History gives us reason for hope that inequality can be beaten
No one cedes power because of a great powerpoint.
Ben Phillips
6 September 2020
2020 isnt just the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its also the year when protest has gone viral. Covid-19 has both supercharged our inequalities and shone a sharper light on them, exposing the reality that the status quo cannot hold. It has opened up a moment of opportunity, and young people are showing how we can seize that moment by building up a movement.
It doesnt seem that long ago that young people were being lectured to stop being so disengaged and start getting involved. Now they get told no, not like that. Discussions in newspapers and news studios, whether about Black Lives Matter, essential workers striking over poor safety and low pay, or young climate justice campaigners, involve friendly advice to activists to tone it down and be less demanding - to be less in the way. Such complaints often include references to history: why cant they be more like the protestors of yesteryear - you know, the uncontroversial ones?
For my new book, How to Fight Inequality I investigated the history of social justice organizing and found conclusive evidence that - contrary to the false distinctions made between then and now - todays protestors stand absolutely in the tradition of those who have gone before them. The reactions they are facing are also uncannily similar, but history also shows that we have real reasons for hope based on action.
In 1966, for example, a Gallup Opinion poll showed that Martin Luther King was viewed unfavourably by 63 per cent of Americans, but by 2011 that figure had fallen to only four per cent. Often, people read the current consensus view back into history and assume that King was always a mainstream figure, learning the false lesson that change comes from people and movements who dont offend anyone.
The true lesson of changemakers is that fighting inequality requires us to be disruptive. As King himself said, frankly I have yet to engage in a direct action movement that was well-timed in the view of those who have not suffered unduly; this wait! has almost always meant never. Icons who today are sanitized as unchallenging terrified the powerful at the time because they refused to be deferential.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/history-gives-us-reason-hope-inequality-can-be-beaten/
llashram
(6,265 posts)been hoping for 400 years. But who knows it possibly might happen one day in the world leader of racist hate, the United States of America.