Learning to Protest
I’ve been going to demonstrations pretty much my entire life. At nine years old, I remember shaking my fist at ACT MP Roger Sowry at Parliament and yelling “Numbskull! Ninny!”, insults from a book I was reading at the time. Protests often serve a church-like role for progressives; they’re an outdoor meeting to reaffirm your collective beliefs and catch up with friends, acquaintances and associates. I don’t get along with half the leftists I know, but the Left is still a lifelong community, maintained by these kinds of events.
In recent years, though, I’ve become weary of demonstrations; rallies, specifically. Some of the problem is standing around for eight or ten often-repetitive speeches, or the cringe of half-hearted chants. But mostly it’s the feeling that these rallies are not part of a bigger strategy or theory of social change. The rallies are the theory of social change—except they plainly aren’t working.
Since effective protesting means standing up to power, it also means putting ourselves in difficult situations with an element of risk. This involves, among many things, learning to overcome fear—not pretending we’re unafraid, but being able to move through the fear until we win something. Staying within an easy zone of rote rallies may let people avoid this fear altogether...but it kind of sucks. Symbolic and non-confrontational rallies have long felt like a chore to me, and I know I’m not the only one. Sometimes their affirmation of collective belief can be moving and cathartic when the rallies are massive, but without a strategy beyond “showing up in large numbers”, even these rallies can’t usually advance collective power. You can feel the difference between symbolic and actual wins, and they’re not giving us the latter.
I can no longer stand the pretence that a sedate rally on the Parliament lawn is “sending a message to power”. More often it’s sending a message of impotence to the crowd, telling us to stay behind the fences within the bounds of control and respectability.
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I’m not arguing for people to immediately escalate into storming the Beehive. But slightly more challenging forms of protest are the next step; learning to tolerate a little more risk and getting the rewards. Last year, some of us drove out to white supremacist Julian Batchelor’s talk in Paraparaumu. The driveway had a checkpoint set up by the organisers, passively backed up by several police, where the former could check we were white enough to get in (they turned most people of colour away). When we parked the car and walked towards the venue, I was shaking inside; I knew we were heading into a den of epistemic and potentially physical violence, and I didn’t know what would happen.
As it turns out, it went fine. Once Batchelor started to talk, I staged a fake and very loud phonecall (“I’m at the Batchelor talk…No no, BATCHELOR…No, I think he’s married”). The crowd yelled at me to get out, and I eventually left and played extremely dumb with the irate man on the door as some cops walked in to help. “You’re the police, do something!” said the man furiously. "What do you want us to do, there’s too many of them!” replied the cop, both unaware how delightful this was to overhear.
I went down to our friends waiting outside the checkpoint with hot tea, baking and music. As more of us came out to join the group, we hugged and cracked up at each other’s disruption tactics. One friend barked like a dog and told Batchelor he was dogwhistling—when he told her to get out, she said “That’s not what you said last night, Daddy.” Others stood up and ponderously sang the national anthem, getting about four verses in before the audience realised they were being trolled.
The atmosphere outside was jubilant—and not just because we were winning. It was because we had learned to do something new; that we could break the general rules of social interaction without coming out hideously embarrassed, that we could escalate a situation without getting hurt, that there were ways of disrupting things that were fun and funny and communal and ruined the other side’s evening. It was a euphoric relief to put down the heavy burden of colonial etiquette; the daily cognitive dissonance of watching our oppressors speak and calmly pretending their behaviour is normal or acceptable, lying to ourselves that disrupting them is somehow worse.
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This is the jubilance that our oppressors fear. They don’t want anyone to know that opposing them can produce deep and meaningful joy, and so they push everyone to forget successful protests as quickly as possible. As Vicky Osterweil said in her essay Remembering As An Act of Revolt, they want us to remember the misery and isolation of 2020, but to forget the sharp drops in pollution during lockdowns, the mutual aid projects people started, the rent strikes people took against slumlords, the Great Resignation—and above all, the burning of the Minneapolis police precinct. Until I read her essay, I had completely forgotten the feelings of hope during 2020, hope that maybe this disaster would also be a catalyst for change.
Not all those feelings are lost. It truly wasn’t that long ago that most people cared deeply about the pandemic, were openly angry at the idea of “letting it rip”, and were still masking and getting their vaccines (remember to book your booster!). The reason people aren’t taking precautions now isn’t primarily a lack of care, but a lack of skill. People haven’t learned or been taught the coping mechanisms required to wear a mask long-term and adjust, for example, how they share meals. When your body, like mine, has clarified how scary this disease is, it’s easier to mask everywhere; otherwise it’s clearly crushingly difficult for most people. We could treat Covid caution as a learning curve, not a binary; most people could probably learn to mask in mundane short-term situations, like the bus or a shop, and build up from there.
The George Floyd riots’ successes owe partly to rioters’ masking practices, which protected them from both Covid and from state surveillance and punishment. While that was misguidedly abandoned, I’m certain people have brought forward many of 2020’s lessons into current movements. Free Palestine and Toitū Te Tiriti are pushing the current boundaries of protest by harassing National MPs at public appearances and picketing outside Chris Luxon’s house. They are thinking more tactically about protest, remembering its proper use as a tool to force change and deploying it accordingly.
If you’re organising a protest, forget Parliament, Aotea Square, the Bridge of Remembrance, or the Octagon. Sit down and ask yourself: what do I want to change? Who is responsible for changing it? Where do these people physically hang out? How can we get close to them, and what could we do once there to make them uncomfortable? Believe that the people you’re organising are capable and desirous of more than symbolic resistance. If they’re scared, don’t uphold or magnify their worst fears; remind them that we can do this, that we are powerful, that we’re learning the arts of resistance together. The reward of actual wins will outstrip any dreary chorus of “We Shall Overcome”.
Ari Wilson is an activist and writer based in Aotearoa. Check out their Substack for their quest to watch every Sam Neill film in existence.