Exclusion Series: We Must Do Better and We Must Be Better: Weird Coalitions and Why They Form
By Noah Truesdale*
My favorite tweet of 2020 so far has been a discussion of the informal coalitions building at the protests in Portland. The tweet read “If we add Dads & Folks With Leaf-blowers to bike/wine moms, Riot Ribs, skate-or-die bloc, the portable dance party speakers, and Guy Who Endlessly Picks Up Trash, I think Portland’s insurrection might now just be ‘everyone who wants to hang in a park in the summer vs the cops”. I found the tweet provocative, not only because it was juxtaposed with video of peaceful protesters being tear gassed, but because it spoke to the weird coalitions rising up in the fight for social justice. I’ve been watching livestreams of the protests most nights now, and something has made me curious. What about this context is different? Why Portland? Why now? And how did this diverse group of individuals find itself willing to stand together and face tear gas, rubber bullets and possible arrest night after night?
This blog post looks at how inclusion and exclusion affect the emergence and success of social movements. While a lot of the language is specific to Portland, which is soon to see its 70th day of continuous protest, the literature of social inclusion has applications for broader movements as well.
I fondly remember my first real taste of Portland-style protests. As a senior at Reed College, I was looking for anything to distract me from the initial experiments of my thesis, which weren’t yielding the statistical significance I was after. So, when Joey Gibson, leader of the infamous alt-right white supremacy group Patriot Prayer, decided to hold a demonstration at Salmon Street Springs, a favored spot for Portland activists of all sorts, I saw counter-protesting as a justifiable diversion from my work. With a group of classmates, I headed towards Southwest Portland and joined in on the action. The first hour or two in that Plaza were just what I was looking for: the sun was out, the weather nice, and I was surrounded by thousands of like-minded individuals showing up in the name of social justice. There was, of course, yelling and occasional conflict between counter-protestors and Patriot Prayer and the riot police protecting them, but altogether the day was a peaceful demonstration about inclusion. Our coalition was larger, stronger, more diverse, and our vision of Portland had no room for white supremacy and fringe right-wing politics.
But as the protesters grew in number, the message changed. Police became more liberal in their use of pepper-spray, batons and, eventually, tear gas. Protestors started pushing back. Eventually Patriot Prayer, apparently satisfied with the reaction they had provoked, moved across the Columbia River to hold a larger rally in Vancouver, Washington. Counter-protestors followed, as did Portland riot police, already agitated from the earlier demonstrations, and eager to reinforce the Vancouver police in cracking down on counter-protests. That early evening was peppered with clashes between counter-protestors and police, and any semblance of the day’s earlier message was replaced with explicit antagonism for the police and the white-supremacists we saw them as harboring.
Since then, Portland has been a hotbed for political protesting by both the left and the right. I’ve been watching various livestreams of the recent George Floyd protests, particularly Portland, with an optimistic (and admittedly nostalgic) eye. And although a lot of what I witnessed firsthand in the 2017 protest is true of today’s — much is also different. My research lately has focused on inclusion and exclusion, and as the composition of the protestors forming outside of the Hatfield Courthouse in Portland has been sensationalized in the media, I’ve had an opportunity to make some observations on who, and why, people participate in social movements.
Research on social inclusion and exclusion begins with an intuitive premise: human beings have an innate tendency to sort other humans into groups. Some of these group labels are inescapable and inherited — gender, race, ethnicity, etc.— but many are situational or merit based, like professional status, education, or age.
The debate hasn’t been settled on why humans have an urge to include and exclude. Some argue that the behavior increased our ancestors’ evolutionary fitness, others say it relates to conceptions of the self, and others note that similar behavior in other species implies grouping can solve free-rider and common-pool resource problems. Regardless, what we do know is that our sorting procedure has resulted in a vast imbalance in power and resources among groups.
In most modern societies, culture, values, and history have arranged group membership hierarchically, with members of high-status groups receiving the lion share of goods, resources, and power over lower-status groups. However, most people are not exclusively members of high-status groups. The organization of society creates situations in which we belong to multiple groups of conflicting status simultaneously. First-generation college students often report difficulties reconciling their identity as students with other identities. A recent paper discussed the difficulties and stress that men of color experience in high-status employment—some boundaries lose meaning and commonalities can be found, but there are still elements of identity that have to be carefully negotiated around to reconcile identity in a white dominated space. That tension between membership in some high-status groups and some low-status groups can have implications for our perceptions of self-identity. The Social Identity Theory suggests that we tend to pick and choose the group memberships most favorable to us and broadcast that identity to the world, while avoiding association with less favorable social identities. After all, why would an individual prioritize their membership in a low-status group when they could lay claim to membership in a high-status group?
History shows us that when members of low-status groups have limited prospects for individual elevation and mobility, the reaction is collective. The Civil Rights Movement capitalized on shifting cultures and values to renegotiate power structures. Occupy Wall Street, with language centered around the collective “we” was seen by many as an opportunity for economic elevation of the 99% after the 2008 recession. More recently, Bernie Sanders’ populist platform was defined by his campaign slogan “Not Me, Us.” When our battles are insurmountable individually, we turn first and foremost to our group for help.
Today, for many protestors, there seem to be many individually insurmountable problems. Wealth inequality was growing even before COVID-19 restrictions led to massive spikes in unemployment and devastating economic conditions. Police killings of unarmed civilians have likewise ballooned in recent years. And while protestors in Michigan can rally against COVID-19 restrictions by storming government buildings armed with AR-15’s and issuing death threats towards state officials, peaceful gatherings across the country have largely been met with extreme police brutality and harassment. In a time where 30 million Americans don’t have enough to eat and 28 million are facing looming evictions, Congress has spent hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out large companies. For many, it feels like the dividing lines of “us” and “them” have been drawn unfavorably — and seemingly permanently — by forces outside of our control.
In a way, the combined forces of economic collapse, global pandemic, and ineffectual politics have blurred the established hierarchies of society. When unemployment rates have ballooned across all professional and education categories, membership in higher-status earned groups offers little security. When the elderly, children, and veterans — three of the more sacred groups in society — have been beaten and arrested by the police for peaceful protest, the value of those identities diminishes as well.
The importance of inflexible groups has likewise been challenged. White Americans have historically held comfortable relations with the police, and so when a horrifying video surfaces of a Black man struggling to breathe for nine minutes before dying while in police custody, unfortunately, for many Whites it could be easy to dismiss it or disengage. Sadly, it has taken a disruption of high-status group privilege for many to recognize that the language and values of Black Lives Matter overlap with their own. When a group of white moms (another of the most sacrosanct groups in American society) are pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, and shoved by heavily armored federal agents, the reaction is indignation. “They can’t treat us like that” creates a recognition that for Americans who haven’t enjoyed the same privilege, this treatment is the norm. Suddenly the old hierarchies of group status and privilege lose their meaning.
If federal soldiers are willing to assail your mom with crowd control munitions, what power or status do you really have? These lingering questions have had real impacts — a recent survey reported by the New York Times found that 45% of white protestors were on the streets because of federal responses to protests. Those are significant numbers and paint a picture of formerly privileged individuals recognizing that the previous arrangements of power in America have little meaning anymore. In the words of Frank Leon Roberts, an activist and professor at NYU, “History has been clear that the people who need to change before the dam breaks are people who have been beneficiaries of the existing systems.” When the benefits of the old system are abruptly inaccessible, it forces us to re-examine who shares our ambitions, our concerns, and our values.
A Social Identity Theory reading of the George Floyd protests helps clarify why this was the tipping point for so many white protestors. We present ourselves according to our most valuable and favorable group membership and in a time where pandemics, economic crises, and neglectful policy have suddenly relegated a class of privileged Americans into low-status groups, the only meaningful option for many is collective action.
In Austin, where I am currently living, the protests took a different form than the ones in Portland. The grievances were the same, but the response from police was not. They were marked by violence and antagonism on both sides, but the priority in Austin was listening to unheard voices and working to amplify them. We were there to demonstrate that we were enthusiastic and supportive members of new status arrangements. The intention was not conflict with the agents of high-status groups, but the bolstering and elevation of our side. Speeches in front of the Capitol building reminded us that we are more alike than we are different, and the backing track of an impromptu jazz band on a street corner and high-fives from the cars we were walking through re-affirmed that we were the majority. In these difficult times, we need each other more than ever. As the graffiti on a boarded-up store front we passed reminded us, for our collective action to succeed, for the new coalitions to mean anything, for social change to be lasting, “we must do better and we must be better.”
*Noah Truesdale, currently studying for a Master’s degree in political science at NYU, is a research intern with Nils Junge Consulting
Photo credit: Noah Truesdale