Movement Tactics: Questions without Clear Answers

By RGodforest - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30703673

Last week, a #BlackLivesMatter protest march stopped in front of council member Kim Gray's house, raising concerns even among Richmond’s largely #BLM-supportive progressives. Did this action cross a line? The answer might not be as obvious as you think.

Questions about strategy and tactics go back to the early days of this now two-month long set of protests. At the very beginning, the protests were characterized by confrontation and especially destruction, with damage to businesses, fires set all over downtown (most famously to a GRTC bus), and sporadic looting. These early actions became justification for brutal police responses, even long after the destruction had largely stopped.

The question of responsibility always looms over contentious politics. When a protest erupts, and property damage occurs, who is responsible? The organizers behind a protest, or the system and authorities that produced the conditions that led to the protest? And what if the protest didn’t really have official organizers, but reflected a more spontaneous uprising?

Part of the problem: there’s no “official rulebook” for movement action. There ARE what social movement scholars call “repertoires of contention” – the models presented by previous movement actions that current organizers and actors can draw upon, and only sometimes in an organized way. This includes the protest march, your Aunt Karen’s “right way” to protest. But the menu also includes a range of action from sit-ins to the barricade to the Molotov cocktail. Where to deploy and where to draw the line are not always universally agreed upon.

And so I see at least 3 open questions facing those who claim to speak for the movement here in Richmond, or at least want to drive it forward:

1. How much to reach out to authorities, including police?

This question seemed especially pressing in the early days. Some well-meaning organizers seemed to try and create dialogue and solidarity with police, but events like a “march with police” were widely criticized. If you collaborate with authorities, does that make you a “collaborator”?

As I’ve noted before, authorities have two textbook responses to protest. One is repression. We sure saw that in RVA, with tear gas and rubber bullets. The other, though, is co-optation, or trying to engage movement leaders in “normal” politics to defuse the movement. Sometimes this leads to meaningful change, but sometimes it’s just a delay.

So what to make of Mayor Levar Stoney’s Task Force on Reimagining Public Safety? There are some well-meaning players involved, but the task force also involves police officers and prosecutors, which again raises the problem of police policing police. And the Mayor doesn’t exactly have a good track record with public commissions after he essentially ignored a previous commission’s recommendations for Confederate monuments - for 2 whole years.

I think RVAMag’s Landon Schroder has it right, in that the best way to think about this task force is that it’s a great way to run out the clock in an election year. It’s telling that the Richmond Transparency and Accountability Project, a well-respected local group that was invited to participate, still asked the Mayor to dissolve it in favor of a parallel City Council structure.

2. How much to rely on/work with white allies?

Some online voices are skeptical of white folks in the movement, and are probably reflective of a broader concern among the city’s Black community. It’s hard to blame them (speaking of lacking a strong track record). In the early days of the movement, there was lots of “white agitator” chatter online and in person, with concerns about white anarchists adding unhelpful chaos to what should be a Black-led movement. These concerns, however justified, unfortunately played into the “outside agitator” rhetoric that always dogs movements – and, ironically, justifies brutal treatment at the hands of police. But the underlying idea still persists: whites will hijack the movement for their own purposes.

Groups like RTAP, New Virginia Majority, Richmond for All, and others have been described as being at the forefront of a new, multi-racial coalition of young progressives in the city. But other folks, even activists, still wonder how much they can trust the purported white allies – including the ones in marches and other protest actions, like the one last Wednesday that stopped by Kim Gray’s house.

3. How best to put pressure on public officials?

And this march, maybe more than any action of the past few weeks, shows the tough choices facing anyone involved in movement action.

On one level, staging a march past Gray’s house makes sense; it’s a disruptive action targeting a powerful political official and mayoral contender who has seemed largely critical of the movement.

But as some critics pointed out, she's also one of the few Black women in power in the city. She has children at home, not to mention a history of segregationist threats on her family that could have been triggered by a “mob” outside of her house. Some protestors were armed. There were no obvious threats of violence, but some may have pointed laser lights; while these are now an often-symbolic presence at protests since the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement started, they could be perceived as intimidation at a private home with guns nearby.

Even if you believe the action was justified morally, the results may still be considered a mixed bag from a strategic perspective. The moment highlighted Gray’s conservatism in relation to movement politics; she went on conservative talk radio station WRVA the next day to claim that “lines are being crossed” and her children were being “terrorized.”

But the action also may have reinforced a widespread view of the movement as lawless and violent, a default view for many observers that plagues all movements (and helps support police repression). Even many of those who cheered when the monuments came down, were happy to see them brought down by cranes, not chains. Movements require disruption to work, but too much disruption can turn too many against you. But you never really know until it happens.

For politics in general, line-drawing is a tough business. It’s even harder in movement politics, when you leave behind the rule book – when the whole POINT of movement action, in many ways, is to leave it behind. Choices over tactics and strategy are never easy, and are often how and where movements fracture. But there are no easy answers.