If you look up "the right way to protest" on Google, you'll be greeted with several interesting articles. There's one from this week's controversy, which I'll get to in a minute.
From 2016, there's a Huffington Post article that talks about the right way to protest that was released a few days after the election of Donald Trump. Also in the Google results is a BuzzFeed article that recaps a 2016 interview Trevor Noah had with Tomi Lahren on "The Daily Show," where he asked her what the right way to protest was.
She repeatedly dodges that question in the interview by the way. The last two notable articles in the google search for the right way to protest include a 2017 piece on black athletes kneeling for the national anthem, as well as an article that talks about National School Walkout Day, which took place in March earlier this year following the Parkland school shooting.
What's the reason I bring all of these articles up? Well, it's clear that our national dialogue on finding the right way to protest goes back a few years now. It's back again in the news this week though, after a controversial tweet from FOX News anchor Laura Ingraham. Ingraham wrote a tweet that criticized Parkland student turned activist David Hogg, writing that his GPA was a "low" 4.1 and included a list of schools he was rejected from. Ingraham received immediate backlash for this. Later on, Hogg tweeted out a list of the 12 top sponsors of "The Ingraham Angle," and told his followers to call 3-4 of the companies listed to try to get them to remove their sponsorships from the show.
As of writing this article, 18 companies have pulled all advertisements and sponsorship from Ingraham's show, according to The Wrap. Bayer, Liberty Mutual, Office Depot, Honda, Hulu, Johnson & Johnson, Wayfair, Expedia, and many more have decided to pull all forms of advertising with no plans of restarting any sponsorship in the future.
After all of this, we are back to the conversation about the right way to protest. Many have voiced opposition to Hogg's ad boycott movement, saying it was either wrong or that it could set a dangerous precedent. My first thought to hearing that was, were you guys not around for Bill O'Reilly's ad exodus that happened at the same time last year that got his show canceled? Precedent's been set. But my overall, more broad takeaway, involves the fact that the "right" way to protest doesn't exist.
David Hogg's protest is about as peaceful as a protest could possibly be. No violence, no name calling, it wasn't blocking traffic, and you didn't have to physically see the protest. It was simply economic pressure on sponsors. However, many still called it the wrong way to protest.
Colin Kaepernick's protest involved kneeling for the national anthem before a game, which was neither violent nor did it infringe on anyone's rights. Many still called it the wrong way to protest, and Colin to this day doesn't have a job in large part because of the fact that it was the "wrong way" to protest.
National School Walkout Day was also a peaceful protest that saw no violence. Well, you catch the drift by now.
It's totally fine to disagree with protest. That is to be expected. We are a divided country that doesn't agree on very many things across the board. However, there is a very important distinction to be made between whether the method of protest is "wrong" and whether you simply disagree with the message.
It's OK to be anti-gun control. It's OK to be anti-kneeling for the anthem. It's OK to be against students walking out of class for a day to protest gun violence. However, please be genuine about it. Disagreeing with the methods of a peaceful protest ultimately means you are objecting to the message of the protest.
And this goes for all non-violent, legal protests, regardless of the subject matter. The quicker we can get to the realization that no one will ever agree on if a protest is "right," the quicker we can have an actual conversation on the topic at hand, whether it's gun control, police brutality, violence in schools, etc. Protests are challenging the status quo of society, and are at the end of the day supposed to be divisive. It is an expression of disapproval to something happening in a society. There will be people that are mad. That's natural. The semantics of the existence of the "right" way to protest make it harder to have any type of conversation on the issues the millions of Americans find themselves divided on.
Frankly, if your protest doesn't have those that will disagree and challenge you, it probably isn't really a protest.
