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Whoa oh oh oh, woah-oh-oh-oh
Feb. 15th, 2010 11:08 amThe first semester I taught, I was the TA for a class on modern Indian history. It was fun to teach--I love South Asian politics, even if it's not my main focus--but the course was challenging; it was a being taught as a general-education requirement-fulfilling course to (mainly) students in art schools, students who hadn't taken a course that required reading and writing papers since high school. They were very smart, very talented, and totally lost.
Once, while we were talking about the Indian independence movement, a student came up to me after class. She'd be asked to write about protest art in another class, one of her design classes. And she asked me, "Has there ever been a social movement that had success?"
I was momentarily struck dumb, because I had no idea how to answer the question. In the end, I talked about how we don't code a single event as a movement, but the whole long stretch of repeated protest; it's not that you hold a march and automatically get something back from it, but that over years of campaigning via different methods a change is made. I named the American civil rights movement, the Indian independence movement, and the anti-apartheid movement as good examples of successes. And I briefly considered going to the graduate teaching assistant office and laying down with a washcloth on my head until the headache went away.
I'm thinking of this today because I spent my Saturday at a protest held by Adalah-NY, one of the groups I'm studying in my fieldwork right now. Adalah-NY has been around since 2006, and is probably the most prominent group working on the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement in the city, and one of the most prominent in the US. The protest was a part of their ongoing campaign encouraging the boycott of Lev Leviev, an Israeli diamond seller. (You can read about their campaign here.) This was the third annual Valentine's Day protest at Leviev's Upper East Side store.
There have certainly been successes in the Leviev campaign, from Adalah-NY's perspective, even if he isn't out of business yet. Their actions are ongoing. How have they not run out of energy to do this campaign? Why are they still going?
I've got the answer: because their protests are fun as hell.
Come on. Doesn't that look like a good time? Wouldn't you want to be a part of that party?
What much of social movement theory misses, in my opinion, is that protesting is fun. It's social. It's loud. There's a feeling of victory in it. There's a feeling of efficacy in it. And, if an organization is good at what they do, they make it fun. At this protest, we sang songs, we chanted chants, we drank cocoa that someone brought in a thermos, we hugged people we hadn't seen in weeks, we recorded dance numbers and diamond commercials. We enjoyed ourselves. Ideology, tactics, all of this--it matters incredibly for activist groups. But at the same time? I've spent my whole weekend singing "It's apartheid so you shouldn't put a ring on it/Occupation is a crime so you must end it."
Once, while we were talking about the Indian independence movement, a student came up to me after class. She'd be asked to write about protest art in another class, one of her design classes. And she asked me, "Has there ever been a social movement that had success?"
I was momentarily struck dumb, because I had no idea how to answer the question. In the end, I talked about how we don't code a single event as a movement, but the whole long stretch of repeated protest; it's not that you hold a march and automatically get something back from it, but that over years of campaigning via different methods a change is made. I named the American civil rights movement, the Indian independence movement, and the anti-apartheid movement as good examples of successes. And I briefly considered going to the graduate teaching assistant office and laying down with a washcloth on my head until the headache went away.
I'm thinking of this today because I spent my Saturday at a protest held by Adalah-NY, one of the groups I'm studying in my fieldwork right now. Adalah-NY has been around since 2006, and is probably the most prominent group working on the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement in the city, and one of the most prominent in the US. The protest was a part of their ongoing campaign encouraging the boycott of Lev Leviev, an Israeli diamond seller. (You can read about their campaign here.) This was the third annual Valentine's Day protest at Leviev's Upper East Side store.
There have certainly been successes in the Leviev campaign, from Adalah-NY's perspective, even if he isn't out of business yet. Their actions are ongoing. How have they not run out of energy to do this campaign? Why are they still going?
I've got the answer: because their protests are fun as hell.
Come on. Doesn't that look like a good time? Wouldn't you want to be a part of that party?
What much of social movement theory misses, in my opinion, is that protesting is fun. It's social. It's loud. There's a feeling of victory in it. There's a feeling of efficacy in it. And, if an organization is good at what they do, they make it fun. At this protest, we sang songs, we chanted chants, we drank cocoa that someone brought in a thermos, we hugged people we hadn't seen in weeks, we recorded dance numbers and diamond commercials. We enjoyed ourselves. Ideology, tactics, all of this--it matters incredibly for activist groups. But at the same time? I've spent my whole weekend singing "It's apartheid so you shouldn't put a ring on it/Occupation is a crime so you must end it."