt her and I know the outcome in Pennsylvania was really close and that she did better than Obama in the suburbs and about equally well in the cities. She lost Pennsylvania because her support collapsed in the exact types of places where these police signs cropped up.
So, yeah, it got attention but it didn’t arouse sympathy. You know, Jeff Sessions is in charge now and Arpaio is pardoned, and it’s just hard for me to see how that’s not a huge loss from the previous status quo.
So, yeah, I don’t think the tactic worked well overall. And I think it will continue to hurt the Democratic Party and the left the longer it continues. I know Bannon felt that way because he said so. And I think Trump wants to start the fight up fresh to hold his numbers up.
If you’re convinced that having this conversation means political death, then I cant see how we do not die because there isn’t any going back, not among the people who are leading movements on the ground. Not with today’s youth, particularly the ones who are political.
I do believe there was a backlash. I believe there would be a backlash no matter how the issue was brought up.
I’m not telling whoever runs in Barletta’s district to yell “open borders!” But the fact is that it’s the job of the candidates to navigate these waves.
I don’t think the conversation is political death at all. And I support making noise to push the conversation to the front.
At the same time, Bannon and Trump aren’t wrong about who’s been benefitting so far from the tactics that have actually been used.
What’s being missed by Kaepernick and his defenders is that noble intentions without a thoughtful and effective plan are just so much self-indulgence. And it’s not just self-indulgence at the expense of the minority members on whose behalf they are assertedly acting; it is, in one way or another, at the expense of all of us. We are all made worse in many ways as long as Trump and the vile creatures around him (including most Republicans in Congress) are empowered.
As the movie “King” made clear, Martin Luther King Jr. did not make this mistake. He calculated his actions and those around him to make maximum impact on the political center of gravity — Lyndon Johnson. He believed that the spectacle of peaceful people being regularly assaulted by haters (in and out of uniform) would eventually force political action. He was right, and out of this we got the legislative side of the civil rights revolution.
If Mr. Longman is right, it’s past time for a quiet word with those who, with good justification and noble intentions, are making the situation harder and the job of those who want to improve things more difficult. It’s not just a matter of admonishing progressive candidates, in effect, to suck it up; it’s a matter of making things no more difficult for them than necessary.
annoying, even.
Colin et al. are doing what they can see within their power to do to take a public “stand” (by not standing!) for what’s right and against what’s wrong.
The critique so far seems to be “not effective, counter-productive, there are better ways”.
But starting with booman, no one’s putting forth those better ways!
If you really have such, you should be sharing them with Colin et. al (not to mention the rest of us here).
Instead, seems like a lotta “I could tell ya, but then . . . ” [ah, you know the rest].
I “stand” with Colin et al.: doing something beats doing nothing. And if you’ve got a better tactic, out with it. Recognizing that of course dishonest demagogues will dishonestly demagogue it, too.
Yes, I agree.
It’s not quite as bad as someone saying ‘move on from this, because Mohammad Ali was treated worse fifty years ago’, but it misses the point just as bad.
Kaep just got the POTUS to call black men that stand up for something important ‘sons of bitches’. That has already gotten a reaction from other black men. It’s very possible this might snow ball.
It’s also very possible that some black people are fed up with black people getting killed by the police, and don’t give a shit if their actions fit within some arbitrary confines of what does or does not help long term.
Perhaps they have waited long enough.
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I don’t think this is going away:
Source
Good. Let us hope this is the beginning of something larger. Kaepernick was blacklisted from the NFL for taking this action last year, and it is very clear that NFL club owners have been Trump donors. Would expect the same among other franchise owners in other professional sports. Certainly I was disgusted enough with the NFL this year that it became very easy to boycott NFL games this season. The point of Kaep’s action, as is the point of this A’s catcher’s action is to take a subset of their fan base out of their comfort zone. While actions like this fall far short of, say, stopping traffic, they have an immediate and national impact. We’ll see how this plays out. But yeah, this is far from over.
Here’s a beginning I didn’t expect, and am pleased to see:
New England Patriots CEO Robert Kraft, who’s buddy-buddy with Trump, released this statement Sunday:
Very nicely done by Kraft.
. . . told (by their ostensible allies, mind you — or at least some of them): be patient; fight back in only these approved ways.
By way of contrast, this critique of booman’s would have made some sense directed at “anti-fa” violence. The remarkable, laudable, impressive thing about protests like Kaepernick’s, BLM, the Charlottesville anti-racist protestors, etc., is that they’ve been almost entirely peaceful, despite the provocations over the quarter-millennium of this country’s history.
And I think boo’s too quick to call them ineffectual and/or counterproductive: Not just three anymore.
I’m reminded of the scene in Ghandi where they march to the sea to make salt, provoking violence against themselves that they answer by simply marching on, thereby winning the struggle.
Obviously an imperfect parallel, but by peacefully provoking Trump’s attack, Kaep, BLM, etc., also provoked more to join them in solidarity, a step on the same path to winning the struggle.
Yeah, I’m not interested in placing a bunch of blame on anyone. Here’s my point. You can’t just say that any action is better than no action, or that anyone who questions a tactic is actually advocating patience or no action or only following approved methods.
A poorly organized protest is almost always worse than no protest at all. That doesn’t mean that no protest at all is the alternative.
What I see so far is that the backlash here involves a kind of cultural awakening (in a bad way) in the sense that it is rallying people to a new point of view. So, what you get is communities that were split politically moving hard right, and doing so based on a feeling of racial animosity that was less pronounced, less shared, in some cases latent in other cases not even existent previously.
And then it is being routed into a kind of hard and blind support of the police that is almost as rote as the support and love people show for the anthem and the flag. The police are fetishized, put above criticism, worshipped on a pedestal as a pure expression of genuine patriotism.
And this is then morphing into an uncritical cult of personality that is forming around the president, so that racism and patriotism and partisanship all get mixed up in a way that is basically fascist in its nature. Where even the decent parts of Republicanism are subsumed and basic support for civil liberties and civil rights because almost synonymous with fifth column propaganda.
And we really don’t know how to resist this or how to stop feeding it ourselves because we’re trapped by our sense of honor and loyalty and the fear that we might be defined out of what’s seen as decent and acceptable.
So, we’ll step and fight on their turf over and over, doubling and tripling down because we’re afraid that failing to respond is somehow to accept, and that we can’t abandon colleagues and allies under attack.
But we don’t want to fight about the flag or the anthem. We want tangible reforms that have exactly zero to do with those things. They are they ones who want to make this all about something it was never supposed to be about. They deliberately start a fight on these terms not because they’re stupid but because they’re devilishly smart.
So, then if a person comes along and says we need to stop and think about how were waging this because we keep losing and making the light at the end of the tunnel more and more remote, that person has to take the slings and arrows that they’re not on the right side, that they’re criticizing the good guys, that they’re the typical white guy trying to orchestrate everything, that they’re showing their privilege, or many other similar things.
In some ways, what’s done is done and there’s no point nitpicking our own side when a battle is going on. But if this war is winnable at all, it won’t be won this way. I’m willing to say it and I don’t want to get attacked for it but I am willing to be attacked for it.
If that makes sense.
Thank you, Mr. Longman. You are struggling honestly with the right way to resist a “devilishly clever” effort to maneuver really good people onto false ground so that they can be attacked by people with no interest in justice, or in humane treatment of others, or in the truth. And I appreciate your dedication in trying so hard on this issue.
To make a longer point short: if the good guys want to hand the flag and the anthem over to the bad guys, they will happily accept this gift — and then take the flagstaff and beat the good guys over the head with it while howling the anthem in their ears. In a country full of unreflective people (which is the country we inhabit), that’s not going to help the good guys get anywhere — and a lot of good guys are going to suffer for it. And that’s a fact regardless of the virtuousness of their intentions.
And as to better tactics than the symbolic kneel, I and others here would be interested in your ideas. But I agree with your basic point: the first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. Right now the good guys are in a very deep hole indeed, and the kneeling tactic looks a lot like a shovel.
I happen to think that kneeling shows more reverence for the flag than less.
My point is that there will never be a correct time, there never will be a correct tactic….if black people let white people tell them when and how.
Certainly our history has shown that the black community must fight, in their own way, for every advancement.
Let’s not forget that the shootings that caused the kneeling were during Obama’s administration, and his whole 8 years was basically ‘wait a little longer, the time is not right’ on EVERYTHING. Not just race, but also bank reform, ending our wars, etc, etc.
You seem to believe that these protests have caused an awakening of hard support of the police, or an awakening of hate. Perhaps the election of Trump makes it appear that way, but something makes me feel the Black community has know it’s been there all along, and it’s not an awakening, but an exposure.
Kaep has not done a damn thing…not a single kneel…for what, 8 months now? Yet he has managed to show…doing nothing….that our POTUS is a white supremacist, he’s got the NFL defending protesting the anthem, he’s got whole teams having meetings. That sounds like winning to me.
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This is the fallacy I referred to.
I can’t change my color anymore than Kaepernick can. That creates a problem for him when he tries to speak, and it presents a problem for me when I try to speak and get a response that “there never will be a correct tactic….if black people let white people tell them when and how.”
Funny, because that’s why I was vague and said I have ideas but didn’t express them. Then people complained that I didn’t spell them out.
As logic, this basically says that any tactic is correct so long as it isn’t patience or inaction, and as long as it originates from someone with the correct pigmentation.
I’m not invited to that conversation, so if I respect it, then I must be silent or comply and clap.
I’m a political analyst and community organizer. I don’t stay silent or clap for political actions that I consider counterproductive.
Lastly, we should not want to bring forth latent racism so we can point to it and say “See, see, when you voted for Obama you were really a racist all along, so we don’t want the votes of the likes of you.”
That’s how we try to exert moral superiority over the victors while they’re putting Sessions in charge of our lives. It’s not how Obama won twice. And it’s not how we’re going to recover from the complete collapse of 2016.
What proof do you have that this affinity for police is directly linked with Kaep? Im not saying it has had no impact — it clearly has. But he started doing this in 2016, and these “Blue Lives Matter” fascists were out and about before that. I think it started the moment Obama said “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” George Zimmerman wasn’t even a police officer, but Obama had “picked a side”. You see this referenced a lot — or at least, anecdotally reading papers.
the evidence?
that’s kind of like asking me what the evidence was that people talking about a wardrobe malfunction were referring to Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl. Timing and context.
Except, facing injustice, “failing to respond is somehow to accept . . . (cf. Neibuhr, “First they came for . . . “)
Well, if “devilishly” is your too-kind way of saying “lying sacks of shit”, well then, sure. But this is how they roll. They’re dishonest. This is exactly how whatever your (still unspecified, I’ll note again) preferred tactic is will be treated if enacted, with the same result in terms of duping and riling up “the base” with lies.
The comment I’m replying to doesn’t appear in the thread position of a reply to me, but it is a distorted echo of what I did say. I didn’t quite say “any action is better than no action”; more like some action is better than no action. And I said victims of injustice are always told to be patient or only follow approved methods, but I didn’t say you were one telling them that.
Demagogues gonna demagogue – or something to that effect. Personally I like the “stand” that Kaep took last year, and that apparently some fellow pro athletes are emulating. Having seen nothing better offered as an alternative (hopefully someone won’t suggest clicktivism – as that has done bupkis), I’m good with “taking the knee” as a form of silent protest to the structural violence that still forms so much of the fabric of our country. Whether or not things were “worse” at some earlier point in time is immaterial. We’re dealing with what is wrong now – if you are a person of color you are much more likely to be brutalized or killed by a cop than if you are white. You still face housing discrimination, job discrimination, and so on. The country still elects politicians who say awful racist things to thundering applause. A black man was beaten within inches of his life not that long ago in Charlottesville and it took twitter activists to do the heavy lifting of IDing the assholes who assaulted him for peacefully protesting while black. Those of us who want to be allies can join in, or if that is too “uncomfortable” can at minimum refrain from demanding that these athletes stay in their lane, shut up and play ball, or whatever. /rant
. . . in those photos I linked was the other players’ (including some whites) choices of showing solidarity and defending their teammates’ rights against Trump’s attacks without kneeling themselves: one simply standing with his hand on the shoulder of a kneeling teammate; have heard reports of players/coaches linking arms with each other (and the protestors?) in support. And the numbers are growing.
Again, I think boo’s declaration of the ineffectuality and counter-productivity of these protests is premature.
This is how these things happen. Struggle looks ineffective/counter-productive until it doesn’t and isn’t, i.e., when some combination of circumstances, critical mass of participation, and critical mass of sympathetic support from more who choose not to participate directly is reached (think also, Occupy).
We’ll only know with hindsight, but there’s a hopeful chance that we may have reached such a critical mass and are at a tipping point.
I just don’t see this.
A black man makes a gesture to bring attention to something it appears (from the outside) he cares about. It gets a reaction….and once again it’s the POC that is responsible for not only his gesture…but he’s responsible for the reaction also. King was calculating…..he calculated his gestures so they would get a reaction…but he was not responsible for the reaction, the people responsible for the reaction were those that used violence.
For Gods sake, the POTUS just called black men sons of bitches, disrespecting both the men, and their mothers. Kaep’s mother got the point right away, and responded. Is she now responsible for the racist reaction that will certainly be coming?
Gandhi also calculated his gestures to get a reaction. That reaction, usually violent, WAS THE WHOLE POINT. An over reaction was what he wanted.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi
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Which worked — when his target was the British Raj, an entity willing to be brutal but only within certain limits. The point with Gandhi, as with King, is that he calculated his methods to work in relation to the adversary he faced the goal he sought to achieve. I don’t think it’s inappropriate to ask those seeking civil rights in our time to do the same.
Oh c’mon.
What in the world makes you assume Kaep did not do that calculation? Almost certainly he did…..he works in a business that he KNEW would not react well. You presume he came to the wrong results, after that calculation, because it’s different than yours.
But it’s him that is in front of a TV camera, and can maybe get someone to notice.
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I can’t say if you are right about this or wrong. But at the gym this morning, the vote was solidly against you. Small sample and all, but they were unanimous to the point of ” I’m not watching football anymore”. Prolly just talk but who knows…… Still all the Ravens and Jaguars knelt today. So we will see.
The Browns had a majority kneeling and most others locked arms.
The Steelers refused to even take the field
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I’m not sure what I could be right or wrong about. I’m not taking the position that this is THE tactic, or that this is THE time.
What I AM trying to say is that Kaep has every right to do what his conscience tells him. And that he is in no way responsible for the REACTION that ensues. Any more than King was responsible for the dogs being sent out, or Gandhi was responsible for the beatings by the British.
What I AM trying to say is that an OVERREACTION should be the whole point of any social demonstration. It’s exposes your enemies, and forces allies off the sidelines.
What I find interesting, is that from my perspective, not standing for the anthem is so mundane. It happens everywhere the anthem is played. Yet one person, not standing, has got people in your gym saying they won’t watch football anymore.
I don’t know…it sure sounds to me like Kaep made his point.
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There is something very basic that’s wrong with your reasoning here, and it’s a vitally important thing for all organizers to understand.
It has to with responsibility.
If you and your third grade buddies are walking home from school and you spot the school bully, you know that this guy is short-tempered. You know he gets his kicks giving kids like you wedgies. So, if your friend says some smart-aleck thing to him and he come over and gives you an atomic wedgie, you’re going to be pissed at your friend.
Was what he said to the bully true? That’s irrelevant.
Is the bully ultimately responsible for how he responds? Also irrelevant.
What matters to you is that your friend did something that was pretty much guaranteed to elicit a beatdown, and you became the recipient of that beatdown. Your friend is responsible for what he did, and you have every right to be pissed at him.
All organizing seeks to provoke something. In some cases, getting a bully to act like a bully for the cameras is exactly what you’re going for. But you don’t judge an action’s effectiveness by whether it elicited a response. You judge it by whether it got you closer to your goal. And the organizer is 100% responsible for knowing how his action is supposed to work and why it is supposed to work.
MLK Jr. and Gandhi were totally responsible for the actions they organized and authorized. Making sure their activists were incredibly well-trained was something they took more seriously than anything else, because everything within their control had to be planned out and had to proceed according to plan. And, yes, they were manipulating their antagonists.
It worked because they looked restrained and victimized and blameless, while their antagonists looks angry and vicious and cruel.
This is why you think about how your actions will be perceived by the most important audience.
You simply cannot engage in responsible, effective organizing unless you’re willing to take responsibility for creating the reaction you’ve set out to get. You want to take advantage of the predictability of your opponent and get them to do exactly what you know they will do.
You can’t say, then, that you didn’t set out to create the reaction. You absolutely did.
To get back to the matter at hand, the action isn’t aimed at getting the police to use excessive violence on television, but to get people other people to focus on police violence, be upset about, and want to do something about it. So, if your action instead gets them to focus on your behavior, that’s already a problem.
In the Civil Rights Era, this was handled by making sure that people would take their beatings and submit to arrest, so that others saw them as almost superhuman in their restraint, and as blameless as they could possibly make themselves seem. They tried to be seen as sympathetic, and all the training went into making sure a few people didn’t screw that up by losing their temper and resisting.
Weeks and weeks of training went into this because it’s not something people are typically capable of doing. But it was considered absolutely crucial.
So, if the messenger is muddling this clear mission to be blameless, the responsibility for failure lies with him or the people who failed to train him.
A good organizer would ask someone like their training session and not to participate in the action.
Now, today, things were better because a variety of ways of expressing dissent were utilized. They partially succeeded in getting the focus off the anthem and the flag by locking arms or simply refusing to come out at all, and also by making it clear that the protest was aimed at the president’s words rather than the country or the police or our nation’s most honored symbols.
The statements that were made were made to the president.
But you still have the problem that no one has been trained for this, so people don’t know quite what to do or how to do it. There’s dissent within the ranks, and still too much side conversation that has nothing to do with the police.
It’s probably worth it to get unanimity, to move the kneeling and arm-locking to the second half where they can delay the restart of the game, get every single player to act in unison, and not have any of the focus diverted to the anthem or the flag. Baseball players can do something before the first pitch or before each at bat.
Overall, getting people unified and working on a single plan, with the purpose of arousing the sympathy and awareness of the key issue…these are the ways this should be tweaked going forward.
It’s already morphed into an anti-Trump thing, which maybe it deserves to be. But the inspiration was something that was happening when Obama was president. It’s not supposed to be about the president. And if it becomes about the president, it damn well better not help the president.
White guys vowing to boycott football because NFL players kneel in protest of racism? White guys are the least likely demographic to deprive themselves of anything that gives them pleasure to make a political or economic point.
Back in the day – say 1980’s or 1970’s – blue and white bumper stickers “Support your Local Police” were pretty common. The john Birch Society was giving the out. All the Birchers had them on their cars.
Since then, I have always associated “Support Your LOcal Police” with right wing extremism.
Your analysis seems spot on to me. But the next thought is: so what could help? Is there a way to address the more or less casual snuffing out of black lives that would not poduce a backlash and help Trump? You said you have some ideas. Wanna share?
Now that we know the Russian trolls targeted BLM it’s worthwhile adding that factor to the conversation.
We never win this argument.
You can argue that dealing firmly with protesters is how Reagan came to prominence.
In general, there is more agreement with the idea behind BLM that generally thought. The last poll I saw in the summer had BLM with about a 50% approval rating.
This was also true with Occupy Wall Street. They were very popular at the start. But their message got drowned out in disputes with the police and they wound up with a popularity rating of about 30%.
Picking a fight over the National Anthem and the flag, regardless of the merits, is right in Trump’s wheelhouse.
Remember, a core argument of the right is that liberals are unamerican and unpatriotic. Liberals succeed when they make the argument that their values are the TRUE American values. This was, in fact, an argument I thought Obama made very well in his Second Inaugural Address.
Republicans dream of rerunning the 1988 campaign.
This tactic makes that easier.
Is your argument about the flag, or is it about police? You’ve combined the two together to contrast BLM and Occupy — another movement I would say was a success in that it fundamentally changed the debate around inequality.
On the other hand this tweet nails it:
MLK was peaceful and tried to link the struggle for Civil Rights with the American Story.
And they didn’t like him.
Did anybody really like Act UP?
So maybe there is no “other way” that makes sense.
Maybe I am just completely fucking wrong.
The pearl clutchers always occupy too much public space.
Well yes, did anyone think that any of these protests would be popular? Patrick Ruffini doing his usual whataboutism concern trolling tonight about Bill Clinton and how the politics “have not fundamentally changed”. Well knock me over with a feather, Patrick, no shit confronting these issues are never popular. Struggles themselves are never popular.
The good news on the popularity front is Donald Trump is fundamentally unpopular and everything he touches instantly turns to shit. Do we see an uptick in how white America sees these protests as a result? Is this a good thing if we want to discuss the problems raised by the protests yet Donald Trump sucks up the energy. Not sure the answers to this.
See Taniel’s tweets this morning, to my point about these movements still being a force for “good” even without immediate nationalized electoral gains:
link
Trump is almost certainly not thinking like that; the preface to the whole part of the speech about this started with “When people like you see THOSE people taking a knee”, which was a dogwhistle so loud MY ears bled.
It was simply a means to rile up his fellow white fascists.
Loyalty to the State is all.
The anthem is part of the State, therefore it is disloyal to not sing it.
It is also his answer to the point.
‘Police kill blacks a lot more than anyone, else!’
‘Good!’
Though of course American Indians have it just as bad as blacks and are even less visible.
about loyalty to the white racial tribe than to “the State”.
Muhammad Ali—
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”
And don’t get Trump started on what he would do if someone took a knee during the Russian national anthem.
POWERFUL Poetry!
(pic 1: Civil Rights Activist kneeling in front of police officers, pic 2: Colin Kaep & teammate kneeling during anthem)
Ugh…darn formatting.
POWERFUL Poetry!
https:/twitter.com/TheUndefeated/status/911682699819208704
It has always been the case, that there would be white backlash when people of color chose to fight back against the system…it’s also been the case that folks would turn away from movements they agree with because of tactics…but if Black folks in the past had let the thought of backlash stop them from taking a stand…where exactly would be be today?
/twitter.com/BerniceKing/status/911603501968642049
(pic 1: Civil Rights Activist kneeling in front of police officers, pic 2: Colin Kaep & teammate kneeling during anthem)
I graduated from Penn State in 1972. When I stated there were just over 100 Afro American students on the main campus of 30,000. I never stood for the anthem at any Penn State sporting event. Just sat in my seat very quite. It pissed off all the white people seated around me. But, I believe this small activism plus all the other stuff I did, contributed to this result…there were 800 Afro American students on the main campus when I left in 1972.
I fully support the taking of a knee as every thing counts when you fight for justice.
This.
When an entire high school or elementary team of football players kneel during the national anthem in Seattle, and San Francisco, and Bellville, IL. When little old ladies, and old men wearing their veterans cap stay seated. When parents watching their children’s sports kneel during the national anthem – then it will make a difference.
It is no coincidence that white people are marching in protests in Ferguson, and in BLM marches just as they did during the civil rights marches. And for the same reasons.
If we want change, what we need is a national certification program to insure that every police force in the nation is properly trained (and stays trained with frequent re-certification). We don’t let doctors wield life threatening tools without training; why do we allow untrained right-off-the-street law enforcement officers to do so.
Yep. I fully agree with Booman’s critique of the how and why of the blue signs. I saw and felt the same about it at the time. I too was worried about what it meant.
That’s the only way that our society will move forward in the struggle with our white supremacy. Maybe the football field is actually the place to start. In an interesting way, its a microcosm of our nation’s economy of race.
And absolutely right, when the NFL owners/management and the white players and fans do it, maybe that will break through to joe sixpack in front of the TV on Sunday afternoon.
As much as I want to agree with Booman on this being counterproductive, and I certainly agree that it might have cost us the election, I think I have to go with the Ghandian alternative here. Consciousness has been, WILL BE raised. Can we, will we, struggle raise it the right way?
And while we are on the subject… weren’t there examples of MLK being resistant to confrontational tactics at the grassroots, but being forced to take them up and then having success in organizing them into a national movement?
What has happened is now the conversation isn’t just about Kaep and “He’s disrespecting the flag.”, it’s about black AND white players (and a Pakistani owner) which negates the racial onus.
And it’s no longer about disrespecting the flag, but about the real reason to protest – police brutality to minorities and then not being held accountable. Not to mention some folks reflecting, for the first time, about what the first amendment actually means.
Some black church leaders in the South were aghast at MLK’s efforts in the beginning and begged him to stop because of the backlash. He wouldn’t have succeeded had white folks not seen the dogs and police batons on national television and come to understand the problem. This is getting national attention, now and the facebook crowd is not the only audience making a judgement and deciding how to react.
Trump’s speech wasn’t calculated, he was speaking from the heart. Calling the kneelers SOBs is in perfect alignment with his supporters, because that’s how he and they really feel about anyone who would question white authority. Remember, for the last eight years their battle cry was “we want our country back,” and now having gotten it with the installation of a bigot in the white house, they’re not going to tolerate any disrespect of the flag that represents “their” country, freedom of speech be damned.
Note though, that when it comes to the anti-government rhetoric and actions of the right wing militia movement, the Bundy nuts, they encourage “second amendment solutions,” and killing “jackbooted thugs,” and this includes cops. There have been several targeted murders of cops by these people. But they will “support the police” when it comes to non-whites because then they see the police as doing the jobs they were meant to do, which is not to question their authority but to reign in and mete out extra-judicial punishment to non-whites and otherwise protect white privilege and supremacy.
That said, I don’t think there is a magic protest formula that would move the people who need to be moved. If every time there is a killing and we all do as we are told and just “wait for the facts to come out” before saying anything, which really just means for us to STFU and let them stereo typically justify whatever has occurred, then there is no pressure or motivation to change. Violence certainly doesn’t help, and symbolic protest such as kneeling during the anthem doesn’t work mainly because, truth be told, too many Americans are too damned dumb to understand what the First Amendment really means.
But to stop kneeling, for BLM to just fade into the blackground and quietly hope for change to magically occur on its own is not the answer either. If BLM is at 50% approval today then that’s because they have been agitating effectively enough to move public opinion.
This is one of these issues where, I don’t believe there is a magic bullet, and that we need to be prepared to play the long game to change this situation.
The effectiveness of protests can only be judged in hindsight. But it is tempting to think that protest tactics ought to be explicit rather than obliquely symbolic and that their targets ought to be explicit rather than displaced.
“…it is so easy to divert attention from the whole point…” for these reasons and also because no one has framed the whole point accurately and forthrightly.
The whole point is that police are unaccountable. Full stop.
The identities of the victims do not matter at all. Here is why. Suppose they do. Then somehow protect that group of victims. Other victims will at once be chosen. Is this an improvement? Think long and hard before you answer.
It is not “a few bad apples”. Here is why. Suppose I paint every surface of my house, inside and out, fire-engine red. What will I learn by doing that? I will learn which of my friends don’t like red: because they won’t come round any more. Unccountability is a color. Anyone who hangs around an unaccountable environment likes that color. So they are all going to have to be replaced, essentially simultaneously, and the expectation set, going forward, of accountability under all circumstances.
Now define your “born assholes” as all and only the people who desire unaccountability for themselves, and/or their friends, and/or roles considered (for whatever ostensible reason) unable to function without it, and it all ties back.
Trump went to ALABAMA, of all places, one of the hotbeds of secessionist sedition and of violent resistance to federal authority, and plays to a crowd that surely included a lot of folks who applaud the Stars and Bars and other symbols of sedition. And those seditious folks are upset about…what? Disrespecting the US flag? How do they keep a straight face while making that claim?
Trump went to AL to bolster (appointed) Sen Luther Strange in the GOP primary because he’s losing to Roy Moore. To whip up the Trumpsters that the millions from DC GOP funding operations and affiliated PACs that are flowing into Strange’s campaign coffers haven’t been enough.
Let’s not overlook Mexico City’68 – Tommie Smith and John Carlos:
The outrage then was huge.
There is a big difference between long term strategy and short term tactics.
Black Lives Matters is a strategic play. Blacks were enslaved, then they were Jim Crowed, now they are subjected to institutional racial violence across America.
When pursuing a long term strategy it may not resonate with the best short term tactics, see 2016. But there’s never a good time to confront racism. In non-election years it’s not very effective, no one is paying attention. In election years, it entails risks.
in the long run, it’s better to know sooner if there is a racial animus problem at large and if your paramilitary institutions are aligned with it. Later, you might be in jail and/or dead.
Honestly, I don’t know what additional proof you need to know that the police have the attitude that they are ENTITLED to perform their jobs however they see fit without any accountability to anyone. Further, the paramilitary institutions view black and brown people as inherently dangerous and therefore subject to hair trigger reaction to maintain their personal safety.
The police reaction to Black Lives Matters is consciousness of guilt.
The difference between racist police officers shooting black people or planting evidence or abusing them to the point of inflicting death in custody or suicide by detainees is a distinction without a difference from a police force that’s been indoctrinated to racially profile / stereotype potential suspects, has been empowered to use deadly force at the slightest real or imagined provocation, and has been given instruction that compelled, instanteous compliance can be expected without any consideration to the context or proportionality to the situation.
There is not a single doubt in my mind that we live in exactly that type of society today. The police are enforcing the latest backlash of. white male straight Pseudo-Christian entitlement against all its perceived ‘threats.’
The real question is why a national police culture that includes the entire NYC police force turning it’s back on it’s mayor, includes black sites in Chicago, shoots black 12 year olds in Cleveland, arrests middle aged/middle class black women in Texas and tortures them to suicide, kills unarmed black men in Missouri, etc, etc, etc
feels threatened by a few black athletes kneeling during superficial display of ‘patriotism’ at inconsequential sporting events?
They would never calculate their actions in real time with such a childish sense of threat to their emotional balance when responding to a female motorist changing lanes in an intersection.
Right?
. . . white?
What strikes me about Trump supporters — and this is a refreshed observation since I spoke to some at a social event last night — is that they are absolutely convinced that race has “absolutely nothing to do” with Trump’s support.
I really don’t know what to do about this. The people I was speaking to were erudite, smart urban professionals (which doesn’t surprise me since I respect all the arguments that this “blue collar salt of the earth Trump base” myth is a convenient press fiction, not that those people don’t exist, but the comparatively well-to-do professional suburban types are where he scored decisively as BooMan reiterates above).
They were Obama voters, twice. And yet, whether it’s Charlottesville or the NFL or the “myth” of White Supremacy in Trump’s White House or amongst his supporters, they were unbendable. They spoke knowledgeably and confidently about Ta-Nehisi Coates and how awful they felt his famous Atlantic piece was despite admiring his book (it’s “badly written”; Coates is “doing very well for himself” despite his complaints; he’s grandstanding; it’s “divisive” etc.)
I really don’t know how to respond to people like this. The word “racist” has become completely ineffectual in all contexts except in our liberal echo-chamber because nobody’s a racist; just ask them.
Something can be done, and must be done, to show people like these that Trump is literally a symbol of white resentment and privilege and brutality against non-whites — that this is the essence of his rise to power — but I have no idea how we can do it.
O/T But great news
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/24/cruz-opposes-latest-obamacare-repeal-243067
Yeh, although in the CNN story I read he was qouted as saying he’s trying hard to get to yes, but it just isn’t good (cruel) enough for him yet.
Who gives a crap if it’s not the tactic that you would use.
Let’s be honest…
There has NEVER been any attempt at protest BY BLACK PEOPLE IN AMERICA..
that has been deemed ‘ acceptable’
Someone ALWAYS finds ‘problems’ with it.
The man took a knee during the anthem.
The Flag?
You mean the same flag that my father fought under ALL THE WHILE THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES SAID THAT HE WAS A SECOND CLASS CITIZEN?
You mean THAT flag?
Show me where, IN AMERICA…
The peaceful protest BY BLACK PEOPLE..
that has been deemed ‘ACCEPTABLE’.
Phuck outta here with that ‘ not the tactic I would use’ bullshyt.