Why People Protest

Why People Protest

by Andrew Moss

761 words

As you read these words, you’ve probably seen some or many of the images coming out of the No Kings 3 protests that took place all across America on March 28.  You may have joined one those protests yourself.  

If the organizers succeeded in achieving their goals, No Kings 3 may well have turned out to be the largest protest in American history, amplifying resistance against an authoritarian Trump regime.

I haven’t yet seen any of those images, for I am writing this column two days before No Kings.  But my concern is a bit different from that of folks considering questions of numbers and impact.  I ask:  why does an individual protest in the first place?  What might draw this person to another protest, and to other (and more sustained) kinds of civic engagement?

A young researcher in social psychology, Anna Sach, offers a psychologically inflected perspective:  “protest is not only a tool for political change, it is a deeply human experience that fulfills emotional and social needs.  It creates community, restores a sense of agency, and offers hope in the face of uncertainty.”

Sach describes how people may be moved to act out of a sense of injustice, out of the moral urgency created by the awareness of something deeply wrong.  They will march, rally, or engage in civil disobedience from a belief in the efficacy of such action – a feeling that such protest can and does make a difference, as it has time and again in history.

But there is something else impelling people’s involvement:  a need to belong, a need for connection – an identification with others who share the same values.  As Sach explains, “this identification, whether with a Pro-Palestine movement, a human rights coalition, or a peace organization, creates a sense of closeness to others and shared values.  Emotional connection is crucial for sustaining long-term engagement.”

It’s this sense of identification, I believe, that allows people to begin seeing their protest activity as part of a life journey, a journey of personal transformation within ever-widening circles of identification.  The protests against ICE and CPB have been particularly powerful in widening these circles, as people in cities across the country began showing up for their neighbors no matter what documentation those neighbors possessed or did not possess.  As one of the LA protesters, a young artist of Afro-Latino heritage, told a reporter in June of last year, “It’s the same thing to me as Black Lives Matter.  We are all equals regardless of what color we are.  And everybody needs support.”

Identification can move, therefore, from a sense of shared values to a deeply held sense of shared humanity.

Perhaps this truth has been no more powerfully illustrated than in Minneapolis, a city that protested abductions, home invasions, beatings, and the killings of two of its citizens:  Renee Good and Alex Pretti.  Minneapolitans not only showed up in sub-zero weather with whistles, signs, and cellphone cameras; they showed up for one another by driving other people’s kids to school, by supporting restaurants and businesses jeopardized by ICE threats and abductions, and by donating all manner of necessities to people in dire need:  groceries, diapers and wipes, and breast milk.

Minneapolitans made clear to the world how expansively the word “protest” can be understood.  It can mean tens of thousands of people marching, chanting, and singing down the streets of a major American city – or lining the roadway of a small rural community.  It can mean a single Minneapolis mother responding from compassion as she provides breast milk to a 3-month-old infant left with the infant’s 16-year-old sister when ICE had seized their mother and taken her into detention in Texas.

There’s a long and venerable history of protest in the United States, a history marked by countless improvements in human rights and human life.  Part of one’s protest journey may be to learn something of that history, to feel one’s self within its great stream.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to fighting mass incarceration and racial injustice.  He encapsulates these meanings of protest in describing his own journey:

“There is something about being lifted up by the whole of human history, by all who found a way to fight oppression and injustice, all who found a way to love despite the hate and brutality.  There was something about being lifted up in that kind of community that shifts your capacity, shifts your identity.  You don’t think of yourself as an ‘I’ anymore; you think of yourself as a ‘we’.”

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Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on politics, labor,and nonviolence from Los Angeles. He is an emeritus professor (Nonviolence Studies, English) from the California State University.