As Democrats in Washington struggle to find a unified approach to the Trump administration’s whirlwind of action in his first few months in office, protests have been sporadic and scattered — some directed at immigration, some against the firing of federal workers, some against Elon Musk.
It’s a far cry from what we saw in 2017 when Donald Trump first took the White House, when hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in the Women’s March and thousands of people gathered at airports around the country in opposition to his so-called Muslim ban.
There’s been criticism that these debates are not focused enough, that they’re just what Trump supporters want the left to do. So, what is the role of protesting in today’s Trump era?
Rashad Shabazz points to the past for guidance. Shabazz is an associate professor of geography and African American Studies at Arizona State University, where he studies how race, gender, and cultural production are informed by geography. Shabazz joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
RASHAD SHABAZZ: So much of protests over the last, you know, 20 years, really since the sort of rise of social media and the internet has really been organized around the "anti-", meaning the anti-, the opposition, and in being, you know, anti this or anti that. Many of these protests aren't organized. They don't emerge out of movement building. They don't constitute themselves through active participation with the community.
And as a result of that, a lot of these protests don't have much more to consider or offer other than opposition. You know, the whole point of the protest is to simply say no. And no doesn't have a vision. No has no horizon, no it is not strategic, you know, it can also be productive. I don't want to say that that there's no usefulness of it, but I think we're at this moment right now where I think we're seeing the limits of that kind of public engagement, that kind of protest.
And I think what we, what I'm hoping this moment might move us toward is demonstrations. You know, demonstrations are based around organizing when it's not sexy when there's no sort of crisis on hand against the backdrop of an idea or a set of policy demands or principles that they want to see happen. And then in particular moments, those people bring those ideas to the public square and they begin to demonstrate to the public this vision for whatever it is. And what we're seeing right now, what we've been seeing a lot of is no, and that it just has profound limits.
LAUREN GILGER: So that's very interesting. The difference there between protesting and demonstrating. One, it sounds like is more action-oriented almost. When have we seen that recently? Like, give us an example of a demonstration, a mass demonstration, even that was successful in really creating a message and change.
SHABAZZ: Well, the most important one really over the last, you know, century has been civil rights, the organizing that was happening in in Greensboro, the organizing that was happening in Montgomery where people were responding to bus boycotts or lunch counter sit-ins, that organizing turned into actions and it was, it was wildly successful, you know, all of the civil rights legislation that emerged out of that.
And then what we started to sort of see within the '90s and early 2000's were these sort of mass protests, right? And I, I was part of some of these in San Francisco when I lived in the Bay Area. We had about 200,000 people who were opposing the Iraq War, the evasion. You get hundreds of thousands of people all over the country. They were powerful, but I think they gave us a false sense that that could immediately translate into public policy, into how people think about something and what it actually did was it simply hardened its opposition.
GILGER: I wonder that because so much of this, and you mentioned social media at the beginning, so much of what's happening right now is on social media or, you know, there will be someone saying we're going to all protest this this day, and then people show up with various flags and various causes and various things they're angry about.
How do you think social media has changed it? Are there ways in which, I always thought like social media would be a help to causes like this because you can socially organize something, you know, like a demonstration, but it seems to have almost just fractured people more.
SHABAZZ: It has, you know, the, the various echo chambers people live in and they're sort of online worlds and because it has this sort of vast access that it can pull in lots of people, but what it lacks is the ability to have them be organized, right? And what they hope to accomplish in unison.
What we have now is just a whole lot of people bringing their own sort of perspectives to these meetings, saying a bunch of different things. There's little coherence, there's almost no organization and the worst part is when they leave no one has a phone number, no one has an address, no one has shook a hand, no one has built a meaningful relationship that will bring them out and get them to do the daily work of organizing.
GILGER: Limitations.
SHABAZZ: Absolutely.
GILGER: Do you think there is still a role for protest like that or maybe it has to be demonstration at this point?
SHABAZZ: I think we need healthy levels of both, but I think we need to vastly increase our demonstrations, which mean we need people to be engaged in organizing in non-crisis moments.
GILGER: What about the Black Lives Matter protests just, you know, a few years ago in 2020, like where, you know, there was a specific message, but it was a lot of no, but it was also very successful, even if we may be seeing a backlash to some of that now.
SHABAZZ: Yeah, I mean, it's really one of the greatest protests in human history, you know, people on all continents across age and race and language and religion, all evoked the name George Floyd, and in Minneapolis in George Floyd Square, those activists took that protest and they translated it into an opportunity to demonstrate and to organize and to turn all of that energy into meaningful structural change.
GILGER: How much are demonstrations about leaders?
SHABAZZ: Yeah, yeah, demonstrations are definitely about leaders and, and here's, you know, I think a useful critique of the left, you know, they have an aversion to leadership. And I think that because we've sort of gotten accustomed to being allergic to leadership and also to a certain degree, being allergic to power, it can have negative implications in terms of organizing.
And I think, you know, those on the left might want to take lessons from those on the right and and looking and saying that, you know, organizing, having clear leadership, you know, not being allergic to power might be useful in terms of how we strategize, build organizations, demonstrate and engage in the sort of minutiae of the democratic reality in terms of state politics or local politics or federal.
GILGER: Could you look at the election of Donald Trump as a form of protest from the right?
SHABAZZ: Oh, absolutely. It, it's, it's a form of protest, right? It is tens of millions of people cohering around an anti, right? And the anti is, you know, wokeness or the left in general, or a Black woman in leadership, you know, and it was effective. It was absolutely effective. And what I think the Trump administration is trying to do is also to turn that protest into an organized, coherent form of political organization and we're going to see if it's effective.
We're going to see if it works, and this for me is the difficult part, and I think both, you know, those on the right and the left struggle with this, but I do think those on the right are doing it better.
