We’ve seen a good number of protests during Trump 2.0. What role does our ability to organize and protest play in this moment as we see the erosion of democracy right in front of us? Omar Wasow, associate professor of political science at UC Berkley, joins to discuss how he’s making sense of American politics at this moment, protests in this era and more.
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Omar Wasow: In some ways, there is this, you know, unsettling panopticon, which means we’re all now surveilled, but it also means that much of the state violence is documented. And I think you’re right that those images are, in fact, moving public opinion, and that this is not a sustainable policy because of that, because people are, at some core level, moved and sympathized with the people who are the targets of that state violence.
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Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
Something I’ve been kind of obsessed with over the last month is the protests that took place on June 14, the No Kings protests. And both the protests themselves and the kind of coverage of them or the place they occupied in public imagination, there were something like 2,200 events. They took place across the country in all 50 states. And unlike some big, say, march on Washington, right, where there’s a centralized location and, say, 500,000 people show up or a million people show up, the idea here was to do it in a kind of devolved grassroots way, right, distributed throughout the country. Also, it makes it easier for people to go and people, even in places that, you know, small corners of Kentucky, for instance, where you might think, oh, there’s a bunch of people who really don’t like the direction the country’s going under Donald Trump. But it turns out they’re there. I thought that was sort of brilliant.
But one of the things that ended up happening, I think, was partly because it happened on the same day as the Trump military parade. The coverage was sort of split screen. The cover of The Times the next day was like, people gather as Trump military parade happens. And I was hosting several hours of television, which we did something similar. But the scale of it really got lost. So after all was said and done, a bunch of people tried to kind of run the numbers, like how many people came out for these protests. And these are not propagandists. These are not people, they’re really trying to get the math right in a difficult science. Crowd estimates are always hard. There’s an old joke in sort of lefty circles that 100,000 people show up at an anti-war march, and the cops say there’s 5,000, right. This is sort of an old trope in crowd estimates and a kind of battle between different forces about how many people were there.
But people who are like serious people trying to sort of scan through and do the best, most rigorous job of like figuring out how many people came out, G. Eliot Morris was one of them, came up with a figure of like maybe 3 million to 5 million people, which you’ll put it as some of the biggest protests of our lifetime.
And I think it’s fair to say that they did not get covered as some of the biggest protests of our lifetime. I think there’s just no way to say otherwise. And I’m pretty interested in this conception. And the reason I’m pretty obsessed with this is I more and more think that kind of as we watch so many institutional safeguards fail, this idea that civil society, that we are all we have here as the bulwark for democracy, and I don’t mean that like we meaning just protests. I mean we as citizens, people that occupy different positions. If you’re listening to this and you’re in the administration of a big university, like you have a role to play. If you’re in a law firm, you have a role to play. If you’re a municipal worker, you have a role. Like all aspects of civil society. But street protest and mobilization are one huge aspect of it.
And so, I’ve been thinking about how should we be thinking about this in terms. We talked to Erica Chenoweth, who writes about this, studies it a few weeks back. And I wanted to return to the topic after those No Kings protests with one of my favorite thinkers and writers on this very thing, Omar Wasow, who’s an assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley. And he’s been thinking about writing about public protest, how public protest shapes political opinion, its political outcomes, ways in which it can go wrong, ways it can go very right. And so I thought no one better to talk to about this topic than Omar.
Welcome to the program.
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Omar Wasow: Thank you so much for having me.
Chris Hayes: Before we get into your work, I just want to do a little bio work with you, because you crossed my radar for some of your writings at certain point. And I saw your name, and I was like, I know that name. And I was like, was that the tech guy from NPR who I used to listen to and love and looked forward to his segments? And I thought he was so sort of uncommonly sharp and kind of humane and also not like a tech nerd, but in this very distinct way. And that was you, right?
Omar Wasow: Yeah, no, I’ve had a funny circuitous career. I actually was on MSNBC as a tech guy in my early days. In the very early days of MSNBC, they had a chat room.
Chris Hayes: Amazing.
Omar Wasow: And I was sitting in the chat room fielding questions during live segments.
Chris Hayes: That’s really amazing. And yeah, you were sort of a tech writer and columnist, right? That was kind of what you did.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, I mean, I was running a startup. And at the same time, in some ways, like helping to pay the bills by doing TV work. So I was on local NBC doing tech reporting with WNBC, had a series, for a brief time was like Oprah’s tech guru. So yeah, it’s been a very winding path to the academy, both through being a tech entrepreneur, running a website called Black Planet, early social media.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, you ran Black Planet. That’s right, dude. Do people, wait, let’s just take a second on Black Planet. People need to understand that Black Planet basically birthed the modern internet. I think that’s a defensible thesis.
Omar Wasow: It’s a very generous thesis. I would say we were part of a long history of what used to be called online community. And so, before MySpace or Facebook, we were bringing the kind of like social experience to the web, right? I mean, just to be totally a dork for a second, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah, let’s do it.
Omar Wasow: The metaphor of the web is a web page. And what we were trying to do was hack the web, this sort of global library, and make it social. And so, we built a social layer on top of that and built one of the first really big social media companies in Black Planet.
Chris Hayes: And one thing I think is actually really important, and we’ll sort of loop back around to this. One of the things that I’m so struck by always is, and I’ve said this before in the program of like how much Black American culture ends up being this kind of nuclear fusion reactor for a global culture. And it’s producing constantly this insane amount of cultural production that then gets often expropriated, exploited, and then in some ways that are not predatory, just the natural moves of culture like shipped out to the world. And I remember traveling and being a rural town in Chile and watching kids breakdance.
And at first, I was like, wow.
Omar Wasow: Right, right.
Chris Hayes: And I feel like the internet has been a new version of that. I think people don’t understand the degree to which even just like the argot of the internet is the product of Black people online. And Black Planet really has a kind of foundational place for that.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, I’m very proud of the work we did with Black Planet. And there was a moment where it was showing up in Kanye West rhymes and was at the center of culture. And then as you note, like the internet just moves so fast.
Chris Hayes: So fast.
Omar Wasow: There are people who came of age, and it was really formative for them. And then a decade later, it’s like invisible.
Chris Hayes: I mean, it’s just funny, like, if you’re spending time around like 11-year-old white boys, and they’re like, what’s up, fam? And it’s like, there’s a lineage to why you are saying that. I mean, again, part of this is just culture. There’s nothing sinister about it at all. But part of it is, it is wild how ubiquitous that is now and how little I think people understand its ubiquity is, I guess what I would say.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, no, that’s right. And Black Planet was really central. I mean, so the co-founders of MySpace explicitly said in one interview that they looked at Black Planet and thought, oh, we could do this for a general market. And so, in that sense, it does feel like part of a long history of appropriation that doesn’t fully give it to do.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, totally. So how did you end up in, why did you go to the Academy?
Omar Wasow: Yeah, so that’s a great question. I grew up in, like you, in New York at a moment where tough on crime was the kind of dominant political agenda. And my parents had been active in the civil rights movement. And there was just this question for me my whole life, which was, how did we get from this kind of, you know, my dad registering voters in Mississippi in the early ‘60s to tough on crime and law and order? And trying to understand that transition was just this, like, something looping for me throughout my youth. And there was a certain point where I realized some questions have a business model. Like, can we build a multicultural internet, like was part of what undergirded Black Planet. But there’s some questions that don’t have a business model. And understanding the rise of tough on crime, law and order, mass incarceration required a different kind of exploration. And so, that took me as a mid-career switcher from tech to getting a PhD in African-American studies.
Chris Hayes: That’s so cool. Was that a crazy culture shift?
Omar Wasow: Yes and no. I mean, the other detail here is that, basically, everybody in my family is an educator.
Chris Hayes: Right, right, right.
Omar Wasow: And so, for me, the–
Chris Hayes: It was foreordained.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, and the rebellion was to be an entrepreneur. And it’s only when I went back to school that I was sort of following in the family tradition and coming home.
Chris Hayes: So you started, your dissertation is on this topic, right? And then you’ve kind of moved from that, I mean, it’s not a huge move, right? To really thinking about political protest. How did you get started on that line?
Omar Wasow: Yeah, so that’s also, like, as I mentioned a moment ago, right? Like, the original question was, how did we get to tough on crime, right? Like, law and order is not just, if you look at the long history of incarceration in America, it goes up some decades, it goes down some decades over the last century. But it’s not really until the, like, late ‘70s, early ‘80s that it just hockey sticks up, right? And so, that led me to a kind of pretty simple academic question, which is, like, what is going on in the ‘60s and ‘70s that is associated with this dramatic change in both public opinion and policy? And as I was pulling on that thread, found my way back to this, you know, again, like, thinking about my parents’ own activism in the ‘60s of trying to see how much was protest driving public opinion?
And there’s just this one moment where, if you look at public opinion in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there’s a particular set of data that looks at the most important problem in America. And what’s interesting is there’s one line on what is called social control. And that’s sort of a mix of things, crime, juvenile delinquency, what’s often called urban riots. And it’s sort of bouncing around a lot. And I just assumed, well, it’s public opinion. It’s sort of moving. You know, public opinion is noisy. And then I overlaid, this is in grad school, like, protest activity by day and the public opinion movement. And they were just like, suddenly, I saw this, like, it wasn’t noisy. It was like, there was a seasonal co-varying pattern where, as these violent protests were happening, concern about law and order was going up. And then when the protests stopped, it went down, right?
I mean, the simplest version of it, I often do this when I’m teaching. I show the plot. And I say, what patterns do you observe? And students will say, oh, it goes up and down. And I’m like, well, what else do you notice? And finally, will somebody say, it’s going up in the summer and down in the winter? And it’s like– it’s seasonal. But it’s not just seasonal because it’s like racism is going up and down, right? I mean, like, bias is certainly a part of this. But public opinion is moving with what’s happening on the ground. And that really became kind of the touchstone for what became this larger body of work, trying to understand how what’s happening on the ground is driving public opinion in politics.
Chris Hayes: Well, let’s stay with this because there’s a, I don’t want to say controversial, but there is a kind of prickly claim at the heart of this, which is that protests of the kind that turned violent, even property destruction, right, not interpersonal violence, but sometimes interpersonal violence, had a negative effect on mass opinion and mass support for civil rights and made people more reactionary on crime.
I mean, I’m oversimplifying the thesis, but that’s kind of one of the key findings.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, that’s right. So, I mean, what’s funny for me is, if I talk to civilians, they’re like, so you’re saying, like, thousands of incidents of arson drove concern about order? Like, what’s the finding? Like, that’s obvious, isn’t it? And then, like, in some academic circles, some sort of left of center circles, it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s a pretty radical claim. And so —
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point, yes.
Omar Wasow: Yeah. So it ended up, you know, just to kind of summarize this one paper that got a lot of attention, particularly in 2020, I looked at both nonviolent and violent protests in the 1960s, particularly in the civil rights era, and found that in counties that were near nonviolent protests, and that’s, you know, civil rights protests, that those counties voted more liberally. They voted more Democratic. And importantly, the Democratic coalition was the pro-civil rights, essentially, it aligned with the Black Agenda coalition.
And counties that were near protests that had escalated into protester-initiated violence voted more conservatively. And I, you know, banged at that a bunch of different ways statistically, and it holds up pretty well that what you have is a kind of conservatizing effect of violence. And importantly, it’s not just violence, you know, general violence by protesters seems to be conservatizing. But when protesters were the targets of violence by the state, right? So, you know, iconic examples like John Lewis being beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Like, those kinds of images, when people were the targets of violence, actually created more sympathy for the movement. And so violence had this kind of double-edged sword.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Omar Wasow: Quality.
Chris Hayes: So, it’s interesting because just the other night, one of our sort of summer projects is to watch “Eyes on the Prize” with our kids, who are 13, 11, and 7. We skipped episode one, which is largely about Emmett Till’s lynching because for the seven-year-old, that felt like maybe not great content. But we did episode two, which is school integration, post-Brown, and a lot on Little Rock. And, you know, one of the things that really comes through, and this is true in, you know, it’s true in the great book called “The Race Beat,” which is about sort of Northern, largely white reporters covering civil rights in the South, and in the Taylor Branch series.
You know, the white folks down there look like deranged psychos. I mean, even, and they certainly do to us today, but also at the time. Like the images being beamed out at that time. I’m making this point because, to your point about sort of it going in both directions, right, that like this very combustible intermix can have a public effect in both directions, and the kind of like paradigmatic sort of like insane discipline of “The Little Rock Nine” and James Meredith, you know, suit, like perfect, like Hollywood, Mid-Atlantic accent.
And all that stuff is problematic for a million reasons, I will concede. But like that combined with the truly like degraded and deranged hate that you’re seeing from this brain mob was pretty powerful in shaping public opinion.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, and so that’s, I mean, what you’re observing there and what “The Race Beat” which was very influential in my own thinking too, find is, and, you know, and most centrally, leaders in the civil rights era understood as well, is that there was this kind of almost jujitsu style move, which is you create situations where you, in the words of King and Lewis and others, you dramatize injustice. You’re trying to kind of reveal the beating ugly heart of Jim Crow and segregation by allowing, you know, Bull Connor or these, you know, white mobs to behave in ways that essentially alienate them from the rest of the country and the world, right?
And so, there was a kind of, I’m mixing my metaphors here, but there was a kind of bank shot, which is we’re going to change how the contestation happens from, it’s not just happening in, you know, Selma, it’s being broadcast around the world. And then suddenly now we’re able to bring in all of these other allies and forces as part of that maneuver.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and it’s, I mean, in The Race Beat, it’s almost, I’ve got to be careful about how I say it, it’s almost something sort of a little morally shocking about how clear they are on this in the sense that like, they know they are sending children out to get beaten, like they are quite aware of the fact that that is what is going to happen. And in some senses is partly the goal. I think it’s not crazy to say like, that when those fire hoses are turned on, you know, these are 16, 15 year olds in some of those iconic images, like they knew exactly that that was essentially going to happen and that that image would be beamed out to the world to represent what was happening in the South.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, so there’s a level of strategy, which is I think often underappreciated and you’ve touched on it, but it’s like there’s a lesson that comes out of some of the earlier efforts that are less successful, which is that you really need somebody like a Bull Connor, a police chief who has a hair trigger for violence, who’s going to behave in a way that sort of maybe locally welcome, but for the national audience is, you know, changes the nature of the debate.
And so, they were, so I mean, I really build on in my thinking about this, it’s not just that they say, you know, we’re going to dramatize injustice, but there’s a whole level of kind of theater and storytelling that’s at the heart of this. And what I mean by that is they are doing location scouting, right? And so, a place like Birmingham is a good location in part, because of the possibility of a police chief who’s going to create these spectacles of violence.
They are casting, you know, Rosa Parks was picked in part, you know, there are multiple women going back more than a decade who refused to, you know, go to the back of the bus, but Rosa Parks was a particularly powerful embodiment of the movement, and so she gets cast in that role.
There are other kinds of decisions, you know, the timing, the costuming, right? There’s a whole way in which they are engaged in a kind of what in political science or sociology is sometimes called narrative construction, trying to build a story that is a powerful narrative of who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy. And again, someone like Bull Connor is not really, he doesn’t understand the game. And so, he just plays right to type as this archetypally evil, you know, sort of violent person that then alienates moderate whites who are largely indifferent to the concerns of black people in the South.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Let’s talk a little bit, I want to come back around to some of the further themes you develop in your work. But I want to talk about some modern day examples and sort of extrapolate lessons. So one of the things to me about the No Kings protest, right, is that there’s really this trap, this problem. I wrote about this a bit on Blue Sky, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m in the business of, I do television news, I’m in the attention business, right? There’s this iconic image that sort of got spread around the internet, it was the inauguration of Trump in 2017 on his inauguration day. And there was a group of sort of radical activists that had some actions. Not very much happened, although a bunch of them got arrested and faced with like insane and unjust charges.
But at one point, someone lit a garbage can on fire and there’s this amazing picture of like 25 reporters photographing the one garbage can. And the reason is that’s a good image, whereas like people just waving cute and funny signs is not. And part of the problem with No King’s Day was there wasn’t that narrative tension, but and also if everyone at those protests had started lighting cars on fire, there would have been a ton more coverage, but it also would have been negative.
So how do we think about this kind of attentional trap for protesters and activists, which is like, if it bleeds, it leads, if it burns, it’s on page one. But if you do that, you also are going to alienate public opinion. If you’re sort of quiet and well-behaved, then it’s a tree falling in the forest.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, and let me share just to tie like the beginning, sort of my early life to this. So I was a tech reporter. There’s a moment where Wi-Fi is a new technology. And I’m like, this is amazing. This is magic.
Chris Hayes: It is magic. The first time Wi-Fi happens, it’s magic, 100%.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, and I went to pitch a local NBC TV, and my producer was like, “Well, what’s the visual?” And I was like, “This is like really amazing technology. Like, I don’t have a visual.” And it took me a year to get it on air. And we finally got it on air when like McDonald’s had free Wi-Fi. And importantly, like, you know, again, to your reference about radio, like each medium has its own logic. And like doing a Wi-Fi segment on the radio was fine, right? That they didn’t need the visual. And that helped me appreciate something, which is a kind of bias that’s often, you know, overlooked, which is there’s like this intense visual bias in television. And so, things that are visually compelling, like a fire, will just, you know, jump to the front of the line in terms of like what, you know, a network wants to cover. And the inverse of that was also true, as you referenced in books like Branch’s and Taylor Branch’s and “The Race Beat,” where there’s a one line that really stood out to me.
There’s a protest in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and the reporter says, you know, no blood and guts, no news, right? And it’s like a large peaceful protest, kind of echoing your point about the No Kings protest, isn’t in and of itself, there’s not drama. And that’s a real challenge. And it’s sometimes described as a kind of activist’s dilemma where you’ve got, if you do extreme tactics, you get more attention, but you also risk alienating potential allies.
And that’s, you know, this kind of fundamental tension. And part of the genius of the civil rights movement is part of how they solved the problem was to make themselves the targets of violence. You get drama and you are sympathetic.
Chris Hayes: Yes, and to do that, right? These are extremely thought through provocations that also require a depth of organization in a deep sense that is very hard to come by these days. I mean, talk a little bit about that, about like how these movements function and how deep those organizational structures were.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, so that’s exactly right. And so, I mean, you know, I mentioned, and my dad did voter registration in Mississippi, and right, like he was getting trained before going down on like, what is it, how do you respond if you get attacked? Right, and people would role play being attacked by vigilantes or state troopers. And there was a kind of a process of stealing yourself for the possibility of being an object of violence.
And not only does that require enormous discipline on the front end, but it’s exceedingly hard to sustain long-term because of course people get tired of being —
Chris Hayes: Beaten to death, yeah.
Omar Wasow: Beaten. yeah, and so someone like Stokely Carmichael begins in the nonviolent sort of tradition. And then at a certain point says, I’ve been arrested and beaten too many times, right? And then turns to a much more militant kind of rhetoric and tactics. So it’s exceedingly hard to do, it’s exceedingly hard to sustain, but we see cross-nationally whether, you know, it’s models like Gandhi or in the U.S. again, in these traditions of when you can be a kind of sympathetic target, it can be an especially powerful combination.
Chris Hayes: What else did you learn about how the mechanism of public opinion and protest functions? So there’s this sort of, there’s a kind of narrativizing, there’s this question of sort of drama, there’s a question of sort of heroes and villains, honestly. Let’s talk about the other sort of finding about protests in which there is violence, there is property destruction, there is arson, and how that gets transmitted and what that does to public opinion.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, so I mean, you know, coming back to this idea of narrative construction. I think one other thing that’s important to appreciate is that like protests happen in a culture and what we’re often doing is drawing on kind of the mythology of that culture in evoking certain kinds of symbols, in evoking certain kinds of, you know, ancient stories. And so, the way I think about the civil rights tradition in the U.S. and both the, you know, kind of non-violent and more militant wings of it is that there are almost two deep stories in America.
There are obviously more, but in this case, two in particular, and one is a story of like the redress of grievances, right? Which is this have rooted in the First Amendment and has this kind of deep, honored, revered, kind of on a pedestal sort of story to draw upon. And another is a story of kind of pathologizing of black people. And that there’s this sort of long history of black life being treated as pathological. And the danger for any assertion or claim of rights by African Americans is that you’re going to get slotted into the criminal pathological story.
And so, part of the echoing would be bringing up, coming back to one of the things you noted about why was it important to wear a suit? Why was it important for people to engage in this respectability politics? It’s because they had to create counter stereotypic images and draw on a different kind of narrative that is, in the words of King, right? Deeply rooted in the American dream, right? Deeply rooted in the American tradition.
And so, that, like we’re engaged in a redress of grievances. We’re part of the Boston Tea Party tradition is evoking one kind of story. And I think what was so hard for the movements that escalated to violence is it was very easy for the media, very easy. And importantly in the 1960s, United States is about 90% white, 10% black, give or take. And so, this is like, it’s just there is the media is overwhelmingly white drawing on these kinds of narratives of pathology. And so, when, even if it’s in response to brutal state repression, the narratives of black pathology are kind of what come to the fore. And so, you get crime and criminality and law and order and riots. And not was this justified as a response to something like a violent crackdown by the police in under segregation.
Chris Hayes: One thing I want to add here, which is a little bit of a sort of adjacent point to what you’re saying, is one of the things that struck me when I was working on my second book called “A Colony and a Nation,” which is about some of these themes, is when you go back to the actual chronicle of the founding, a lot of the redress of grievances was absolutely riot mob action. Like there were, it is really lost to our notion of things, of how much the colonists were straight up rioting. They were grabbing customs officials off the street and literally physically tarring and feathering them.
So there was way more of that, like that second kind of pathologized uprising from black folks, whether it’s the ‘60s all the way through, you know, Michael Brown, what happened after Michael Brown, which I was there for, or after Freddie Gray in Baltimore, which I was also there for. And like, to the degree that there was mob action, destruction of property, like that is absolutely central to the American Revolution. And that story is totally lost in the telling of it.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, and I, you know, it’s a really important corrective. And I think part of what I think I probably could have said more clearly is that like —
Chris Hayes: I’m not correcting you, by the way. I’m just saying like —
Omar Wasow: No, no, no, no.
Chris Hayes: It’s an adjacent point that people don’t, I think, know about our history.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, no, no, no. But it’s, I mean, I’m taking it not as a criticism, but as a like, right, like the Boston Tea Party was, you know, property destruction.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.
Omar Wasow: So I mean, even as I’m telling it, I’m kind of like smoothing over the edges. And I think it speaks to maybe another way of thinking about the challenge of violence, particularly in a black freedom struggle, which is that there’s a kind of a double standard, right?
And that like January 6th is treated differently. And so, there’s like a different set of the stories of some kinds of violence aren’t viewed with quite the same, you know, stereotypes. And that means that there’s a broader kind of repertoire available maybe to the majority than to a stigmatized minority. And whether you’re African-Americans or disabled people or people with AIDS, like you’ve got to think about, we are somewhat demonized in the culture and that asymmetry when we’re strategic has to be kind of baked into our tactics.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You just mentioned January 6th. I want to talk about that because it occurred to me that there’s sort of two lessons there on either side of this kind of divide. One is that it’s not an accident the lowest approval rating of Donald Trump’s political career was right after January 6th. And I think it had an effect on public opinion, much like the brain white mobs Little Rock or Bull Connor.
I mean, verifiably, as much as we can measure public opinion, move public opinion against Donald Trump, against the right, against MAGA, against all that. At the same time, if it had been a thousand black people sacking the Capitol, it’s just an absolutely different scene.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, that’s right.
And part of what has been in the 1960s, right? When some of these protests escalate, National Guard gets brought in and there are 30,000 rounds of ammunition fired in Detroit, right? So like one of the things that came up when you were talking with Erica Chenoweth in an earlier episode was how in South Africa, you can’t, as black protesters kind of try to build connections with the white security forces where they will kind of see themselves in you, right? And what we’ve seen in some of the repression of black protest is much more state violence against protesters, even when the protests are overwhelmingly peaceful.
And so, that’s also a challenge is that there’s, the deck is stacked in multiple ways. The medium may not be as sympathetic to your cause. The state may have engaged in more repression. And so, that’s, I mean, I think again, coming back to the genius of the civil rights era, they sort of understood how much this was a David and Goliath fight and were able to turn that to their advantage.
To that point, one of the details that I had forgotten when I was watching the episode two of “Eyes on the Prize” is that when the mob first shows up and the governor shows up to stop James Meredith from enrolling at Ole Miss, and the National Guard gets called out, the first night, the white mob shoots dozens of National Guardsmen and none are shot in return. So, and again, this is the crazy thing about January 6th when you look at it, right? There’s one woman who was shot and killed at the moment that she’s about to actually enter the chamber where members of Congress are.
But all these cops are armed and they’re getting their heads bashed in. There’s a, I mean, the amount of restraint that is shown there, and it’s always stuck with me. And then when I saw that detail about the night of the, the first night of the Ole Miss, I was like, wow, yeah, there is some continuity here.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.
And so, to kind of come to the No Kings era of this, there is an asymmetry. It’s not quite the same because now it’s not, a kind of a racial or ethnic minority trying to make claims or a sexual minority or disabled minority trying to make claims. It’s sort of this broad coalition in the country, but there is a way in which it’s still kind of the outsiders trying to sort of take on the establishment. And in that way has to think about how do we make claims and hold onto legitimacy? And when, in fact, we may be perceived as, maybe a kind of a rapid way in which we are delegitimized.
Chris Hayes: So, obviously, I think that there’s a kind of consensus view of the sort of, particularly the King year civil rights movement as a sort of apex of, non-violent protest and in terms of its efficacy, its ability to move public opinion, the sort of legislative accomplishments that follow the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, housing.
Are there other movements through the years to learn from or who sort of solve these problems in interesting different ways?
Omar Wasow: Yeah, so I mean, part of what I have tried to do in the intervening years is look, particularly in the U.S., what are other cases that seem to fit what I observed in the 1960s? And I think ACT UP is a really interesting model where if you watch a film, “How to Survive a Plague,” which I highly recommend.
Chris Hayes: Amazing movie.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, there’s a scene where an ex-CNN producer is speaking to an assembled gathering before they do a demonstration. And she says, “Don’t talk to the media, talk through the media,” right? And it’s like, literally they are echoing this kind of civil rights era logic, which is that we’re trying to use the media to amplify our concerns, our minority concerns, our stigmatized minority concerns to the general public. And that that’s kind of like a key strategy.
And I’ve had the privilege to talk to some of the people who were leaders in ACT UP, and they tell stories about, I mean, one of the most amazing ones to me, and this actually, it’s like a blink of the scene in “How to Survive a Plague,” but they’re doing a demonstration at, it’s either the NIH or the CDC, I’m forgetting now, but there is a moment where smoke bombs are, you see these multicolored smoke bombs. And just to be clear, smoke bombs are, this is like a children’s toy. This is not anything more serious than that.
And a bunch of the people in the movement had been involved in things like set design in New York, and they were trying to think about how to make a good image. The New York Times had just started printing in color, the front page, the photographs in color, and they thought, well, smoke looks great on camera. And so as part of the demo, they had these like multicolored smoke bombs where you have this like rainbow of smoke. And that was what led the newspaper, the New York Times, the next day, right? So a level of incredible intention about how do we construct an image that might, if we’re lucky, could turn into the front page of the New York Times and get our concerns in front of a national audience.
Chris Hayes: It’s like crafting the burning garbage can, right? It’s like, oh, you need a garbage can on fire. We can, I’ll get you one.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right. And it’s like, think about how many movies you’ve seen where there’s like a cigarette. It’s like the smoke, smoke looks great on camera.
Chris Hayes: Totally, it does, yes.
Omar Wasow: So, and another film, which I think does a nice job of conveying this is “Crip Camp,” which talks about the birth of the disability rights movement. And there again, there’s this real attention to how do we essentially turn our suffering into a kind of seizing of power. So like there’s a scene in that film where people with disabilities are climbing the steps of Congress as a way of drawing attention to how inaccessible the people’s house is, right?
And it’s incredibly moving to see this range of people with a range of disabilities climbing up these stairs, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Omar Wasow: And so that’s, again, like the thing that I think for me is a lesson I kind of keep coming back to. You mentioned Emmett Till earlier, and I think that is in some ways the most important touchstone in all of this, which is that Mamie Till has this brilliant insight, which is that, I mean, unspeakable horror that happens to her and her son getting lynched. But she says in this one interview, “Let the world see what I have seen.” And she turns this profound suffering into an act of power by showing her son’s brutalized body both to media, black publications like Jet, had this image that was seen around the world, open-casket funeral. And that kind of turning suffering into power is a pattern we see in other cases. I mean, I’m sorry to keep coming back to films. I teach a film in politics class.
Chris Hayes: No, I love it, it’s great. No one reads anymore, Omar, so this is great.
Omar Wasow: There’s a film called “Hunger,” which is a little bit of a strange film, highly recommended. It’s by the same director who did “12 Years a Slave,” and it follows a hunger strike. And what we see is another kind of way in which directing violence at yourself can be incredibly powerful as a way to seize power. So I think we do see examples of that strategy of saying taking our, in some ways, our powerlessness and turning it into power.
Chris Hayes: I mean, the place that’s happening right now, and I think, and part of the reason I really want to talk to you in this moment is with mass deportation and ICE, right? And this is where it has a kind of echoes of Bull Connor feel to it. I mean, you are watch, I have watched videos of a 50-something car washer at a car wash in L.A. have five, like, jacked up, camo, armed dudes in masks push his head into the hood of a car that he’s washing. I’ve watched a father of three Marines who’s a landscaper and an IHOP get smashed into the ground and have his arm seemingly dislocated. I don’t know if it actually was.
I mean, I could give you, and these, and then now what’s happening here is this is not the product of, in 95 percent of cases, this is not the product of a bunch of long meetings that happened about how do we cast the landscaper and draw out the venom and injustice inherent in this. This is how the state is acting.
And I think in some weird ways, actually, they have the weird same incentives because I think they want to put on a show that scares people and the people opposed to it want to show the world what this looks like. So there is a strange coincidence here, but what you are seeing is public opinion moving in this almost whipsawing direction against what’s happening. And I’m curious to hear your thoughts about this because it seems to fit with that model so well.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, so I agree fully. And so, let me draw one thread from coming back to, so we talked about Emmett Till and Mamie Till’s just insight about using the media strategically. Fast forward to 1992, George Holiday happens to have a video camera at home in a moment when that’s not so common and documents the beating of Rodney King. And that is a profound moment in American understanding of police violence.
Fast forward again to Darnella Frazier with her phone documenting the murder of George Floyd. And each of those moments is galvanizing for public opinion. And so, I think you’re exactly right that we’re in another one of these moments where video, you know, I mean, the big difference in some ways between the 1960s and now is everybody has a video camera. And even some of the incidents, I’m forgetting her name, the graduate student who was picked up on the street.
Chris Hayes: Rumeysa Ozturk
Omar Wasow: Yeah, Rumeysa Ozturk, right? Like the fact that that happened to be caught on a security camera, which somebody then released is sort of, we don’t even stop to notice how remarkable it is.
Chris Hayes: We wore that film out. I mean, we played that over and over to your point, like as a television producer and host, like that was a key part of telling that story.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, and it’s like, and so we just have, in some ways there’s this, you know, sort of unsettling panopticon, which means we’re all now surveilled, but it also means that much of the state violence is documented. And that I think you’re right, that those images are in fact moving public opinion and that this is not a sustainable policy because of that, because people are at some core level moved and sympathize with the people who are the targets of that state violence.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and I also noticed this, like the sort of narrativizing aspect to it too, which is like, again, there’s always a little bit of this double-edged sword of respectability politics. My belief is even if you’re like kind of a scoundrel, you shouldn’t have like cops smash your head into the ground because you’re, while you’re doing away, even if your kids aren’t three U.S. Marines, you shouldn’t. But like, that’s my own personal commitments as a human being.
But from a narrative standpoint, like it really does matter. Like we’ve had the Marine son of this man on to be like, “I serve my country and my brother serves my country and my father’s a good man and he has no criminal record.” All these aspects of that kind of narrativizing that we’re talking about here are really present here. And again, strike me as really important to what we’re seeing happen in public opinion formation.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, and so. let me just to provide, you know, to type both sides of kind of my research around like both the sort of the sympathize, the stuff that produces sympathy and the stuff that produces a taste for order. You know, I think one other way to understand this moment is that the kind of disorder that happened or perception of disorder around the border under Biden was another echo of the 1960s, where in the moment where it’s like, oh no, these violent protests are happening. Like we want, you know, the taste for tough on crime, law and order spiked.
And I think what’s often hard for, I mean, at least in terms of some of my own conversations, what’s hard for people to appreciate is that there are people who are sympathetic to rights and they want order.
Chris Hayes: Yes. This is the mass middle of American opinion.
Omar Wasow: That’s right, that’s right. And so, you could think of like, you know, I mean, obviously Eric Adams is kind of a disaster of a mayor, but you can think of him as an embodiment, at least in his campaign, of somebody who says, “I don’t want black people to be mistreated and I want order,” right? And that that’s a very appealing kind of message to a broad swath of the middle. And now to come back to what’s happening in these images is the disorder is now state backed disorder, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Omar Wasow: It’s the state is the one that’s extreme. The state is the one that’s the bully and the bad guy.
Chris Hayes: Well, and also there’s a really interesting question here. The really interesting narrative problem for the administration, which is no one ever gets much credit for solved problems because you can’t see them. So in this sense, like it is the case and this started way before Trump. So it really was, it was a combination of Biden and policies undertaken in Mexico, which we should be very clear on, we’re a huge part on this and actually are sort of the key fulcrum and lever of policy about what’s happening at the border is really the actions of the Mexican government.
All of that combined, it started before Trump. It has continued under Trump. Like there’s not 2,000 people presenting themselves a day at the border anymore. But the absence of that actually turns out to be a difficult thing to narrativize. So like, it’s sort of interesting because you see this, I see this with sometimes with liberal, you know, I’m calling this a policy success in quotation marks because fundamentally I believe in people’s right to asylum and I like, don’t think it’s a policy success that people aren’t presenting to the border. Put that aside for a second.
You know, you see this with, for instance, declines in crime. I mean, it’s right now you’ve got this crazy situation in which crime is declining by, as far as we can tell in our statistics kind of suck, historic amounts to possibly historic lows around the country, including in jurisdictions like Philadelphia where Larry Krasner is the DA. And you know, when crime went up, it was like, you’ve got this soft-hearted lib DA, that’s why crime is up. It’s happening in Baltimore, which has been such a source of, you know, had an extremely high homicide rate, something we’ve covered extensively under Mayor Brandon Scott there. I think we’re actually going to have him on the program to talk about it.
But that ends up being difficult to, like the sort of the absence of something, right? Is actually sort of difficult to narrativize. And it becomes kind of an issue, I think, for people that are on the governing side of this as opposed to protesting side of it, particularly in this context of like, if a liberal mayor gets crime down, you know, what do you show?
And Scott actually is doing some interesting things in Baltimore to narrativize, you know, and Brandon Johnson in Chicago too, that’s another story. But anyway, it’s an interesting thing because I think right now that idea of like, where is the order and where’s the disorder, ICE are the agents of disorder, which is just plain as day.
I mean, it’s literally people going about their lives. Like it’s literally a situation in which there’s total order. It’s just an ordinary scene in America and it is thrown into chaos by the presence of ICE.
Omar Wasow: That’s right, right. It’s a harm caused by the state, not a harm that the state is protecting people from. And so, you know, part of the challenge for movements now, and, you know, just to come back to the No Kings thing is like, there’s one other puzzle, which is, do you focus on the most dramatic images, the most dramatic kinds of material like the ICE raids, or do you focus on the kind of big tent kind of challenge, you know, we want to have a democracy, that, you know, everybody, you know, from Liz Cheney to, I think, as you put it–
Chris Hayes: Chomsky.
Omar Wasow: Cheney to Chomsky.
Chris Hayes: Cheney to Chomsky coalition.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, right. And this is one other thing we see as a tension in the 1960s is there, you know, it’s like, what are you going to focus on is not obvious. There’s an enormous uncertainty and it’s not clear what’s going to move the public. And you also are trying to hold a coalition together and you’re trying to raise money. And all of that is at play. And so, you know, the movements now have this very morally compelling claim of, here’s the state out of control, but that’s a much narrower kind of movement than say Medicaid or No Kings or, and so that’s another kind of movement challenge that is going to be ongoing.
Chris Hayes: Maybe the last sort of, in the last few minutes we have here, I wonder if you have insights or thoughts about the change in the media landscape, right? Because one of the things about your research is how, this is all mediated in a literal sense, right? There’s only a few thousand people who are at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, right? Millions of people see it because the cameras are there and they beam it out, right? And you have different media regimes at different times. You’re talking about, you know, how to survive a plague and act up. It’s like, what will be on the front page of the New York Times? And like today, that doesn’t matter one way or another really.
Do you think about like, you know, as this sort of balkanization of media and the sort of algorithmic feed and like the videos, I mean, I do think that like in some ways, what you call the business user-generated content, right? The bystander videos of ICE are like a kind of interesting form and content moment in the new media where it’s like, the person has a smartphone so they see it and then they upload it. And that then becomes a story in vertical video. Like there’s a kind of hand in glove effect to it. But I’m curious if you think about how the media changing, changes the tactics or how the causal mechanisms work.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, so I mean, it’s, I can only speculate, but I mean, we do have some more recent evidence, right? So, I mean, 2020 is not that long ago and it wasn’t, you know, CBS documenting an act of state violence. It was again, this 17-year-old teenager with her smartphone, Darnella Frazier. And that punched through in our culture and, you know, and became a kind of a national, international point of conversation and mobilization.
So there definitely are echoes of the past in the present. One other echo of the past in the present for me is, people are often very concerned about, I mean, understandably about how fractured our media is now. And I think it’s just important to remind people in the present, and again, this comes through in “The Race Beat,” the book we both referenced now. There’s a pro-segregation media. –
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.
Omar Wasow: In the 1960s.
Chris Hayes: Yes, a large one, yes.
Omar Wasow: Yeah, and the non-Southern press is largely indifferent to the concerns of Black Americans. And so, there’s like a Black press that’s sort of pro-civil rights. There’s a pro-segregation press, and there’s a kind of indifferent national press. And part of what the civil rights movement does is to kind of draw that indifferent national media into the South and to kind of cover that issue in a way that’s more sympathetic.
And so, I think that, yes, our media is more kaleidoscopic now, and it’s much harder to kind of like just have some story kind of make the evening news and reach a national audience, but we do see evidence that it still happens, and it’s not a new thing to have media fragmentation.
Chris Hayes: It’s a really, really good point.
Omar Wasow is an assistant professor of political science at UC Berkeley. His work is really fascinating. I highly recommend you check it out. Maybe we’ll post some links when we put this up on social media.
Omar, that was so enlightening. Thank you.
Omar Wasow: Thank you for having me. A real pleasure and an honor.
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