We're Not Going
by David Boaz, britannica.com
May 2nd 2011
“This time they said, ‘We’re not going.’”
That’s how Seymour Pine of the New York Police Department’s Morals Division
described the raid he led on the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village
on June 28, 1969, and the unprecedented refusal of the gay men in the bar to
hang their heads in shame and go silently into the paddy wagons. The “Stonewall
riots” that resulted are generally regarded as the beginning of the gay rights
movement in the United States. A documentary featuring Pine and other
participants, Stonewall Uprising, aired on PBS’s American Experience last week.
(It played in independent theaters in 2010; DVDs are available.)
Pine’s comment made me think about resistance to oppression. Sometimes all it
takes is one person or a few people saying, “We’re not going” to light the
spark of a movement or a revolution.
Fourteen years earlier Rosa Parks had sat down on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.
When the bus driver told her to stand up to give her seat to a white passenger,
she said, “I don’t think I should have to stand up.” Later in her autobiography
she wrote:
People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that
isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at
the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of
me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of
giving in.
More recently Mohammed Bouazizi, a vegetable seller in Tunisia, got tired of
the corruption, contempt, and confiscation he faced at the hands of local
officials. On December 17, 2010, he went to provincial headquarters and set
himself on fire, dying on January 4.
Rosa Parks helped to galvanize a civil rights revolution that changed America
in less than a generation. The Stonewall uprising created a gay rights movement
that also brought revolutionary change, even though gay people are still
working toward equal rights. And Time magazine called Bouazizi “The Man Who Set
Himself and Tunisia on Fire”—though that article appeared before the fire
spread across the Arab world.
To these, of course, one could add many others: the American farmers who fired
the shot heard round the world at Concord Bridge, the Gdansk shipyard workers
who launched Solidarity in 1980 or the Leipzig peace marchers in 1989.
Over the centuries many other people have risked their lives to stand up
against oppression without successfully rallying others or sparking a
revolution. Some make an impact, like the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but
there are many more whose names are lost.
What causes some acts of resistance to succeed? Is it historical inevitability,
just the right moment for the dry field of hidden dissatisfaction to be set on
fire by a spark? Some libertarian — and other — radicals wonder why Americans
don’t revolt against what the radicals see as tyranny.
In Foreign Affairs, Jack Goldstone posits the factors that lead to revolution:
The necessary and sufficient conditions are fourfold: a government that has
come to appear so irremediably unjust or inept that it is widely viewed as a
threat to the country’s future; elites (especially military) that are alienated
from the state and no longer willing to defend it; broad-based popular
mobilization that spans different groups and classes; and international powers
that are unwilling to step in to defend a threatened regime, or that constrain
it from using maximum force to defend itself.
He’s talking about the overthrow of a ruler or regime, of course, not just a
major change like the civil rights revolution. But some of the same factors
seem relevant, including a status quo that has come to seem irremediably
unjust, a change in the perspective of some elites, and broad-based
mobilization. A key factor seems to be lack of democracy, either in the polity
as a whole or for a particular group. The United States was a democratic
country in the 1950s, but not so much for black people. Especially in the
South, they were effectively prevented from voting or otherwise participating
in normal politics. And indeed in the Deep South they lived under many of the
conditions of a police state. Gay people could vote, but they were forced to
deny the reality of their lives to family, friends, employers, coworkers,
neighbors, and strangers on the street. As historian Eric Marcus says in
Stonewall Uprising, “Before Stonewall, there was no such thing as coming out or
being out. The very idea of being out, it was ludicrous. People talk about
being in and out now, there was no out, there was just in.” William Eskridge,
professor of law at Yale and author of Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the
Closet (and also the author of the Cato Institute’s brief in the Lawrence v.
Texas case, cited in the Supreme Court’s opinion), says, “The federal
government would fire you, school boards would fire you. So you couldn’t have a
license to practice law, you couldn’t be a licensed doctor. You needed a
license even to be a beautician and that could be either denied or taken away
from you.”
It’s not always clear when the “tipping point” of popular discontent has been
reached, but social media are making it easier for the alienated to find
allies. If they find enough traction, all that’s needed is a spark—and an act
of individual courage.
Original Page: http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2011/05/were-not-going/
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