AGAINST CIVILITY

A political scientist calls for disruptive protests to combat racism.

The director of the African-American Studies Program at the University of Detroit, Mercy, Zamalin shows how, throughout U.S. history, calls for civility have been “a tool for silencing dissent, repressing political participation, enforcing economic inequality, and justifying violence upon people of color.” Most recently, he points out, civility has been invoked as a way to combat the divisiveness incited by the Trump administration, but Zamalin asserts that civility in everyday life is different from civility in the political “arena of power and struggle.” He advocates disruptive direct action—what he calls “civic radicalism”—that has as its goal “liberation for all, regardless of who disagrees.” Offering a vivid, though generally familiar, history of racism in the U.S., the author contrasts those who promoted civility with those who urged public protests: Booker T. Washington, for example, against Frederick Douglass. Douglass, Zamalin writes, “saw misuse of power, division, contestation, deceit, and hypocrisy everywhere he looked. But Washington saw the unachieved promise of racial reconciliation, forgiveness, generosity, and compromise” and therefore urged Blacks to keep their place—advice that racists welcomed. Racial reconciliation, Zamalin cautions, “is something of which we must be wary. This is because it can sidestep collective responsibility and instead become about confessing individual guilt, which is no recipe for changing history. Guilt is a depressive emotion that makes one withdraw rather than take action.” Martin Luther King Jr. saw as his greatest adversary not the Ku Klux Klan “but the white moderate basking in civility, the rules of which dictated compromise and mutual respect.” Zamalin is heartened by recent street protests over racism, inequality, and police brutality, noting that media coverage focusing on the protesters’ violence recalls “the civil versus uncivil distinctions elites have always used to interpret popular anti-racist uprisings throughout history.”

An impassioned argument for public acts of resistance.