Dylan Matthews
One concern I’ve heard raised frequently is that protests, particularly violent protests that involve looting, risk triggering a backlash among white voters; the political scientist Omar Wasow has a recent paper suggesting this was an important factor in Richard Nixon’s election in 1968. How do you weigh that risk against the odds that protest will persuade people to take police violence and other underlying concerns seriously?
Heather Ann Thompson
This is an incredibly important strategic question people are thinking about. But to me, it’s not helpful, I think, to think about the rise of backlash as the fault or responsibility of people who spoke out on behalf of justice. We’ve somehow gotten this idea that we wouldn’t have had Nixon or law and order if it hadn’t been for the activism of the 1960s. And I just think that’s a fundamental misreading of the historical record. The truth of the matter is that it’s precisely because of that level of racial backlash — because of lynching, because of slavery, because of the high prevalence of white backlash — that the 1960s were born in the first place.
To the extent that that stuff was rolled back at all, it was perhaps because the protests of the 1960s had not succeeded in pushing racial injustice back fully, and is not because there had been protests. That level of backlash has always been there.
If Trump were to win reelection, or if this were to embolden MAGA, people will say, “That’s because people were protesting.” That’s a complete misreading. The white supremacists were on the march and on the move well before anyone showed up in downtown Philadelphia. They always are.
Dylan Matthews
How do antiracist protests like this connect to the history of race riots where whites targeted black communities, as in Tulsa or Red Summer or Colfax?
Heather Ann Thompson
Again, I think the way we’ve set this up is dangerous, this idea that blacks need to be careful about how they struggle to be human because there might be another Rosewood or Tulsa or Chicago 1919.
What we have to understand is that the difference between what happens every day and what happened in Greenwood, Oklahoma, is a matter of magnitude but not kind. We tend to ignore the slow-rolling level of daily aggression and violence against people of color in this country, but we focus on these very dramatic episodes of white racial violence. And then we look at those incidents of white racial violence and say it’s a response to blacks being more demanding. All of those particularly ugly moments were by punctuated, escalated versions of what was going on every single day to the black and brown residents of this country. And they didn’t cause them simply by speaking out on behalf of justice.
It’s really important for us to digest this truth. Not protesting at all would not keep white racial violence at bay. It’s a complete twisting of what’s in fact going on. Protests keep happening precisely because white supremacy is never sufficiently reined in. It’s never seriously taken on by those with power. And so the people will continue to erupt.