Protests Are Near Constant. Do They Work?  ## Metadata - Author: [[Code Switch]] - Full Title: Protests Are Near Constant. Do They Work? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/89dee743-ca61-4462-9b75-452e03d19920 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Teen's Doubt on Protest Impact** - Katie Hamill's 17-year-old son questions the purpose and effectiveness of protests. - He feels frustrated and anxious about societal issues and protests failing to cause change. Transcript: Katie Hamill My name is Katie Hamill, and I'm from Austin, Texas. My husband and I went to the No Kings protest here, and I had been talking to my son about the protest a couple days prior, seeing if he wanted to go, come down with, like, let's go out, let's Hold some signs. I was planning to blow bubbles and just be like a happy fairy sprite, which is kind of my jam. And his response was almost immediately, what's the purpose? I don't think protests really do anything. Like, they don't seem to make any difference. Gene Demby Wait, but Parker, how old is Katie's son? He's 17. B.A. Parker And Katie said he feels frustrated and defeated being a progressive teenager living in the conservative state of Texas. Like, the things he wants are likely just never going to happen. Katie Hamill And I was, you know, gutted, first and foremost, but also understandable. Understandable about where he's coming from. B.A. Parker Katie says for her son, one worry can spiral into another. Katie Hamill We started talking about just his generalized anxiety about the state of the world. And that led us down a path of speaking about AI and particularly the capacity of AI to create disinformation videos that can be used to foment political violence on a really massive Scale that, you know, he's terrified. He's just so anxious. Oh, he's going through it. Oh yeah. He's in it. In it. All the teenage angst. ([Time 0:01:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9c38ecb2-2207-468c-9af3-d0d1ee8cb220)) - **Broad Forms of Protest** - Protest history shows how people fought for rights and lasting change in many ways. - Protest does not always mean street marches; it includes various forms like boycotts or symbolic acts. Transcript: B.A. Parker I spoke with Professor Gloria J. Brown Marshall. She's a professor of constitutional law and Africana studies at John Jay College. And her book, A Protest History of the United States, explores how people in the U.S. Have always organized. From indigenous revolts to union strikes to the 2020 protests after the killing of George Floyd, rebellion and protest have shaped this country. Gloria J. Brown Marshall We need to know how to do this, and do this meaning protest. And people have said, oh, it's not effective anymore. Nobody does anything with protests. It doesn't really work. And so I wanted to have examples, and I couldn't put everybody's protests in there, but it's got a lot of protests from, you know, the indigenous uprisings and all these different things That people have done, large and small, that I think is necessary for us to understand today to inform our protests today. B.A. Parker Gloria told me that she wanted to write the book because she was seeing a disconnect between the rights we have now and the knowledge we have of the people who fought to achieve those rights. Gloria J. Brown Marshall And they were almost dismissed from history. And I felt that they should be, or at least their efforts and their work should be known. And also I wanted young people to understand that there are protests that have taken place that can inform the protests they're doing today. B.A. Parker This is a perfect segue because I was talking to a listener who lives in Austin, Texas, a mom, and she's trying to persuade her teenage son that protests work because he doesn't think That way. And what would you say to this mom to try to, like, cajole this kid back into action? Well, depending on the age, they've seen a lot. Gloria J. Brown Marshall And they've seen a lot of protests, and yet they see a lot of backsliding. And so they have the right to be cynical. So I think she should really see him as someone who's deservedly cynical based on everything they've seen in their short time period on the planet, but also to realize that protest, Even if it's street protest or some other protest, is empowering. And it allows them to lift that weight off of their shoulders and be a part of something that's social, that sense of empowerment that comes with being a part of something greater than Yourself. B.A. Parker What would you consider the most successful movements in U.S. History? Eight-hour workday. Gloria J. Brown Marshall Yes, that's why people, you don't think that came from protests. Is an eight-hour workday a good thing? An eight-hour workday is a good thing because people used to work 16 to 20 hours. They used to work whatever amount of time the employer wanted them to work. And see, that's why I was saying basic things like that we take for granted, and we don't realize that the eight-hour workday was in law in the 1860s. But in practice, it didn't take place until the 1900s. People had to protest to make it a reality. You had people in the street. You had strikes. You had work shortages or slowdowns. You had work stoppages. And my book is about there are many ways in which to protest. We don't think of Rosa Parks with a bullhorn in the street with a sign, but her protest was internationally known and effective all the same. So for that mother talking to that young person, just think protest doesn't have to be just out in the street. It could be a singular decision not to buy at a certain store. That's protest. So I look at it, somebody wants to take a knee. That's protest. That's an individual part or could be part of a group. And if we expand the idea of protest, it can involve more people and do more things. ([Time 0:05:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/949dad53-34ff-4bf9-8497-d330b74dc42a)) - **Coal Miner Protests History** - Coal miners in West Virginia protested brutal working conditions and company control. - Led by Mother Jones, workers faced evictions and harsh retaliation to form unions and fight for rights. Transcript: B.A. Parker From us. The ground you took is mine. I think it would be interesting to just go through the strategy of a single protest, the non-TV version of it. Okay. Gloria J. Brown Marshall The co-workers strike based on the fact that the corporations, the train barons and the coal company barons, and they used the word barons back then because they were basically taking From the European models. They would come here and with the same mindset, many of them, of serfdom, that the worker is a serf. And at the time in Europe, the serf was connected to the land. That's why you get that word, landlord, because yes, they were lord of the land. It became the version of south of sharecropping, where the farmer would get a little part of what they produced, and the lion's share of it would go to the plantation owner. And so what we have now are people who are working in the coal mines. They find this massive amount of coal in the mountains of West Virginia. And so there's no eight-hour work day. They work them as long as they need to work them. They're going into these dangerous conditions, and people are dying. People are losing a limb. But the corporation owns the land. They own the homes. They own the schools. They own the church. The corporations own the stores. And so the people who are working there are paid in what is called scripts. Their piece of paper is not real money. It's a piece of paper with the company's name on it. Say it's $10 and then you go to the company store and then the company store, which is owned by the corporation, then, you know, writes down how much you bought at the company store and Takes it off of the script and writes it down how much you now owe from the rent, from the store, from clothes. The worker had nothing. So the workers want to join unions. They want to become united and have a power to sit at the table and decide certain things. So they wanted to renegotiate their wages. And to do that individually, they would have, they call yellow dog contracts. And in the contract, it said you could not negotiate your wage. You could not be part of a union. And if you did, you would be evicted from your home. And so what they had to do, they had someone named Mother Jones. And Mother Jones was this little, she's like a little grandmother, this little white haired white woman who would, with this fierce voice, and she would tell them, you know, get together, Everybody come together. So you had this strategy of how much money we should make, what should be the union, how can we bring in somebody from outside to help organize us. Then you have this union organizer and Mother Jones. So you have all these things coming together, but you also had people who were not going to allow that to happen. So folks were evicted, and once they were evicted, they would live in a tent. But then the corporation owned the land where the tents were, so they were evicted from the tents. So you had a high price paid in order for them to continue to have union organizers. But because unions were in other parts of the country, outside people came in to help them organize their unions. ([Time 0:10:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/66f2ad89-4d1a-41f1-b124-31ef6a6ceca2)) - **Childhood Protest Experience** - Gloria J. Brown Marshall shares her first protest experience as a child supporting a school tax levy. - The levy did not pass, highlighting early feelings of protest loss and the complexity of issues involved. Transcript: B.A. Parker I've been talking to Professor Gloria J. Brown Marshall about her book, A Protest History of the United States. And she told me that one thing that stood out to her in her research was the importance of young people in protests. Gloria J. Brown Marshall So many high school students have played major roles in protests. They haven't recently because so many people refuse to give young people their due as far as effective protesters. They became effective during George Floyd because older people like myself who had respiratory issues or whatever couldn't protest as much as we would have. And so that gave the entree for young people to take their true role. But protests are usually by the young. They have the time to read the issues, but they also have the type of jobs that would allow them to protest. And the children's marches, for example, during the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King had children, high school students, because if the parents marched and they lost their Job, the whole family would lose their income. And so they would have high school students participating or college students participating in sit-ins and marches. B.A. Parker That's why they're protesting at night. They got to get out of school. You got things to do. Gloria J. Brown Marshall Do you remember? You write about it in the book, but I wanted you to say, do you remember your first protest? I remember my first protest. I was in grade school, and this was during the time period in which a lot of white parents were taking their kids out of school and moving to the suburbs. I didn't understand any of this. All I knew was they wanted to pass what they called a levy, a tax levy. I wasn't even sure what a tax levy was. All I knew was that we needed the tax money to sustain the school. I didn't know as a child that, you know, people, working people, disliked taxes. I had no clue. But we went to the streets and we had our little sign, you know, vote for the levy. And I had a little sign, vote for the levy to save our school. Vote for the levy. We're depending on you. And so, yes, now you know I didn't go in and sing it. And so I wrote the little song and we were there. We were marching the street with our signs and everything like that. And the levy did not pass. We did not have the taxes to sustain the school system with all of the people who had like the higher incomes leaving, you know, the school district after Brown v. Board of Education. This wasn't right after Brown. Thank you very much for anybody trying to add stuff up. B.A. Parker This was 1950. Gloria J. Brown Marshall Thank you. Thank you. This was not in the 50s at all. Thank you very much for folks going on Google already. But what really got me about losing was just what you said, that feeling. How can we lose? This was to help our education. This was a good thing. So that was my first time going all in on a protest as a little kid, not understanding, not being mature enough to realize all the different levels of what was going on at the time. And that's why I said a lot of the young people were the ones who had the opportunity to study these things, the high school students, the college students, to study the issues, the different Layers of the issues, and not just go out emotionally and protest, but ([Time 0:18:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/652e905c-b112-4a33-82f4-7fea72ea243b)) - **Real Protest Progress Reality** - Social change via protests often involves slow progress with setbacks. - The 'TV version' of protests oversimplifies and ignores years of effort and back-and-forth struggles. Transcript: Gloria J. Brown Marshall So that when you have the two steps forward, when you have that one step back, the one step back is not so deep that it's devastating. B.A. Parker I'm thinking about when reading that in your book, when I was a kid and my first protest didn't go well, that would have devastated me and dissuaded me. But then I remembered my first protest as a teenager long before I was a journalist. Please note that it didn't go well. It didn't work in the way that I wanted it to. And as you were saying that, like, oh, I wasn't dissuaded as a young person from protesting. Gloria J. Brown Marshall I think it's very important to know that protesting does give a sense of power. We've been thwarted and our rights undermined for most of the time in this country. So to say I'm so disheartened by this past election that I can't do anything else is to negate all the history and all of our ancestral work that fought in the face of crooked elections, Fought in the face of denial of the right to vote, lynchings based on the right to vote. Look at the nation's history. B.A. Parker It feels like this country has been in this perpetual state of protest since maybe 2020, maybe earlier 2017. Gloria J. Brown Marshall Does what we're looking at right now seem to be working or have you seen it shift? I've seen a shift because I haven't seen the use of strategy the way it was used previously. And there's an impatience. This is the 21st century. People don't want to re-protest what was already protested and won. So consider the Montgomery bus boycott was in 1955. We gained the civil rights legislation in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And so many lives were lost. So many people were assaulted. So many protests happened during that time period of 1955 to 1965. But people want the TV version, and they want to see the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March. Some of the protests happened, and it was all done. And it was all done. It was 1965. I saw that movie. Yeah, you saw the movie, Selma? We heard them say we don't deserve to be here. B.A. Parker But today, we stand as Americans. Gloria J. Brown Marshall You know, it's like, yeah, and you even get a theme song. Gene Demby One day, when the glory comes, it will be ours, it will be ours. Oh, day. Gloria J. Brown Marshall So I think that there's much more to it because we're in a nation that began with this kind of, you know, dual personality of stating we want ([Time 0:23:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0ca6bf0d-850d-4933-843f-7b6dc144a44f)) - **Sustain Protest Momentum** - Use protests as entry points to ongoing activism and community connection. - Engage in creative, varied actions beyond protest days to sustain impact and hope. Transcript: B.A. Parker So I called up the news and politics editor at Teen Vogue, Lex McMenamin. They've been covering protests for years, and they said while protests are often messy and incomplete, they've definitely seen reasons for hope. Reasons that aren't always easy to pick up from afar. Lex reflected on the 2020 uprisings that happened after George Floyd was killed and during the height of the COVID pandemic. Katie Hamill And so, just like everyone else, like, I, my family was suffering. Like, I was in a really terrible position in 2020. And it wasn't like just being at home bored all the time. It was like there were real material conditions that were, you know, not only impacting me directly, but my friends, my communities. Things were really difficult. The 2020 uprisings for George Floyd and the movement for Black Lives was covered was as these scary, violent, terrifying, need to call in the National Guard for safety purposes rhetoric That obviously Trump had no shortage of other politicians and public figures used, when in reality they were often extremely joyous. They were opportunities to make public art. There were dance battles, more mutual aid, food handouts. I got so much free stuff during those protests. One of the best reusable masks I'd ever had in my life I got at a George Floyd protest in D.C. Lex also talked about some of the tangible results that have come out of those and other protests. I mean, I have like a list of some things that are actual wins that are going on in the last couple years. Please, Lex, give it to me. Just in the last six months or whatever, the Tesla takedown movement has like completely, completely targeted Elon's pockets, like quite effectively. Like you've seen it in how Tesla is like trending, for example. So that's one thing where it's like that's not necessarily what I think protesters would necessarily highlight is like the movement. But it's a way in which people are trying to connect with each other to target someone that has a role in this administration right now. Or like traditionally, after Trump's executive order in January around hospitals providing gender-affirming care, which people have suggested is an attempt to lay the groundwork For adult-level gender-affirming care bans, several hospitals across the country preemptively complied and announced they would stop providing gender-affirming care for trans Youth. But protests that happened in various cities across the country actually got some of those hospitals to reverse their decisions on that and continue providing care, which truly is Life-saving health care. And so even if that's 10 kids, right, that are, like, able to continue seeing their doctors, that's 10 kids who are going to make it to 25, maybe, and, like, get to be people, like, after This, not just statistics. Once again, like, the idea is, like, the protest is the one-time thing that can bring you in. The rest of your life is, like, how you keep actually enacting the protest beyond just that one day. So, like, use it as an opportunity. Like, figure out a way to do something that maybe sounds fun to you. Maybe it's making art for the next protest. Like, there's only a thousand million ways that we can find little ways to fight back. ([Time 0:28:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bf7a2845-b660-49a1-b3c5-98653bdbbf9f))