I think people fundamentally misunderstand what nonviolent protest is and how it works. The nonviolent methods of the Civil Rights movement, for example, did not mean that there was an absence of violence in those protests. Nonviolent demonstrations required violence to be present. The point was for the victims of oppression, Black people, to act in a passive, respectable, and nonviolent way while they were actively being brutalized by the police and white supremacists. The point was to shock the conscience of America by revealing in a spectacular public display just how violent the state and individual white supremacists were. The point was to show that Black people had done nothing to provoke that violence except for existing. The point was to show that Black people were respectable, innocent, and peaceful, and yet were brutalized anyway.

Protesters dressed in their Sunday best, and walked or sat peacefully knowing that they would beaten, have hoses turned on them, have objects thrown at them, have dogs sicced on them. The point was for those images of peaceful, unarmed men, women, and children being senselessly brutalized by police officers to show white Americans who the real bad guys were. Effective nonviolent protest requires the violent reaction of white supremacy.

So when you scream that people need to use nonviolent protest, realize what you are saying. You are telling people that their protests are only legitimate if they passively allow themselves to be beaten, brutalized, or even killed for your consumption. No one should have to do that.

And yet people are still using this method. This is how protesters have approached Black Lives Matter. That is how protesters of the Palestinian genocide on college campuses are approaching things. The protesters are simply occupying space, peacefully, nonviolently. Chanting is not violence. Pitching tents and making signs demanding a stop to genocide is not violence. Occupying space on campus to raise awareness is not violence. And just as in the Civil Rights Movement, their peace is being met with cruel violence from the state and its accomplices.

This violence is similarly unprovoked, and should be similarly shocking. But many people are displacing the violence of the state onto the protesters even though the protesters are not the source of that violence. Part of me thinks that the reason for this is that today, when police have attacked protesters the protesters have started to defend themselves. They don't turn the other cheek and passively allow themselves to be brutalized. And because of this very natural, human reaction, people are condemning them, as if they were the ones who brought the violence to the protest.

The people involved in the nonviolent protests of the Civil Rights movement were often trained and instructed not to react, to simply let themselves be broken by their attackers in order to dispel the myth of Black criminality and savagery, in order to highlight the real source of the violence. But let us be clear, they should not have had to do that. They should not have had to perform perfect victimhood to be believed. They should not have had to be saints to get their rights. If they had defended themselves then as protesters are now, that wouldn't have made their cause any less righteous or just. That would not have made the oppressors any less violent. And protesters now should not be held to this standard of perfect passivity in the face of the ruthless tyranny and savage physical violence of the police and white supremacists.