This is my quarterly reminder: stop specifying “peaceful” or “non-violent” when describing protestors/protests. No matter of how folks are protesting, DON’T DO IT. It is an imprecise, meaningless (and thus co-optable) adjective which undermines the action and cedes narrative ground to the state.
Our use of the qualifier, knowingly or not, asks for dominant power structures to “legitimize” a protest. It is a form of narrative begging, a plea for acceptance, it is seeking the blessing of our enemies rather than accurately describing a protest.The discourse ultimately becomes a debate on whether or not protests/protestors are peaceful (and thus legitimate) rather than what is being protested or the world a group is attempting to build through that protest.
If American concentration camps are being protested, then they should be described only in terms of the issue or their aims: “anti-concentration camp protests,” “anti-ICE protests,” “pro immigrant rights protests,” “protest for families and working people,” “fight for a free public.” The options are endless and they should either deconstruct the power systems being protested or—better—affirm the world we want to build on the other side of those systems.
Using “peaceful” as a qualifier for a protest does not deconstruct, it does not illuminate/educate and it does not affirm a new world; it invites debate into the conduct of protestors, it limits the acceptable forms of dissent, and it cedes power back to the forces we are attempting to take it from in the first place.
Sit-ins work because they disrupted local capital and asserted a challenge to the public, public space and public belonging not because “they are peaceful.”
Boycotts and strikes work because they disrupt capital and assert collective impact or control over the market, not because they’re “peaceful.”
Blocking roads works because it disrupts daily movement and performs a restriction of mobility/agency for a public either not directly affected by the issue being protested or unaware of the ways in which they are affected. In this way they are effective because they assert a visible microcosm and demand attention not because they are “peaceful.”
From a violence studies perspective it can be argued that none of these forms of resistance are even peaceful, but lesser forms of justified violence—whether you are for the actions and their cause(s) or against them, their claim to peace is dubious and—more importantly—irrelevant, uninformative and distracting.
Part of direct action (the meaningful part of nonviolent direct action which gets left out) isn’t just the action, but how that action is understood AND remembered. How a protest is described should either be capacious enough to illuminate how an action works/its function or the meaning of it/its aims (or both). Political education isn’t just the result of intentionally crafting spaces of teaching and learning about issues and structures, it is the result of intentional language in naming, framing and thus shaping how issues and structures are understood.
There is always a question as to why American protests are so tame compared to Colombia, France, Albania, Sri Lanka, ad infinitum. Part of the reason is how the state co-opted the memory of the civil rights movement. Part of that co-optation is our own participation in moralizing “nonviolence” as a philosophy rather than a tactic. We do this every time we say, “peaceful protest.” Every time.
We must abandon defining the morality of a tactic based on the category of action in which that tactic falls. Morality in action should instead be defined in terms of its proportionality, success and minimization of harm.
If what is imagined as “nonviolence” is in fact the BEST way to win (and save lives) in the face of the mass incarceration, deportation, r*pe, starvation, disabling and (increasingly) murder of immigrants and refugees then it is moral because it wins. If it loses in the short term (doesn’t disrupt/stop) and the long term (doesn’t produce a new and life affirming system) and is thus not the most effective way to win and save lives and build a world in which lives can thrive and not be in need of saving then it’s not moral. It is decidedly immoral and, because of what it allows, violent. Only its violence is pointed the same way as the regime in question rather than against it.
I have written about this before, but it bears repeating. The other side of this is that violence is not an exceptional category of action. It is commonplace and a primary organizer of daily life in large and small ways. Violence is accepted and cheered on routinely if it is viewed as justified.
A MAJORITY of Americans believed burning Minneapolis’ 3rd precinct after the murder of George Floyd was justified regardless of whether or not the act was “violent” or “nonviolent.” It was morally right and strategically sound. It was interpreted as proportionate and effective. Some might argue that burning the precinct was “peaceful” because no one was inside. Don’t do this. We should be migrating such actions into the realm of acceptable and rational forms of political action rather than attempting to fit them within the indices of “nonviolence,” a term which cannot contain them, and the definition of which we do not control.
If violence as a term cannot be rehabilitated in the public consciousness, perhaps we need to assert new categories of action: kinetic, passive/static, performative, elegiac, commemorative. If it can be rehabilitated then we should become comfortable with most or all political actions outside of official civic participation as “violent” to varying degrees along a continuum. Their acceptability/morality defined by proportionality, successes and minimization of harm rather than the action in and of itself.
If an action threatens the state, the state will call it violent regardless. Sit ins of the past can now be called nonviolent (they weren’t at the time) and thus seen as “moral” because the collective and national memory of the civil rights movement has so thoroughly been reduced to a narrative of Black folks seeking ONLY the right to vote/participation in the capitalist democratic state and because of the relative temporal distance of those sit-ins. As such, their memory no longer threatens the state or economic order because they are remembered as actions to participate in both. Sit-ins now would never be framed as peaceful. We know this, we acknowledge it in mass, and yet we still say “peaceful” and “nonviolent” protests.
We have the power win. And in the power of winning is not just the power of action, it is the power naming, framing, education through each, through the practice of world building and extending the bounds of acceptable political action, the realm of the possible and shifting public discourse more wholly away from un/comfortability with forms dissent and fury with the conditions which engender dissent in the first place.
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