With Helicopters Overhead
How to keep violence out of your non-violent protest
Sunday, May 31, 2020…
In Los Angeles, it’s usually not good to hear helicopters hovering overhead. It’s either reporters covering terrible traffic when you need to leave for work, or police searching for a suspect who’s on the run somewhere in your neighborhood, or a fire that’s broken out that could spread in your direction, spark to spark.
On this should-have-been-calm Sunday, there have been helicopters overhead in Santa Monica all day. It’s early evening, and that sound of blades grinding the air has been our companion since mid-morning. A protest had been scheduled for just a few blocks away at noon, and given the violence and disruption of the night before in other parts of the city, the mood has been understandably a bit fraught from the git-go. But hey, my wife and I are still under Coronavirus lockdown. We weren’t going anywhere anyway.
But we’ve been monitoring the feeds. Seeing familiar places in our neighborhood looted, vandalized. Hearing the whoop of sirens rushing this way, that way. Occasional loud bangs that make us jump. A guy in the alley behind our building who yells something and slams the gate. A friend sends a message telling us to duct-tape a long knife to a broom handle, just in case. And as with everyone who has ever been rolled over by the tide of history, we sit here blinking, thinking, How did we get here?
Violence Salad
Various commentators have identified three competing groups at each protest site:
(1) Real, peaceful protesters. By far the vast majority, seeking some small measure of racial justice after the murder of George Floyd.
(2) Outside agitators. For example the infamous Umbrella Man in Minneapolis, dressed in black and wearing a gas mask, who knocked out the glass in a local business. This sets the stage for…
(3) Looters. Opportunists. When they see a business where the windows are already broken, of course they’re going in.
But there also seems to be, in many instances, an extra group that, in some instances, is as bad or worse than any of the others:
(4): Local police. Too many people this past weekend are saying “Everything was fine till the cops showed up.”
In New York, a police vehicle drove into a crowd of protestors. (Yes, the vehicle was being pelted and no, that’s not an excuse, they’re supposed to have been trained on how to respond effectively to that sort of thing.) A photojournalist, Linda Tirado, lost an eye in Minneapolis from a police projectile. Elsewhere in Minneapolis, a roving band of police fired explosive pellets at people standing on the porch of their home.
So that’s how we got here. Three years ago my wife and I participated in the Women’s March, which was enormous and entirely peaceful. Now, it seems as if the very idea of peaceful protest is under direct assault. One instance of violence can undo the work of a thousand peaceful marchers. Can any protest movement save itself from the agitations of outsiders?
James Lawson and the Tactics of Nonviolence
In the early 1950s, Rev. James Lawson traveled to India, just a few years after Gandhi’s assassination, to study the tactics of satyagraha, non-violent resistance. He then brought those skills back to the United States, becoming one of the key figures in the Civil Rights era. Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to Lawson as “the mind of the movement.” Lawson created non-violence workshops, which are a model for how modern protests should be organized. The key element: non-violence is hard. You can’t just turn up on a Sunday with no training and hope that everything will be fine.
Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights icon, described Lawson’s training in his remarkable graphic novel March. “In time, everyone plays the roles of protesters, the instigators, and the resistance,” Lewis writes. “There may be a black person playing the role of a white person, or vice versa. We each tried to do everything we could to test ourselves, to break each other’s spirits. We tried to dehumanize each other. … Lawson taught us how to protect ourselves, how to disarm our attackers by connecting with their humanity, how to protect each other, how to survive. But the hardest part to learn — to truly understand, deep in your heart — was how to find love for your attacker.”
Most people who attend modern protests have had none of this training. They are not prepared to be dehumanized. They are not prepared to connect with the humanity of their attackers. They are not prepared to love their attacker.
But what these tactics accomplish is what’s known as the “paradox of repression.” During the Civil Rights era, the forces aligned against protesters made the critical mistake of attacking them directly. Beatings, bombings, fires, attack dogs, fire hoses, etc. This only served to ennoble the protesters, to make them martyrs whose cause was just and whose path was righteous. Violent repression only swells the ranks of the protesters.
Now, unfortunately, the people behind the violence appear to have realized that it is more effective to undermine protests rather than attack them directly, to foment violence that appears to be part of the protest and therefore tarnishes the entire movement. It’s not a new idea (FBI CoIntelPro infiltrators for years attempted to surveil and disrupt civil rights groups, Vietnam war protesters, Communists, and environmental groups), but now independent groups appear to have taken up that banner with, shall we say, a vengeance.
The good news is that there are many more people committed to non-violence than violence. In a prime example of the paradox of repression, protests across the country only grew in the wake of the violence, and in turn, acts of violence dissipated and dwindled. And while in-person training workshops of the kind once run by Rev. Lawson may not be available to you, there are resources available to help anyone become a more effective non-violent protester.
Steps to Take During a Demonstration
Cobbled together from various sources, including the James Lawson Institute, some online resources from Black Lives Matter, and Rep. Lewis’s graphic novel, here are some useful tactics for anyone who would like to participate in direct nonviolent action.
Deep Preparation. Learn something about the issue you’ll be protesting. Go beyond a few tweets and build your understanding of how even a simple idea like racial justice can be very complex.
Have a Strategy. Know why you’re there. Don’t do “an action for action’s sake,” as Rev. Lawson likes to say. Understand what specific changes you want to see, create specific strategies to accomplish those, and stick to them. The Freedom Riders were one kind of an action; the sit-ins at lunch counters were a different kind of action; Gandhi’s march to the sea to make salt was another. They were all tailored toward the specific goals of the moment.
Know Your Message. Have a couple of key points always in your mind and stick to them. A favorite tactic of the people challenging you is to hop from one idea to another so you can never pin them down on their nonsense, and as soon as they lure you to a subject you don’t know as much about, they declare victory.
Check in With Yourself. How’s your breathing? Have you been drinking water? Make sure you’re okay whenever you can, so if things get challenging later you won’t get caught by dehydration or hunger or some other kind of loss of focus. Chanting with the group can also help build solidarity and focus.
When in doubt, sit down. If accosted or directly challenged, sit down. It makes you harder to move, and makes it easier for you to center yourself and avoid any temptation to react to violence with violence.
The Greater Strength
Who is stronger? The person who gives a blow, or the person who receives a blow without returning it in kind? Isaac Asimov liked to say that “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent,” but it is perhaps also true that violence is the first refuge of the weak. It’s easy to strike someone. Easy for four uniformed officers to compress a man’s body and choke the life from him. Any individual can be silenced in this way. Violence, in the moment, appears triumphant. Might makes right.
But then, consider the paradox of repression, and tell me: which of these images is stronger?
