6 ms·

Groups like Black Panthers and associates of Malcom X were arming up and rearing up to back up their wishes with violence. King certainly gets the credit for o

Groups like Black Panthers and associates of Malcom X were arming up and rearing up to back up their wishes with violence. King certainly gets the credit for oratory influence, but I think a lot of the obsession on overrepresenting it is white washed non-violence 'protest and vote harder' nonsense that the history books like to push hardest when giving role models to the youth in schools. So people like King became elevated but omit the part that there was a very real looming rod waiting and the carrot King offered was only half of the equation.

andsoitis 10mo ago
interesting to ponder is whether violence alone would have had a similar positive outcome? I think I can hold in my head two things: prefer changing minds; realize that major changes are often made real by violence. However, I would hesitate to encourage violence. I hope you also.
- CGMthrowaway 10mo ago
  The civil rights movement was not a single‑track nonviolent morality thing, and the way it’s taught does often flatten it into something safe, palatable and politically convenient
JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
> it is white washed non-violence 'protest and vote harder' nonsense that the history books like to push My family is largely [EDIT: South Asian] Indian. It’s really not nonsense. > there was a very real looming rod waiting The rod was thinly-veiled racial violence and domestic terrorism. It would have been a route towards exterminationist rhetoric and potentially action on both sides. Not civil rights. Keep in mind, while King was in jail America was in its own telling losing the Cold War. We were behind in space. We drew a stalemate in Korea and were getting routed in Vietnam. A year earlier the Cuban missile crisis had been narrowly averted through diplomacy. King vs. Malcolm is a textbook illustration of the downsides of escalating to violence as a political tool. (And the upsides of refraining from it even if your adversary embraces it.)
- mothballed 10mo ago
  If the Indians would have gone the King route alone rather than being on reservations they'd have been annihilated and you wouldn't even have been born. The token offering of the reservation was what they got in exchange for not fighting a losing battle to the last man, but the exchange wouldn't have happened had that not been on the table.
  - paavope 10mo ago
    I think the ”Indian” there referred to India the country and Gandhi’s nonviolent protest as background
    - mothballed 10mo ago
      Excellent point. Though I find it distasteful when someone uses an ambiguous word counting on you to be able to figure it out from context, then "ha ha you are wrong" downvotes follow when I make a good faith effort to respond to it. It's certainly a weaponization of the word if it is implied the counterparty is naïve when they guessed the wrong one.
  - et-al 10mo ago
    The poster you're responding to might be from the Indian subcontinent and not Native/Indigenous American.
    - mothballed 10mo ago
      In US Native/Indigenous usually call themselves either by their tribe or "Indian." White people are the ones that generally use native/indigenous more even though natives call themselves Indian more. Since the context was US civil rights you can see how I came to the conclusion, since it didn't make any sense someone could simply declare their heritage is from an extra-continental nationality and thus I was wrong. In any case in the context of US civil rights, the Indians (native) are a far more reasonable conclusion than Indian (Asian) so at best it is a shared failure of communication.
malcolmgreaves 10mo ago
Thanks for getting out the word on an incredibly historically accurate take on the Civil Rights movement. I think people often forget that _this_ is an incredible part of the movement. We got large-scale non-violent demonstrations and civil disobedience instead of a proliferation of armed protest and possibly something even worse. Many folks were tired of waiting around to be safe and treated justly. Just one too many a cop beating up your father or murdering your brother or lying under oath to send your neighbor away for years. The Black Panthers started armed patrols of their own neighborhoods to protect themselves from racist Oakland police officers. There were growing calls for other Black neighborhoods to use their 2nd amendment rights to arm and defend themselves from a tyrannical government. They were succeeding and spreading. As a direct response, Regan (while governor of CA) eventually signed the Mulford Act of '67 which made carrying firearms in public without a permit illegal. (_And they were stingy when it came to giving these permits to Black folks._)
- CGMthrowaway 10mo ago
  Re Mulford, you make a brilliant point. Rights are often tolerated until marginalized groups begin to use them effectively. Mulford is to 2A what FACE Act is to 1A. And the FACE Act is about to be used against the peaceful protesters who went into that church in Minnesota the other day.
- cassepipe 10mo ago
  Self-defense and revolutionary violence are two different things. The former can bring you safety through deterrence, the latter only lead to a violence escalation that the State is almost always most prepared for and better at
Rperry2174 10mo ago
I think the underappreciated part isn't "violence vs non-violence", but the role that malcolm x and black pathners actually played. They weren't primarily organizing armed revolt.. it was more about the idea that they were articulating moral clarity. They were, in the most credible way, refusing to accept endless delay. This allowed them to shift the baseline of what was politically tolerable. In that sense, the movements worked collectively because of a kind of good-cop/bad-cop dynamic. MLK JR offered a path to reform that felt (to some) constructive and legitimate _because_ there was a visible alternative that many people udnerstood as worse. I think violence is already far to prominent today, but I think successful movements do need both moral persuasion (if morality is still a thing that persuades) and _also_ a credible way of making inaction feel unsafe.
- undeveloper 10mo ago
  > good-cop/bad-cop The first essay in "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" deals with this dichotomy and how it's been used many times. Great read.
- pear01 10mo ago
  I think we also shouldn't sell the nonviolence short. It wasn't merely nonviolence. It was subjecting yourself openly to state violence and not resisting. It was letting the brutality of the state be made manifest as it washed over you. As the cops abused and beat people who were not responding even remotely in kind. That was part of Malcolm's moral clarity, though in the alternative. He suggested it was immoral to subject yourself or people you loved to such an exercise, tantamount to one of self immolation. Malcolm X essentially advocated a system of sovereignty not unlike the American founders, who of course were violent, not nonviolent. In that way MLK JR really was America's Christ. He was willing to be nailed to the cross if it meant bending the arc towards justice.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
cassepipe 10mo ago
You argument is intuitive but it is also very wrong. In the face of violence, human groups tend to become tighter and more authoritarian with less room for dissenting voices. If you believe that the State was really afraid of revolutionary violence you are terribly misguided, repressing violence with violence is one of the State most ancient task, what all States are most prepared for and good at. Only in rare cases where there is a legitimacy crisis and/or a repressive apparatus unwillingness to do its job, only then regime change may happen.
AngryData 10mo ago
Thank you, everyone always likes to harp on about non-violent resistance, but that really only works when there is a further threat behind not accepting the non-violent demands.
bonsai_spool 10mo ago
> Groups like Black Panthers... This is a little ahistoric, to the point where I'd appreciate if you provided scholarly sources about your overall argument. This is years before the founders of the Black Panther Party went to college: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
jgwil2 10mo ago
That seems to have become the received wisdom on the subject in certain circles but I do wonder how strong the evidence of this dynamic actually is.

andsoitis 10mo ago

interesting to ponder is whether violence alone would have had a similar positive outcome? I think I can hold in my head two things: prefer changing minds; realize that major changes are often made real by violence. However, I would hesitate to encourage violence. I hope you also.

CGMthrowaway 10mo ago
The civil rights movement was not a single‑track nonviolent morality thing, and the way it’s taught does often flatten it into something safe, palatable and politically convenient

JumpCrisscross 10mo ago

> it is white washed non-violence 'protest and vote harder' nonsense that the history books like to push My family is largely [EDIT: South Asian] Indian. It’s really not nonsense. > there was a very real looming rod waiting The rod was thinly-veiled racial violence and domestic terrorism. It would have been a route towards exterminationist rhetoric and potentially action on both sides. Not civil rights. Keep in mind, while King was in jail America was in its own telling losing the Cold War. We were behind in space. We drew a stalemate in Korea and were getting routed in Vietnam. A year earlier the Cuban missile crisis had been narrowly averted through diplomacy. King vs. Malcolm is a textbook illustration of the downsides of escalating to violence as a political tool. (And the upsides of refraining from it even if your adversary embraces it.)

mothballed 10mo ago
If the Indians would have gone the King route alone rather than being on reservations they'd have been annihilated and you wouldn't even have been born. The token offering of the reservation was what they got in exchange for not fighting a losing battle to the last man, but the exchange wouldn't have happened had that not been on the table.
- paavope 10mo ago
  I think the ”Indian” there referred to India the country and Gandhi’s nonviolent protest as background
  - mothballed 10mo ago
    Excellent point. Though I find it distasteful when someone uses an ambiguous word counting on you to be able to figure it out from context, then "ha ha you are wrong" downvotes follow when I make a good faith effort to respond to it. It's certainly a weaponization of the word if it is implied the counterparty is naïve when they guessed the wrong one.
- et-al 10mo ago
  The poster you're responding to might be from the Indian subcontinent and not Native/Indigenous American.
  - mothballed 10mo ago
    In US Native/Indigenous usually call themselves either by their tribe or "Indian." White people are the ones that generally use native/indigenous more even though natives call themselves Indian more. Since the context was US civil rights you can see how I came to the conclusion, since it didn't make any sense someone could simply declare their heritage is from an extra-continental nationality and thus I was wrong. In any case in the context of US civil rights, the Indians (native) are a far more reasonable conclusion than Indian (Asian) so at best it is a shared failure of communication.

malcolmgreaves 10mo ago

Thanks for getting out the word on an incredibly historically accurate take on the Civil Rights movement. I think people often forget that _this_ is an incredible part of the movement. We got large-scale non-violent demonstrations and civil disobedience instead of a proliferation of armed protest and possibly something even worse. Many folks were tired of waiting around to be safe and treated justly. Just one too many a cop beating up your father or murdering your brother or lying under oath to send your neighbor away for years. The Black Panthers started armed patrols of their own neighborhoods to protect themselves from racist Oakland police officers. There were growing calls for other Black neighborhoods to use their 2nd amendment rights to arm and defend themselves from a tyrannical government. They were succeeding and spreading. As a direct response, Regan (while governor of CA) eventually signed the Mulford Act of '67 which made carrying firearms in public without a permit illegal. (_And they were stingy when it came to giving these permits to Black folks._)

CGMthrowaway 10mo ago
Re Mulford, you make a brilliant point. Rights are often tolerated until marginalized groups begin to use them effectively. Mulford is to 2A what FACE Act is to 1A. And the FACE Act is about to be used against the peaceful protesters who went into that church in Minnesota the other day.
cassepipe 10mo ago
Self-defense and revolutionary violence are two different things. The former can bring you safety through deterrence, the latter only lead to a violence escalation that the State is almost always most prepared for and better at

Rperry2174 10mo ago

I think the underappreciated part isn't "violence vs non-violence", but the role that malcolm x and black pathners actually played. They weren't primarily organizing armed revolt.. it was more about the idea that they were articulating moral clarity. They were, in the most credible way, refusing to accept endless delay. This allowed them to shift the baseline of what was politically tolerable. In that sense, the movements worked collectively because of a kind of good-cop/bad-cop dynamic. MLK JR offered a path to reform that felt (to some) constructive and legitimate _because_ there was a visible alternative that many people udnerstood as worse. I think violence is already far to prominent today, but I think successful movements do need both moral persuasion (if morality is still a thing that persuades) and _also_ a credible way of making inaction feel unsafe.

undeveloper 10mo ago
> good-cop/bad-cop The first essay in "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" deals with this dichotomy and how it's been used many times. Great read.
pear01 10mo ago
I think we also shouldn't sell the nonviolence short. It wasn't merely nonviolence. It was subjecting yourself openly to state violence and not resisting. It was letting the brutality of the state be made manifest as it washed over you. As the cops abused and beat people who were not responding even remotely in kind. That was part of Malcolm's moral clarity, though in the alternative. He suggested it was immoral to subject yourself or people you loved to such an exercise, tantamount to one of self immolation. Malcolm X essentially advocated a system of sovereignty not unlike the American founders, who of course were violent, not nonviolent. In that way MLK JR really was America's Christ. He was willing to be nailed to the cross if it meant bending the arc towards justice.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

cassepipe 10mo ago

You argument is intuitive but it is also very wrong. In the face of violence, human groups tend to become tighter and more authoritarian with less room for dissenting voices. If you believe that the State was really afraid of revolutionary violence you are terribly misguided, repressing violence with violence is one of the State most ancient task, what all States are most prepared for and good at. Only in rare cases where there is a legitimacy crisis and/or a repressive apparatus unwillingness to do its job, only then regime change may happen.

AngryData 10mo ago

Thank you, everyone always likes to harp on about non-violent resistance, but that really only works when there is a further threat behind not accepting the non-violent demands.

bonsai_spool 10mo ago

> Groups like Black Panthers... This is a little ahistoric, to the point where I'd appreciate if you provided scholarly sources about your overall argument. This is years before the founders of the Black Panther Party went to college: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

jgwil2 10mo ago

That seems to have become the received wisdom on the subject in certain circles but I do wonder how strong the evidence of this dynamic actually is.