Last week I wrote about the protests that had come to dominate my professional home, Columbia University, and make headlines across the country. I said that though I did not believe the participants were motivated by antisemitism, the volume, fury and duration of their protest left many Jewish students feeling under siege for their Jewishness. That assessment has turned out to be one of the more polarizing things I have ever written, in part because some readers interpreted my position as opposing student protest overall.
I had no objection when the protests began last fall, but since that time, they escalated significantly. After students occupied the university’s storied Hamilton Hall — and police officers in riot gear conducted over 100 arrests — the administration closed the campus, moved all classes online and recommended that we professors either trim or eliminate final examinations in our classes. The mood is as grim now as when Covid forced the spring semester of 2020 to end with a desolate groan.
What happened this week was not just a rise in the temperature. The protests took a wrong turn, of a kind I have seen too many other activist movements take. It’s the same wrong turn that the civil rights movement took in the late 1960s.
After the concrete victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, a conflict arose within the movement between those who sought to keep the focus on changing laws and institutions and those who cherished more symbolic confrontations as a chance to speak truth to power.
The conflict played out most visibly in what became of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC began with grass-roots activism in the form of sit-ins and voter registration, but in 1966 John Lewis, a veteran of the Selma demonstrations who spoke at the March on Washington, was replaced as the group’s leader by Stokely Carmichael, who spoke charismatically of Black Power but whose political plans tended to be fuzzy at best. The term “Black Power” often seemed to mean something different to each person espousing it. It was, in essence, a slogan rather than a program.
This new idea — that gesture and performance were, in themselves, a form of action — worried the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who regarded some of the group’s demonstrations as “expressions of rivalry and rage, without constructive purpose,” according to the historian Taylor Branch.
James Bevel, who worked alongside King, scolded his fellow activist Hosea Williams for having no political strategy beyond putting Black people — he used a racial slur instead — “in jail to get on TV.” In response to what he considered dangerous rhetoric, Andrew Young asked some activists in Memphis, “How many people did you kill last year?” and proposed that they translate their militancy into an actual policy goal instead.
Did this focus on performance bear fruit? Here’s something: Name some significant civil rights victories between 1968 and the election of Barack Obama. It’s a lot harder than naming the victories up until that point. Of course, protest requires theatrics, as King knew. (Writing to Young in 1965 amid the Selma demonstrations, King said, “Also please don’t be too soft. It was a mistake not to march today. In a crisis we must have a sense of drama.”) But it’s perilously easy for the drama to become the point, for the protest to be less about changing the world than performing a self.
I share the campus protesters’ opinion that the war in Gaza has become an atrocity. Israel had every right to defend itself after Hamas’s massacre, which itself was an atrocity. However, the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, with uncountable more left maimed or homeless, cannot be justified. I am increasingly dismayed that President Biden does not simply deny Benjamin Netanyahu any further arms.
Beyond a certain point, however, we must ask whether the escalating protests are helping to change those circumstances. Columbia’s administration agreed to review proposals about divestment, shareholder activism and other issues and to create health and education programs in Gaza and the West Bank. But the protesters were unmoved and a subgroup of them, apparently, further enraged.
Who among the protesters really thought that Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and the board of trustees would view the occupation of Hamilton Hall — and the visible destruction of property — and say, “Oh, if the students feel that strongly, then let’s divest from Israel immediately”? The point seemed less to make change than to manifest anger for its own sake, with the encampment having become old news.
The initial protest was an effective way to show how fervently a great many people oppose the war, but the time had come for another phase: slow, steady suasion. This is not capitulation but a change in tactics, with the goal of making the activists’ work pay off. We recall King most vividly in protests, including being imprisoned for his participation. However, his daily life as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was about endless and often frustrating negotiations with people in power, which eventually bore fruit. In this, as much as in marches, he and his comrades created the America we know today. Smoking hot orations about Black Power might have instilled some pride but created little beyond that.
Richard Rorty wrote in “Achieving Our Country” of the sense in our times that self-expression alone is a kind of persuasion. Marc Cooper, describing the left in the George W. Bush years, wrote of the danger of viewing “rebel poses” as substitutes for how “to figure out how you’re actually going to win an election.”
In our times, when the personal is political, there is always a risk that a quest to heal the world morphs into a quest for personal catharsis. Keeping in mind the difference will get the Columbia protesters closer to making the changes they champion.