I love protests. There’s something exciting about seeing people sticking it to the man—expressing themselves in public, risking their comfort and safety for what they believe in. But I worry that we all haven’t thought enough about what it means to demonstrate. What is a protest, and how can it be most effective?
Brandeis has a proud tradition of student activism. As the National Strike Headquarters in the late ‘60s, we helped coordinate some of the most consequential student protests in American history. On an institutional level, we have seen the Ford Hall demonstrations of both 1969 and 2015—students saw a problem and put themselves on the line to fix it.
At its core, protest is a fundamentally transgressive act. No one protests because they’re happy with the status quo. The demonstrator takes time out of their day and puts themselves in a heavily-trafficked public place so that they’ll be both seen and heard. The point is to draw attention and to take people out of their rhythms. Optics are key to getting people to care.
If protest is transgressive, then rule-breaking must be a part of it. Breaking rules should be the point. Maybe I’m showing my secret anarcho-Marxist sympathies here, but the protest should fight indifference by unabashedly barging into people’s lives. Banners, loud colors, chants—all of these work to pull the observer out of their apathy and into the cause.
I spent the first half of this year in Spain, where protests are almost a daily occurrence. I remember one by a group of actors from a historic theater that the government was planning on defunding. Instead of a show that evening, they performed protest songs outside on the steps. Unorthodox and attention-grabbing, it soon drew a sympathetic crowd.
Institutional rules are part of the problem—following them to the letter when we protest just keeps the system functioning. If the point is disruption, working within the system isn’t going to be effective. We want to keep things from working properly until our demands are met.
Demands are a key component: Having actionable goals dramatically increases the likelihood of the protest being productive. I could stand in front of President Liebowitz’s car to demand that the university divest from fossil fuels stop climate change, but would that really help with what I’m trying to accomplish? Instead, we need to think local. What can we disrupt that would have a direct impact on the powers-that-be that decide what we want to protest?
To continue that thought, what are the real, specific, achievable goals that I would want the Brandeis administration to enact? Advocating for national change is laudable, but casting too wide a net means things become unfocused and objectives infinitely harder to accomplish. We have to think about the here and now.
We also have to be cognizant of how using social media for a cause can be disruptive. It’s easy to think that because we used a hashtag or angrily commented something on Facebook that we’ve done our part for the cause, but nothing could be further from the truth. The system doesn’t care about your tweets. The system only pays attention when it’s being pushed out of order—it’s the only way to get a response, and, hopefully, what you want.
Risk is implicit in protest. If you’re not risking something, your demonstration probably isn’t going to be very effective. When rules are broken, there are going to be consequences, but the selling point of the radical activist is that they care about their cause enough that they’re willing to accept the risk of being punished.
There can be different kinds of risks involved: disciplinary punishment from breaking the rules, reactivated trauma by reliving difficult memories associated with the protest. There could be very real, very painful consequences. But the calculus of the protest is that it’s all worth it; that the possibility of achieving the intended goal outweighs the high likelihood that the protester will suffer in some way for their actions. The cause is worth the suffering.
This kind of invested transgression is appealing to outsiders—if you care about something deeply enough to have bad things happen to you, then there must be something important about it—and now I as a bystander I’m interested and might want to become involved.
As the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said, “When deeds speak, words are nothing.”
In the best case scenario, people pay attention to what you’re doing and want to join in and help publicize it. Getting to this stage means that one part of the protest has already been successful.
In garnering public sympathy, you’re winning people over to your cause and becoming closer to achieving your goal. By having places for them to participate and welcoming the publicity—free press—you can get the word out even more. Once enough people believe in the cause and the actionable goal, there will be much more pressure on the system (i.e. in our case, the administration) to change.
The ideal protest should be loud, transgressive, inclusive of new supporters and taking advantage of any media to spotlight their cause. The goal is not to be an insular club of “woke” people but to actually make real changes in the world—keeping in mind all the messiness that entails. To do so, you need dedicated activists, a worthy cause and a willingness to weather the reactions of the system until your practical goals are achieved. Break the rules and fight for what you believe.
