Protest
A Personal history
It's all strangely Nostalgic
I enjoy classes where I can apply what I’m learning. I remember taking the notorious Math 2B course last quarter, I couldn’t figure where the heck I’d apply the MacLaurin Series in my life. I almost failed the course because of my distaste in Series – it just didn’t seem to be useful.
While I’ve had fun in Humanities Core these past two quarters, I still question how reading books about weird old white men would be useful to me (the Magistrate from Waiting for the Barbarians thoroughly creeped me out). Regardless, I think that this quarter has been about applying what we’ve been learning. A call to action. Resisting empire.
A lot of this course has been nostalgic for me, particularly because my high school’s International Baccalaureate program also had a curriculum that covered the Inca, India’s path to independence, and civil disobedience.
The I.B. program and Humanities Core, after viewing all these ‘case studies’ of resisting empire, pose the same question: What is the best way to resist?
In both classes we debated against each other the benefits and drawbacks of peaceful and violent disobedience. In Humanities Core we looked at the efforts of the militant Savarkar and pinned him against Gandhi’s pacifist strategies. In I.B., we analyzed how peaceful, more moderate groups persevered and took power over more violent resistance groups. This moment is critical – I think that the question of application has been the most important part of Humanities Core so far. Absolutely, it’s important to see how history forms and is changed; however, it is also imperative to apply what we learn from the past. What is the point of asking who was more effective in their actions, Gandhi or Savarkar, without taking to action the answer of that question?
Rewinding to high school, we didn’t just postulate how civil disobedience should work, we did it.
A "History Menu" we made in high school, with "meals" that symbolize different events and groups that took part in various movements (including India's movement for independence). Click here to see the entire document
Shortly after Trump was elected president, my fellow classmates and I ditched our 7th period to go protest Trump’s agenda for our nation. I’ll never forget seeing my friends leading chants to fight against deportation, racism, and misogyny (on an interesting tangent, my friends that led this protest ended up going to UCLA, UC Berkeley, USC, along with another enrolled in our Humanities Core course).
More than a year later, I’m back to studying peaceful resistance in Humanities Core. I often found myself reflecting to November 2016 after Dr. Chaturvedi’s lectures on Gandhi and Savarkar. These past few months have led me deeper down the rabbit hole of effective resistance.
It's not all happiness and rainbows
From the ass-kickers of the Andes, to Caliban’s humanity, and more recently, India’s movement for independence, these ‘case studies’ have shown me how so many people are driven to resist empire. I feel like it’s almost romanticized in this course, the idea of fighting some oppressing power. We’ve spent a lot of time admiring the Inca, analyzing the rebellion of Caliban, and reading the literature of Indian revolutionaries. While we’ve covered the struggles of resisting empire, I think we have not delved deeply into the failure of such resistance.
Dr. Chaturvedi’s last lecture on the tragedies that followed India’s independence was quite the unhappy ending, but it’s a true part of history and its important to recognize this. While resistance was successful – India gained independence – it came at a great cost. And this is the reality of rebelling against empire; it isn’t always a happy ending.
Towards the end of the protest in November 2016, I remember thinking, what am I doing here? President Trump was lawfully elected. No matter how much we disagree with him, our chants will not put him out of office. From this perspective, my school’s protest did absolutely nothing because here we are, more than a year later, and President Trump is still President Trump.
This leads me to one final question: Why protest if you can’t possibly make change?
Sure I could go down some long road of cliché lines of “anyone can make change” or “if you believe hard enough then anything is possible”, but the simple, brute reality that echoes in my mind is that a bunch of teenagers ditching class in some Northern California high school will do nothing to effect the White House.
Am I being nihilistic? I hope not. Allow me to redeem myself:
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Enacting change
Sure, protest may not always move the pens of law makers, but there is something even greater happening within protests that make them all the more important.
“The interactions produced at rallies and protests can affect citizens’ social contexts in ways such that a movement for political change persists autonomously”
What this study shows is that change isn’t necessarily enacted because huge protests pressure lawmakers; rather, protests mobilize the population to becoming politically active. People take matters into their own hands by becoming more involved in the process and enact change through this.
This is why protesting is so important: It inspires people to follow.
And I know this is true because when I see my fellow protesters in UCLA, UC Berkeley, USC, and Humanities Core itself, I know that change is coming from these leaders.