With the new school year starting, universities across the country anticipate a new wave of protests around the war in Gaza, now in its 10th month. To offer broad perspective, Zócalo brought a panel of scholars and practitioners to the ASU California Center Broadway last night to discuss the history, legality, and art of American protest.

The Zócalo event—which asked “When Does Protest Make a Difference?”—took the form of two back-to-back panels, both moderated by KQED correspondent and “The California Report” co-host Saul Gonzalez.

The first panel was made up of academics: urban journalism professor Danielle K. Brown, former director of the ACLU LGBT Project Matt Coles, and First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh. They discussed what makes an effective protest movement, the media’s role in legitimizing protest in the eyes of the public, and what forms of protest the First Amendment allows.

Coles, known for his work in the LGBT rights movement—notably, authoring San Francisco’s first sexual orientation nondiscrimination law—shared his thoughts on what it takes for protesters to make real change.

First, he said, think about what you want to achieve: Are you trying to energize your constituency? To persuade people generally of something? To change policy?

Reflecting on the anti-war movement of the ’60s and ’70s, ACT UP’s AIDS demonstrations of the ’80s and ’90s, and LGBT protests more broadly, Coles, now a constitutional law professor, pointed to successful strategies. Particularly at the start of a protest, he said, it’s important to catch public attention with an action “that feels arresting, whether that’s norm-defying or convention-defying.”

To make change you also need “concrete articulated goals” that allow “you to make change over time,” Coles said.

One more key thing? Organization “to keep a movement sustained.”

Sometimes protests are “simply there to signal their capacity to other people,” added Brown, the journalism professor. The goal could be getting a politician to recognize that an overlooked issue matters to their constituency. Or it could be to impact “the hearts and minds of other people” more broadly, she said.

Brown’s research focuses on media representations of protests and social movements—particularly, Black Lives Matter. “Most people don’t go to protests, most people learn about protests through the media,” she said. That’s why the way media coverage approaches protests is important, she argued. What biases does the coverage reflect? Does it present protesters as a legitimate part of the electorate? Does it portray them as having an agenda with concrete goals and demands?

Volokh, the legal scholar, spoke about the limits of First Amendment protection. “Movements may be successful or not,” he said, “but they all have to comply with the law or else face both the risk of criminal punishment [and] the risk of civil liability.”

A great deal of protest is constitutionally protected, he said, but some conduct is not. Decades of litigation established that officials cannot restrict protests based on the ideas they express. But authorities can crack down for other reasons: noise level (say, if people are protesting at night), or picketing in a residential area. Protesters who block highways illegally can be jailed or fined.

“Before you figure out what you’re going to do, you need to figure out what the lines are and what the risks are,” Coles affirmed.

The evening’s second panel featured activists and a law enforcement official: National Day Labor Organizing Network co-executive director Pablo Alvarado, Los Angeles Police Department former assistant chief Sandy Jo MacArthur, and immigrant rights and labor justice activist Victor Narro. They mused on responses to protests, what a “well-policed” protest might look like, and joy in protests.

Narro, who has engaged in activism for decades, said that witnessing police repression as a kid growing up in New York City was a formative experience. His friends and neighbors were unjustly targeted, he said, not just because of law enforcement attitudes but “because [the NYPD was given] the green light from the mayor.” It’s important to recognize how officials’ “perception and viewpoints” translate into law enforcement conduct, he said. “We have to hold them accountable as well.”

MacArthur, who is retired from LAPD, now works at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office teaching law enforcement agencies de-escalation skills. There are things police can and should do to prevent needless violence, she said. “Our fundamental duty is to be out there to protect and to allow those people to have the right to assemble,” she said. Through training, experience, and working with organizers, officers can understand “at what point to engage.” If it’s too late, she said, “there’s too much going on.” If it’s too early, “then we create the storm.” Offering regular training to help officers know what to expect on protest days and placing seasoned supervisors in the field are tools that can de-escalate future situations, she said.

Alvarado, who came to the United States from El Salvador in 1990, near the end of that nation’s 12-year civil war, organizes low-wage workers. He spoke about how protests can be joyful spaces, sharing an example from 2010, when his organization was pushing against an anti-immigration law in Arizona. While they were protesting a local business that had hired off-duty sheriff deputies to patrol neighborhoods and arrest workers, armed counter-protesters showed up—”people with swastikas and really ugly messages against immigrants”—supported by then-sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Rather than escalate the situation, Alvarado’s group decided to infuse their protest with arts and culture. Bringing in mariachi bands, eloteros (people who sell corn on the street), and brass bands helped to dial down the hostility, he said, “not only on our side but on the other side.”

Martin Luther King taught us how to fight with “peaceful tension,” he added.

Both conversations concluded with audience Q&A. One of the audience members asked panelists about “keyboard warriors.” Are digital protesters effective?

“There’s nothing more powerful than physically holding up that protest sign, that picket sign, or that banner,” Narro said. But digital media can feed into how we physically come together. “You can never go wrong when you get activists together in solidarity to make their message heard.”

The post What’s the DNA of an Effective Protest? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Earlier this year, activists opposing the war in Gaza marched onto the Golden Gate Bridge and Interstate 880 in Oakland. They blocked traffic for hours, some chaining themselves to vehicles or cement-filled drums. Twenty-six were arrested and charged.

Similar scenes played out across the country—perhaps most controversially on college campuses, where students found themselves banned, suspended, and expelled—in this latest chapter of the global “age of mass protests.” Participants in historic uprisings from Hong Kong to Paris to Sidi Bouzid have braved tear gas, rubber or real bullets, imprisonment, and even set themselves on fire while standing up for their beliefs.

Headline-making demonstrations raise questions about what protesting requires of us: Are huge risks necessary to engender social change? Do I personally need to step in front of moving cars, spend a night in jail, or launch a hunger strike to advance the causes that matter to me? Does my social media post, bumper sticker, lawn sign, signature on a petition, or attendance at a peaceful rally still make a difference?

According to social science, strenuous and risky protest does tend to make a bigger impact than protest involving lower effort and risk. But studies also show that slacker activists—slacktivists, who stick to low-cost, mostly online activism—play key roles in successful movements.

Costly protest, like when demonstrators suffer violent repression, sends a strong signal to the media, voters, and power holders that activists mean business. If someone is willing to spend hours of their time, endure discomfort, and even put their life on the line for a cause, their grievances come across as more genuine than those of someone who spends a few seconds typing “#MeToo” or “#BlackLivesMatter.” (One caveat is that violence initiated by protesters, albeit costly, almost always backfires—nonviolent campaigns across the 20th century were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts.)

Some protesters bear significant costs simply by virtue of their social identities. Demonstrators from minority groups frequently endure harsher repression than their white counterparts; women face backlash for daring to speak out against the patriarchy; and low-wage hourly workers pay a higher economic price relative to their income (in foregone wages, transportation expenses, etc.) to attend a protest than salaried professionals with flexible schedules. Though unfair, these disproportionate costs also empower protesters by amplifying their messages. Research by political scientist LaGina Gause reveals an “advantage of disadvantage” whereby lawmakers are more likely to support the preferences of low-income and minority protesters than the preferences of more privileged protesters. Gause highlights how protests concentrated in minority and low-income communities of L.A. after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King exerted electoral pressure on Southern California Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis. Lewis, whose Inland Empire district sat just east of L.A., switched his normal voting behavior to endorse the Dire Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act of 1992, a Democrat-sponsored bill to fund relief for businesses destroyed during the protests.

While costly protest packs a punch, scholars also emphasize that activism is not all or nothing. “Slacktivists” strengthen movements in two critical ways.

First, they provide numbers. Hardcore veteran activists (the type who block traffic or take a rubber bullet) are exceptional. Usually, they cannot fill the streets on their own, so they must recruit greener activists into their ranks. One study of the Arab Spring showed that turnout by “peripheral” protesters with few previous activist connections contributed more to rising protest rates than turnout by “central” protesters with numerous Twitter followers. Movements, like viruses, need “fresh blood” to spread.

Second, including casual activists in a protest or movement helps to generate common knowledge about shifting social norms. If even your politically apathetic cousin starts posting “#BlackLivesMatter,” it becomes more socially acceptable for others in their network to endorse that cause—and eventually awkward not to. While support for Black Lives Matter in the general population has dipped from its high of 67% in 2020, a majority of Americans continue to support it. Ideas that were once fringe, like gay marriage and universal healthcare, became mainstream in part through ordinary internet users normalizing them, often from the comfort and safety of their couches.

A common concern is that slacktivism breeds complacency: If people are content to blast words of solidarity with their phones, they may never feel compelled to take up more demanding modes of activism that movements also need to meet their goals. “Someone still has to go to prison,” argued techno-critic Evgeny Morozov in The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.

Fortunately, evidence from multiple countries indicates that dipping your toes in online activism makes you no less likely to perform costlier gestures such as demonstrating, attending political forums, or donating to charity. Slacktivists are not destined to remain slacktivists. Online activism can open a gateway to protesting in real life and to deepening one’s investment in a cause.

If slacktivists are ultimately harmless, and even beneficial, for social movements, then why do they get such a bad rap? For instance, some fans of Taylor Swift and other celebrities chose to unfollow their idols on social media for not speaking out forcefully enough about bloodshed in Gaza. Journalists branded these ex-Swifties as slacktivists indulging in empty virtue signaling rather than undertaking more meaningful action. Why did these former fans provoke such ridicule if they were not really hurting anyone?

The answer has to do with the fact that we are hardwired to judge others by the costs they inflict, or are unwilling to inflict, on themselves. This explains our instinctive admiration for courageous, selfless activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and our disdain for timid, “fake” activists who send nearly costless signals of their political commitments by, say, sporting an awareness ribbon or unfollowing insufficiently “woke” celebrities. Higher risks earn greater rewards.

However, as I elaborate in my new book, we would be wise to refrain from wagging our fingers at slacktivists. For one thing, most of us behave like slacktivists at one point or another. Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai took flak for tweeting “#BringBackOurGirls” after armed extremists kidnapped more than 250 Nigerian schoolgirls in 2014, but it is difficult to seriously question their activist bona fides. As First Lady, Obama spent countless hours on the Let Girls Learn initiative, and Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting girls’ education in Taliban-occupied Pakistan, for which she was shot by a would-be assassin.

More importantly, shaming slacktivists can discourage them from attempting any kind of activism at all. The savvy organizer strives to make activism more—not less—accessible by sharing their wisdom with newcomers. Building a truly inclusive mass movement calls for patience and humility on the part of status-conscious movement leaders. This is its own form of sacrifice for a cause: the sacrifice of one’s ego. Community-engaged scholar Biko Mandela Gray implored fellow activists, “Let us check our egos at the door of political engagement and resistance, and remember that our wellbeing is always connected to the wellbeing of the whole.”

Some slacktivists will blossom into the next generation of devoted changemakers, whereas others will continue dabbling. And that’s OK. Both types of people have roles to play in the collective pursuit of justice.

The post Does ‘Slacktivism’ Deserve Its Bad Rap? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” Audre Lorde wrote in A Burst of Light, 1988.

After 20 years of working and volunteering in a mixture of direct anti-poverty services, Jewish community organizations, and the arts, I find there is almost no situation that writer, poet, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde hadn’t already anticipated, considered, and conquered. At a moment of local, national, and international crises, when I consider the role I must play—and the space the organization I lead, Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center, should occupy—I find reason and answer in Lorde’s indelible wisdom.

Lorde—who was Black and queer—lived the daily reality that her very being had been politicized, with or without her art and activism. This is the experience of many non-dominant artists and culturally specific institutions today: Your very existence is, apparently, political. You don’t have the luxury of deciding whether you are or are not an activist. You will be perceived as such, and as engaging in culture wars, regardless of your intention or action.

That assumption, and others that underlie it, are worth pushing back against. Especially right now.

I am not an artist, but as the head of a Jewish-identifying cultural institution, I have encountered such assumptions in small, largely innocuous, ways. I have been assumed to have a political agenda vis à vis Israel. I have encountered an assumption of progressive politics and feminism in my work. I have been assumed to work in the nonprofit sector to enjoy more time at home with my young children (ha!). And I have seen far more problematic instances of assumption and even aggression impact my colleagues of color, different cultural backgrounds, or minority sexual orientation.

It is infuriating to be reduced to one aspect of myself, without regard to the merit of my whole person, or the effect of my demonstrable efforts. It makes me appreciate those moments when I do have the freedom to decide to engage in activism. Or not. What extraordinary luck of birth and circumstance to have the freedom to make art without political retribution. It seems to me that the least those of us with that privilege can do is attempt to extend that freedom to others. This includes the freedom to choose not to be an activist, or to choose what issues to address and when and how.

Many artists I have had the privilege to know stress that their work is in dialogue not just with external influences and influencers, but with the audience itself. For them, the art is completed in the reaction and response of its consumer. Activism is, by definition, intended to persuade. To force artists to engage with audiences as activists is to narrowly define what creative interaction can entail.

I know this because I am one such audience member. On bad days at the office—when the office was a homeless shelter, a street clinic, or a courtroom during my time as a civil rights lawyer—the artists who brought me comfort, joy, distraction, and ultimately resilience were those who took my mind off my work. Who reminded me of my humanity. I would sit as the sun set on the Temple of Dendur. I would rest beside Whistler’s “Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink.” I would take a break from trial at the Irvine courthouse and have lunch in the Noguchi Garden. In each of these moments, the art felt just for me, no matter how many hundreds of other people were walking by. These scenes touched something in me. Not because of their subjects, much less the political context in which they were created, but because of the works’ aesthetics and mine.

Activism is inherently time-bound. To force artists to speak only of the here and now is surely to deprive them of their chance at timelessness. Their chance at connection to the as-yet unborn, whose needs we can hardly imagine, but might yet be healed centuries from now, by the art of today.

I think of Peter Krasnow, the Ukrainian refugee whose oil paintings we showcased in a collection spotlight at the Skirball this past spring. In response to the events of World War II and the Holocaust, he transformed his artistic style completely, moving to the abstract and a color palette of highlighter greens and bubble gum pinks. He explained in his autobiography that this was his personal therapeutic approach to the depression he experienced as war raged and his family and homeland were annihilated. Seventy years later, his work not only feels current, but his clutching for beauty and light in a period of overwhelming darkness is resilient and instructive. I saw visitors to this show smile, cry, wonder aloud, point, decipher, get close, take a step back, and move forward.

Would we say to the Peter Krasnow of today, “No, your emotional expression, your desperate attempt to heal yourself, this is insufficient”? I hope not.

The post Let Artists Choose Activism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What happened to Stockton’s first Asian enclaves?

In the 20th century, downtown Stockton established itself as a cultural and commercial hub for Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino communities in California’s San Joaquin Valley. But, over decades, misguided and racially biased projects deliberately destroyed this ethnically diverse and inclusive urban core.

Only recently have the city and state started to look into remedying the harm they did to the people of color who lived and worked in that five-by-five block of Stockton and made it home. This work, part of a larger national racial reckoning, includes exploring paths toward restorative justice in Stockton, such as a recent project by Caltrans, the state transportation agency behind the Crosstown Freeway, or State Route 4, which tore through the heart of downtown Stockton’s Chinatown, Japantown, and Little Manila neighborhoods in the 1960s and ’70s.

Asian immigrants first arrived in Stockton when it was a jumping-off point for the Gold Rush. Later, as the area established itself as a shipping and food processing hub for the Central Valley’s growing agricultural mega-economy, they came as farmworkers and low-wage laborers, along with their families. The work fueling the “nation’s breadbasket” was brutal and backbreaking, the type of employment that many whites refused to do. Alongside Latinos, Asians became a significant portion of this labor force by the early 1900s, building levees, farming the land, harvesting crops, and canning produce.

As the Asian population in Stockton grew, residents put down more permanent roots. Chinatown came first, in the 19th century, with several hundred residents building restaurants, hardware stores, grocery stores, and gambling houses; Japantown followed, boasting 150 businesses at its peak in the 1930s; and Little Manila came last, establishing a distinctive community all its own by the early 20th century with dance halls, barbershops, and grocery stores.

Each enclave was vibrant and distinct, but intersected with the others as well, creating a five-by-five block neighborhood flush with life, and filled with ethnic organizations, religious institutions, and communal gathering spaces. These communities forged a strong sense of home and belonging in Stockton. However, racial segregation and government policies created substandard living conditions. Discriminatory redlining laws prevented Asians from buying property in surrounding white neighborhoods, which meant they had to crowd into a tiny area. With few economic opportunities available to them, Stockton’s Asian population had to work low-wage jobs, and could often only afford to live in crowded low-cost boarding houses or poorly maintained hotels.

Despite the racial disparities they faced, community members experienced the enclaves as a vital home. Reflecting on Little Manila in the 1950s, one Filipina resident told us: “I never was fearful ever, of going down around the El Dorado Street area and its vicinity, because that, to me, was like the only place where I saw so many Filipinos, and it was like going home, you know, for a lot of Filipinos because that’s where they met long lost friends.”

But by the mid-20th century, people who did not live downtown considered the Asian enclaves to be “undesirable slums” that were contributing to what seemed to be a declining central business district. Meanwhile, white households and businesses left Stockton for the suburbs. Local officials could have invested in preserving and strengthening existing neighborhoods to prevent people from moving away. But it was easier and more convenient to scapegoat their Asian neighbors downtown, already weakened by decades of discrimination.

In 1956, under the banner of progress, the city of Stockton formed the West End Redevelopment Project. With a stated intention to make “a community of which its citizens can be proud, rather than apologetic,” it set out to “revitalize” downtown by clearing out the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino enclaves, and replacing them with mainstream retailers.

It was around this time, too, that the Division of Highways, the state transportation agency, now known as Caltrans, was selecting a route for the proposed Crosstown Freeway—part of an unprecedented infrastructure development project to modernize the Golden State’s roadways.

A sign of Chinatown in downtown Stockton. Courtesy of Wayne Hsieh/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

The Crosstown Freeway would link Interstate 5 and Route 99, facilitating the movement of trucks between the two highways, and would connect the suburbs to downtown. The Division of Highways considered a number of options for the freeway’s placement, including one route through white neighborhoods north of downtown Stockton. But in the end, as in so many places around the state and country, the agency chose the path through communities of color, dooming the three Asian enclaves.

According to the Division of Highways’ 1958 Master Plan Study, the agency picked the route through the ethnic enclaves to help expedite the West End Redevelopment Project’s plans to raze Stockton’s “slums” in favor of mainstream commercial development. The choice was also politically expedient; the agency knew Asian American residents lacked the knowledge, expertise, and political power to fight city hall, state agencies, and federal funders to stop the “progress” that would disproportionately impact their communities.

The one-two punch of redevelopment and the building of the Crosstown Freeway destroyed hundreds of homes, and displaced over a thousand people living in the Asian enclaves. Such losses were not just physical. Losing Little Manila, Chinatown, and Japantown meant an end for community—shuttering gathering places such as stores, cultural centers, and social clubs that had drawn people together from throughout the region.

Residents of Stockton’s Asian enclaves had no choice but to disperse, throughout San Joaquin County and beyond. Some fought to rebuild what they had lost downtown, but it was an uphill battle. Japanese Americans raised money to relocate the Buddhist Church of Stockton, for instance, but moving it away from its original central downtown location severed its historical and spiritual ties to Japantown. The Chinese community built the Lee Center in 1970 on Washington and El Dorado Streets, hoping to create a symbol of Chinese presence in Stockton and to replace low-income housing and commercial space that had been destroyed by the freeway. But financial difficulties forced it to close after only a few years of operation. The Filipino community had somewhat more success, building the Filipino Center in 1972 to restore lost housing and commercial space, and banded together to help those most impacted by the freeway, like the manongs, elderly male farm laborers who’d made Little Manila their home.

Today, Asian organizations in Stockton such as Little Manila Rising and the Chinese Benevolent Association still fight to tell their history, and rebuild the essence of what was lost. Amid recent demands for racial justice throughout the nation, government agencies—including Caltrans—are also talking about remedying past harms. Caltrans has proposed a Stockton Downtown Transformation Project to revitalize Asian enclaves in Stockton that the Crosstown Freeway upended. In a big step, the agency is acknowledging its role in bisecting communities north and south of the freeway.

In the past, officials excluded the Asian community from having a meaningful voice and role in government plans. This time around, Caltrans promises to “collaborate with the downtown communities such as… Little Manila Rising” to provide “improvements that will help restore the once vibrant cultural identity and community.”

It’s too early to know if such rhetoric will prove to be tokenism or materialize as real restorative justice. Seeking redress will take grassroots efforts by community groups and businesses—and the cooperation of the same state agencies that tore through these neighborhoods in the first place.

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The story seems impossible to believe: A low-budget traveling slideshow kept oil drills out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But Indigenous leaders from the Arctic, environmental advocates on Capitol Hill, and grassroots activists across the United States all insist it’s true.

If you haven’t heard of The Last Great Wilderness, you’re not alone. During its many years on the road, the multimedia slideshow was not covered by the national media. Its photographs never became iconic. The people behind it remain unsung. And yet this humble work of activism, shared in such unassuming venues as college lecture halls, public libraries, and church basements, exerted an enormous impact on one of the biggest environmental fights in North American history. Its surprising success reminds us of the power of grassroots action to enact real change.

The Last Great Wilderness was born in response to the Ronald Reagan administration’s scheme to drill in the Arctic Refuge. Tucked away in the northeastern corner of Alaska, much of the refuge was protected as permanent wilderness in 1980, but its coastal plain was left in legislative limbo. Considered sacred by the Gwich’in Nation and called the “biological heart” of the refuge by scientists, the coastal plain provided critical, life-sustaining habitat for caribou, polar bears, and a stunning array of migratory birds. The oil industry, the state of Alaska, and powerful politicians, however, argued that the land should instead be slated for fossil fuel extraction. Congress was left to decide its fate: grant the coastal plain wilderness status or allow oil development there.

Caribou Migration I, Coleen River valley, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska, 2002. Photograph by Subhankar Banerjee

As the debate raged, an aspiring photographer and former jazz drummer by the name of Lenny Kohm traveled in 1987 from California to Alaska, hoping to document the controversy for Audubon magazine. When Kohm arrived in the Arctic, he found himself awestruck by the spectacular wildlife he saw in the refuge and angered by the environmental devastation he witnessed in the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay. But it was the time he spent in two Gwich’in communities—Arctic Village, Alaska, and across the border, in Old Crow, Yukon—that completely changed his life. From the Gwich’in, Kohm learned that the media coverage of the refuge debate had left out a crucial part of the story. The framing was always a question of wilderness versus oil: Should the refuge’s vast coastal plain be protected as wild nature or handed over to the fossil fuel industry? This ignored what was at stake for the Gwich’in—their food security and cultural survival.

Since time immemorial, the Gwich’in people have stewarded Arctic lands and formed relations of responsibility with the caribou. Their stories, their spirituality, and their way of being in the world had always been tied to the Porcupine caribou herd. This herd, which currently numbers over 200,000 animals, journeys every year from its wintering grounds in northwestern Canada and northeastern Alaska, crossing steep mountains and icy rivers until the caribou reach the Arctic coastal plain, where they have their young. But the place where the caribou go to replenish their population was the exact place that the Reagan administration sought to turn into an oil field. This act, the Gwich’in explained to Kohm, would devastate the herd and lead to cultural genocide.

Kohm, who had never been involved in political organizing before, returned home to California and threw himself into activism, forming a small grassroots group called the Sonoma Coalition for the Arctic Refuge. The following year, he returned to Alaska. He did not come as a salvage ethnographer, seeking to create a visual record of a culture he believed was doomed to extinction. Instead, he sought to work with Gwich’in communities dotted across Alaska, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories to bring their voices to the forefront of the refuge struggle.

The Last Great Wilderness paired almost 250 slides taken by Kohm and 15 other photographers with a soundtrack and narration, and employed what was then considered cutting-edge technology—a fade-dissolve unit—so that the slide from one projector would fade out as the slide from the next projector would fade in. For the next two decades, from 1988 to 2008, Kohm and Gwich’in representatives took their show on tour, giving as many as 200 presentations a year. Their aim was not only to educate but also to empower—to turn spectators into activists.

Every event began the same way: Kohm would turn out the lights, and as the room darkened and as the projectors began to cast images on the screen, spectators could imagine themselves embarking on a journey to a distant land. But by the end of the show, many audience members would recognize how this remote place was entangled with their own lives. They would feel a sense of obligation to the photographed subjects—and to the Gwich’in representative standing before them. They would want to join this campaign to ensure the protection of Arctic ecosystems.

The title slide from The Last Great Wilderness, with caribou image likely photographed by Lenny Kohm. Courtesy of author.

Unlike the iconic “Crying Indian” commercial and the repeated media emphasis on recycling, individual action, and green consumerism as the answer to environmental problems, The Last Great Wilderness struck a chord with audiences because it addressed them not as consumers but as citizens—and sought to enlist them in this collective project to defend the Arctic Refuge. Running contrary to its name, The Last Great Wilderness also changed conventional perceptions of wilderness. Here the Arctic was presented not as some remote, faraway place, disconnected from human society, but as land stewarded for millennia by Indigenous peoples—and still vital to their culture, spirituality, and food security. This helped audience members grasp the urgent human rights issues at stake.

The Last Great Wilderness subscribed to the “trickle-up theory of politics,” where refuge activists believed that by galvanizing citizen voices and local media coverage, their political will would “trickle up” to national media outlets and policymakers in D.C. And while there were many close calls and tense moments when it seemed that Arctic drilling proponents would prevail during the two decades that the show toured, this approach staved off development time and again, often by convincing fence-sitting politicians to vote against oil drilling. Beyond the Beltway and outside the national media spotlight, The Last Great Wilderness cultivated networks of participation and action that lasted long after the show ended. Though the slideshow alone did not save the Arctic Refuge, without the people-first political movement it built, the coastal plain’s fate would have been sealed.

In our image-saturated, social media-dominated culture, the story of an analog slideshow no doubt seems quaint, a throwback to a very different era. Yet The Last Great Wilderness was remarkably prescient in its activism, which was built upon sincere listening and learning, and sharing power and authority with Indigenous nations. Its legacy carries on through to the present, as the Gwich’in, in the face of new threats from the oil industry, continue to share their story with the public to inspire more permanent protection for the Arctic Refuge.

Take what happened in 2017, when the election of Donald Trump, together with the ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party, dealt a blow to refuge defenders, with the approval of Arctic Refuge drilling as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Nevertheless, the first-ever oil and gas lease sale of the refuge—held on January 6, 2021, at the same time that insurrectionists were storming the Capitol—turned out to be a bust. The lackluster sale resulted, in large part, from banking and corporate campaigns led by the Gwich’in alongside Iñupiat and environmental allies who made many industry leaders decide that drilling there would be a bad investment.

The Last Great Wilderness is a reminder of how slow, patient coalition work can turn the tide by activating and informing voters and helping them realize their voices really do matter. By bringing non-iconic images and Indigenous testimony to colleges, churches, and other grassroots venues across the country, a rambling activist, Gwich’in spokespeople, and local organizers took on the power of special interests and won. In the process, they established a model for how to transform a traditional wilderness battle into something else entirely: a struggle for Indigenous rights and environmental justice.

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The feminist uprising in Iran—sparked by the beating, arrest, and death in police custody of Mahsa (also known by Jîna) Amini, a young Kurdish Iranian woman accused of “improper hijab”—is generating previously unimagined ideas, images, and possibilities. The current movement, led by women and girls, has forced us all to rethink the glorified figure of the revolutionary as a militant, often militarized, and individual masculine subject. It also invites us to understand the complex history of women’s struggle in Iran—not as counterpoised to or lagging behind Western feminism, but rather on Iranian women’s own terms.

Indeed, this breathtaking moment builds on decades of feminist activism in Iran and underscores the significance of the women’s movement in the country in the decades following the revolution. The 1979 Iranian Revolution, sometimes referred to as the Islamic Revolution, was a broad-based movement against the corrupt dictatorship of the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whose U.S.- and U.K.-backed rule had benefited a small and powerful elite and violently squashed dissent. The Shah implemented reforms in health, fertility, and education, but they helped primarily middle- and upper-class women. And so, the revolution captured the imagination and participation of many women, including those who were excluded from the Shah’s economic and social reforms—including rural, working-class, poor, and traditionally religious women.

The revolution also created a vast social welfare state with programs and services that dramatically increased literacy rates and life expectancy for women and men and increased the percentage of women in universities. Iranian birth rates also dropped drastically, by more than 70%—the average woman in the 1970s under the Shah gave birth seven times, a number that by 1985 had dropped to 5.6, and by 2000 had fallen to two. As the freedom of women’s and girls’ bodies is so central to this current uprising, it is critical to acknowledge that the post-revolutionary society invested in conditions that improved many women’s life chances, freeing them from poverty, illiteracy, inadequate healthcare, and lack of education. Nonetheless, these improvements were exacted at a very high cost for women: a discriminatory legal structure that legitimizes patriarchal control over and violence against women and girls.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, buoyed in part by their improved health and education, women mobilized to end the legal discrimination that was increasingly at odds with their growing social presence in Iranian society. Generally, an end to compulsory hijab has not been the central or most pressing issue around which feminists have organized. Rather, they’ve been compelled by issues like citizenship status, which until only recently was conferred through the father, rights in marriage and divorce, and custody of children, all of which seemed potentially winnable.

In 2006, following a demonstration in Haft-e Tir Square in Tehran, women activists launched the One Million Signatures Campaign, a local and transnational effort to end discriminatory laws against women, drawing on the unfulfilled promises of the revolution to grant women equality. The campaign sought to collect signatures from one million people in support of changing gender-based discrimination in Iran and demonstrating that these laws were not consistent with Islamic principles. The laws the campaign sought to challenge were mostly family laws pertaining to custody, marriage, inheritance, and divorce—in total 46 articles embedded in Iran’s Civil Code, 22 in the Penal Code, and one Constitutional article used to ban women from seeking the office of the president.

Activists went door to door to gather signatures, organized house meetings and public gatherings, and in general, built a movement based on collective participation and dialogue. In her book about the campaign, women’s rights activist and campaign co-founder Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani argued, “The power of the civil and democratic movement of the Iranian people must come not from blood, clenched fists, bulging veins, and zealous revenge-seeking, but rather from life-affirming endurance, persistence, and thoughtfulness.” Khorasani’s call for these last three traits challenges the ubiquitous figure of the charismatic and lone revolutionary male leader—for instance, Ayatollah Khomeini, who consolidated his power in and after the 1979 revolution and became, subsequently, Iran’s first Supreme Leader—offering instead a politics informed by feminist principles and organizational practices of collectivity, dialogue, and a deep embeddedness in the ordinary lives of people.

The campaign didn’t always succeed at being non-hierarchical—some campaigners received more attention and visibility than others, and class and ethnic divisions did emerge. Still, it was largely characterized by an emphasis on the importance and capacity of each participant, and an insistence on women’s rights as an integral component of Iran’s overall self-determination. Campaigners hoped to present the signatures to Parliament in the form of a bill, but ultimately they were unsuccessful at reaching the one million mark. Despite this shortcoming, the One Million Signatures Campaign and similar pragmatic efforts exerted sustained pressure on the state to address political demands for women’s rights. Moreover, they created organizational cultures based on deeply feminist visions of social change.

Khorasani and her fellow campaign activists also put forward an ethical, feminist, and everyday vision of Islam that stands in stark contrast to the state’s patriarchal interpretations of Islamic law. It is that vision that informs one of the many utterances of the present uprising: that compulsory hijab is un-Islamic, as is the state’s horrendous violence against women. As women in the current uprising defy compulsory hijab, they are not arguing against Islam, but against the conscription of their bodies into gender-differentiated regimes of power. They are making links to the bans on hijab in India and France, as well as to the bans on abortion in the United States. In this sense, they are challenging the binary between the “free” women of the West versus the “unfree” women of Iran, instead crafting transnational connections around the patriarchal and authoritarian attacks on women’s bodies.

This legacy of feminist activism is woven through the current uprising, which also might well be the unfolding of a distinctly new kind of feminist revolution. In the streets, schoolyards, universities, restaurants, shops, and homes of Iran, women and girls are demanding their freedom and autonomy and, in the process, creating relationships based on mutuality, solidarity, love, and care. Unlike their predecessors, however, they are not interested in negotiating within the parameters set by a patriarchal authoritarian state. In the multiple and extraordinary acts of celebration and defiance—removing and burning hijabs, dancing in the streets, eating in restaurants without hijabs, graffitiing walls, kissing in public, creating art, singing, cutting hair, taping sanitary napkins over surveillance cameras—women and girls are occupying space with their bodies and creating a new world of political symbols, ideas, practices, and visions.

This is their moment, no longer deferred to a future that never comes. Whatever the outcome of this exquisite movement, the women and girls at its heart are the new revolutionary figures on the world stage, showing us all a different path forward.

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I can very clearly remember in 1993 the first time I heard Robin S.’s “Show Me Love.” I felt moved.

It wasn’t just me. The infectious groove and Black gospel diva delivery filled dance havens across New York City (where I had become a studied and serious house head) and all over the country. It had us all doing our best house moves on the dance floor as we loudly sang along to the lyrics of the anthem, still considered, by many, to be the last great song of the golden age of the house and dance movement.

In the late ’80s, it seemed everyone was into this music. There was so much going on: inflation, a global AIDS pandemic, gender discrimination and racial strife, and government failure and corruption. The dance floor was a place to sweat it all out. Inflected with house music, it became a truly liberatory space that Black women and queer folks of color were the key architects of.

Now, as we’re faced with similar societal crises—rampant inflation, the COVID pandemic, racial, political, and social disunity—one of the biggest stars on the planet is bringing it back. Beyoncé’s first single, “Break My Soul,” off of her multi-part project, Renaissance, out tomorrow, heavily samples “Show Me Love,” using house and dance to speak directly and irreverently to the moment.

Beyoncé has long established herself in the tradition of what I term “Black female cool,” a historical line of Black women artists whose cultural production and social engagement have reflected both the Black woman’s unique interior self and external struggles. The singer is known for raising feminist themes and spotlighting challenges to Black life, such as police brutality and women’s inequality.

From her headlining Coachella performance, which included over 100 Black performers in the marching band military formation of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), to her homages to the South, Beyoncé draws on and salutes Black tradition. She speaks to and for Black women. She has also given queer culture its due when many artists failed to directly acknowledge its substantial popular imprint. Now, with Renaissance, she is purposefully reaching back to the unsung Black divas of dance, who, in tough times, were continuously signaling pathways to freedom in their verses.

Beyoncé is drawing not only on the sound, but also the aesthetics and ethos of liberation fostered by her dance forebearers. This legacy includes Loleatta Holloway, whose song “Love Sensation” became the foundation of vocal and musical sampling in early house; Jocelyn Brown, whose “Somebody Else’s Guy” was a blueprint for ’80s dance music formula; and gender-defying icon Sylvester, whose “Do You Wanna Funk?” was a lesson in transformative angelic funk. This says nothing of their many formidable contemporaries, such as Gwen Guthrie and Alicia Myers or the many seminal DJs of house, such as Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles who ascended from vibrant Black gay nightclubs. The starkly segregated homophobic music landscape kept the majority of these singers and DJs from true breakout success, despite the fact that they were laying the groundwork for the genre for little money or credit.

Then came ’90s pop, which got a firm stranglehold on dance. It had already killed disco and was now stalking its progeny, house. With it, the national airwaves brought the boil to an easy simmer, extracting more accessible club music from the unapologetic strongly queered and Black diva dominated genres of house and underground dance. As pop ascended, house lost its fleeting moment of commercial emergence—one of the reasons Robin S.’s song that broke through in ’93 was such a pleasant reminder of the truly liberatory space that house and dance of that era embodied.

Renaissance is taking from all these threads and transporting us all back to the spirit of house once again, while also reminding us that the production of dance music never stopped. It’s continued and multiplied in forms, such as bounce, a fusion of dance and southern Hip Hop with a strong queer base, developed out in New Orleans. “Break My Soul” has this legacy, too, with queer bounce artist Big Freedia’s song “Explode” sampled in the track. It’s all a reminder that house is still a refuge that can transport us mentally and physically away through boogie. As Beyoncé said of her new album: “my intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment. A place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, release, feel freedom.” She adds, “I hope you find joy in this music.”

Beyond labor and social discord, “Break My Soul,” is about liberty, the freedom of thought, spirit, and movement. It gives some sustenance to our souls, as it simultaneously illuminates the looming economic and political forces surrounding all of our bodies. As Beyoncé sings, “You won’t break my soul … I just fell in love, And I just quit my job, I’m gonna find new drive … I’m takin’ my new salvation … I’ma build my own foundation …”  This message of finding freedom outside the economic and political structures conjures the legacy of the house and dance movement.

Scores of people rethought their lives and the meaning of personal happiness during the COVID-19 lockdown. From spikes in break-ups and divorces to wild relocations to the Great Resignation (the high number of people who voluntarily resigned from their jobs during this pandemic), many were attempting to find or reconstruct bliss, even momentarily. This included big moves by women, people of color, and those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Inequity was made even more visible as the world concentrated the burden on their backs. Beyoncé speaks their language when she says that their soul, that spiritual core of who you are, is intact and will not be broken.

In these times, one answer to the question “where can freedom be found?” is “where we last left it”—on the dance floor. I am not talking a girls’ night out here. I’m referencing the holy state of being that pure music can illicit. Be it disco, house, bounce, or some other dance club genre. Dancing for the sake of dancing. It’s that “come as you are” crowd feeling that accompanied house and ’80s dance—eclectic club kids spanning all genders and sexual orientations from downtown mixed with those from uptown wearing baggy jeans and extra clean sneakers, and middle-aged white men in business suits from midtown—which may be just what the world needs right now.

The ‘Come As You Are’ Playlist:

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Since the 1970s, Japanese Americans have observed the Day of Remembrance on February 19, the anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 that authorized the forced removal and incarceration of all people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. Activists conceived DOR as a radical act to bolster the then-faltering movement for redress and reparations.

Today, it largely is embedded in mainstream Japanese American culture, but this year’s musical commemoration at the Getty Center in Los Angeles—“120,000 STORIES with Nobuko Miyamoto and Guests,” presented in collaboration with the Japanese American National Museum and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival—reconnected it to its radical origins and linked it to today’s racial and social justice activism.

Nobuko (as I call her) is an icon of Asian America who has melded art, culture, and politics in her life and work since the 1960s.

A professional dancer early on in her career, Nobuko was a rare Asian cast member of the original West Side Story film and performed on Broadway. But before all of that, she was one of the roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans the U.S. government incarcerated during World War II.

The “120,000 STORIES” are for all of those incarcerees, and the program begins with songs about their experiences at camp, as Nobuko and all of the other Japanese Americans I know, including my own family, learned to call it—just camp, not modified by internment or incarceration or concentration. Her first song is familiar to me: Nobuko going to the camp at the Santa Anita Racetrack, holding her obaachan (grandmother)’s hand on the way to the toilets with no privacy, wondering if they would be interned there all their lives.

Camp—camp plays, camp music, camp art, camp photography—has been our default genre for so long that it can be hard to imagine any other Japanese American genres. But breaking through the camp narrative has been part of Nobuko’s life’s work, and this is reflected in the expansive performances and stories shared on stage that night. This is why, alongside stories of her family moving to Boyle Heights after the war and of her brother-in-law biking from Pasadena to Santa Anita Racetrack searching for his Japanese American neighbors, she includes a narrative about joining her mother-in-law, Mamie Kirkland, who is Black, on a pilgrimage to her Mississippi hometown nearly a century after the family was forced to flee from a lynch mob.

Nobuko also performed songs by the late Chris Iijima, who she traveled the country in the 1970s with making Asian American folk and protest music. Collaborating with musician Charlie Chin, they eventually recorded Grain of Sand, considered the first album made by artists who called themselves Asian American, embracing the pan-ethnic term coined by activists in the late 1960s.

And Nobuko spoke about her fears of raising her Black son, who was only 10 weeks old when his father, Attallah Ayyubi, was killed at the Ya-Sin Mosque, a major gathering place for Black Muslims in 1960s and ’70s Brooklyn.

By the end of the show, nearly 20 musicians joined Nobuko on stage, from shakuhachi and taiko players to violinists. Los Angeles musicians and community organizers Atomic Nancy of the Atomic café, Sean Miura of Tuesday Night Project, artist Dan Kwong, and Quetzal Flores were among those who brought their own radical histories and musical lineages into the room.

Nobuko’s work gathers and galvanizes artists and audience, musicians and activists, alike. Sitting in the theater that night were the aunties and uncles of the 1960s and ’70s Asian American movement. They were members of Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, who won reparations for those incarcerated people; of Gidra, the monthly newsletter that was “the voice of the Asian American experience” from 1969 to 1974; and of the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization, which fought against redevelopment in their downtown L.A. neighborhood in the ’70s and ’80s.

Their stories, and Nobuko’s, are as primal as any folktale or origin story for me, and for so many others. They are embedded into the work of reimagining our narratives today.

In January 2021, JTOWN Action and Solidarity—a group I co-founded, but of which I am no longer an active member of—started weekly mutual-aid actions at the main encampment of unhoused residents in Little Tokyo, providing electricity to charge their devices, personal protective equipment, food, and other essential items. These weekly “Power Ups” became a way to build connections among community members, housed and unhoused, and today include open mics, communal tables, and birthday celebrations. But the effort provoked conflict with and within the community. Some of Little Tokyo’s small, legacy businesses, struggling through the pandemic, believed that supporting the unhoused and bringing visitors back to the neighborhood were mutually exclusive.

The conflict escalated on the Day of Remembrance, when JTOWN Action and Solidarity released a statement about reparations. They asked why only Japanese Americans had received redress—in contrast to other groups also forcibly removed and incarcerated during the war, such as Alaska Natives or Japanese Latin Americans. By extension, they questioned the very possibility of reparations to address injustice, given that they are functions of an inherently unjust, illegitimate state that continues to forcibly colonize indigenous land. To some, this was a denigration of hard-won battles. To others, it was a show of urgent solidarity.

But despite such conflicts, the people in the audience that day, and the Japanese Americans engaged in this work, were raised by the stories of 120,000 incarcerated to believe in the possibility of a better world. That evening at the Getty brought us together and reminded us of this shared endeavor. It sought to highlight our intimacy in all its thrilling, maddening contention.

And at our center was Nobuko, the feminist troubadour who used her voice to create our folk songs, manifestos, and mythologies, for whom multiculturalism and coalition-building was the source and handiwork of her life-art.

When introducing “Not Yo’ Butterfly,” a song that shares its title with her recently published memoir, she addressed Giacomo Puccini, the Italian composer who wrote Madame Butterfly, the opera “that has plagued Asian women ever since.” All those aunties who were the Asian American Movement got up and danced, a joyous rejection of Madame Butterfly, and all her progeny, the fantasized figures of weak Asian women, subject to the desires and violence of a racist world.

One of Nobuko’s last songs of the evening was “Bambutsu.” Before performing it, she taught us the looping choreography of the accompanying dance in the style of Bon Odori, the traditional Japanese folk dance performed in a circle during the summer festivals that honor the harvest, spirits, and ancestors. Because of the pandemic, it had been a long time since I last danced Bon Odori in temple parking lots or on the streets of Little Tokyo. But there we were, in the auditorium, together. We all rose to our feet, guided by Nobuko’s movements, guided by our memories.

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That’s an incredible achievement over the short span of a decade. However, climate divestment’s increasing visibility has also cultivated an audience of detractors who argue that it is ineffective. Bill Gates is famously skeptical of the benefits of divestment because it doesn’t directly stop carbon emissions the way innovation in new low-carbon technologies might. Other opponents claim that divestment cannot meaningfully change the demand for fossil fuels. Divestment might lower share prices, but according to these critics, those lower prices make them attractive to less ethical investors, making the strategy self-defeating. Going a step further,  such critics even claim that divestment’s economic harm to companies has always been minimal—that it was so even in apartheid-era South Africa, where divestment as a tactic was born.

The problem with these critiques is that measuring divestment’s success solely on its financial impacts is a mistake. Focusing on short-term balance sheets obscures divestment’s true power: the strategy changes minds and mobilizes action, with effects that reach far beyond targeted investors and companies.

What happened in South Africa shows why this is the case. From 1960 through the 1980s, anti-apartheid activists were unable to persuade governments to push back against South Africa’s oppressive racial laws. American presidents, for example, were loath to act because South Africa was an important ally during the Cold War, acting as a regional policeman and actively warring against Marxist groups in neighboring countries. Individual congressmen were often sympathetic to imposing sanctions on South Africa, but overriding a president meant building a bipartisan movement—and creating consensus, even within a political party, took time. With governments unwilling to take action, activists in the United States and elsewhere had to look for different ways to undermine apartheid. They turned to divestment, refusing to invest in companies that did business in South Africa.

But divestment was not seen as a way to hurt the South African economy, or even to punish U.S. companies. In 1966, minister and activist George M. Houser, who helped found the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), a group dedicated to opposing colonialism in Africa, wrote a strategy paper advocating what he called “disengagement”—both withdrawing existing investments and prohibiting new ones. It reflected a growing consensus on how to strike at South Africa. At the time, ACOA was working with other groups to boycott Chase Bank (then known as Chase Manhattan Bank) because of its policy of lending to South Africa. “This campaign is not based upon the thesis that even if all of the economic power of the United States was brought to bear…the architects of apartheid would feel they had to accept new policies,” wrote Houser. Rather, he argued that this type of disengagement policy “would materially affect the outlook of many other powerful countries.” Houser’s model was the strategy that became divestment, and in many ways, continues to guide the movement today.

Initially, the tactic targeted specific companies and financial institutions who engaged in high profile projects in South Africa. In addition to the Chase campaign, Polaroid was targeted in 1970 for selling its photographic equipment for use in producing the hated passbooks used to control the movement of people in South Africa. Then, in the mid-1970s, activists began to pressure city and state governments to remove investments from companies working in South Africa.

Divestment gained steam with small victories, such as at Hampshire College in 1977 and the University of Wisconsin in 1978. Within a decade, companies found themselves constantly under criticism for their presence in South Africa. As divestments multiplied, some companies did decide to withdraw from the country.

But beyond these material effects, divestment had one huge effect that even Houser and others might not have fully foreseen: it helped build a truly national anti-apartheid movement in the United States. Up until divestment, the anti-apartheid movement in the United States saw limited success. While ACOA was technically a national committee, it was primarily a New York institution. During the Chase Bank campaign, the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph referred to the anti-apartheid cause as “the germ of a movement.” Some activists launched consumer boycotts, but sustaining such efforts could be difficult, because many South African goods exported to the United States, such as platinum, could often be difficult to boycott. And as long as South Africa dodged the news cycle, it took the wind out of organizing sails. But divestment broke through. Where Houser was hoping to sway other countries into supporting sanctions, the strategy worked on the hearts and minds of people within the United States.

What made divestment different, and ultimately so popular? Some of it was moral appeal. It’s no coincidence that the movement gained strength quickly in churches and on college campuses: whether or not you could stop apartheid, profiting from it was immoral. Part of it, too, was political. Activists had great success reminding Americans that even as U.S. companies were shedding manufacturing jobs, they were taking advantage of cheap labor in South Africa. Amidst poverty in the United States, investments in an oppressive and immoral regime seemed doubly hypocritical.

Image created by Angus Crutcher.

But even more successful was the way that divestment created opportunities for action: in the words of activist Cherri Waters, “movements need something for people to do.” Divestment created tangible targets for people to organize around and against that were also specific to where they lived: university pension boards, church investment boards, and local governments. Lobbying these organizations was effective. Not coincidentally, this helped the movement to spread all across the country.

This widespread activation led many Republicans to endorse sanctions against South Africa against the wishes of Ronald Reagan. It simply became too difficult to ignore their constituents. Richard Lugar, a prominent Republican senator from Indiana, began supporting sanctions after complaining that he couldn’t go to his kids’ baseball games without constituents asking him what he was going to do about apartheid. Privately, Lugar was skeptical that sanctions would pass, but the pressure to do something simply became overwhelming. Congress authorized sanctions against South Africa in 1986, precisely because of that pressure.

The critics are right, in a way: divestment’s economic impact on companies was small during the anti-apartheid movement. Lowered U.S. share prices on their own were not economically damaging to South Africa. Even the withdrawal of businesses was largely a blow to South African morale.

But that doesn’t undercut the importance of divestment as a strategy. By increasing awareness of apartheid and the U.S. role in sustaining it, divestment activated a core of people who would support other actions against South Africa and beyond. This is the best way to understand divestment’s power then, and its power today. Stigmatizing companies and lowering investor confidence is important, but the tactic’s primary advantage is that it organizes people, gives them an action to accomplish, and leaves them open to pushing for even more substantive change.

Against climate change, which is not a human target and which isn’t an effect of the same sheer evil that undergirded apartheid, this approach is all the more critical. Whether it affects the bottom line or not, building a movement of people is what matters.

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