Opinion | Are We at the Start of a New Protest Movement?

In 1960, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. congratulated black college students who had initiated a new way to protest racial segregation: lunch counter sit-ins. Dr. King described the sit-in as a “dynamic idea” and “creative protest” that was “destined to be one of the glowing epics of our time.” Faced with the intransigence of the law across the South, black activists were forced to find a way of effectively engaging in protest. And they succeeded.

There are countless other examples, but the point is that new situations create new obstacles that have to be overcome. Social distancing is one of them. Yet, there is a bigger challenge: the internal barriers to organizing a movement. After all, many of the issues we face — poverty, inaccessible health care, housing and inequality — are not new. But even as these conditions have been getting worse, there has been little concerted effort to collectively move against them. There are also the differences of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality that can threaten to unravel the unity necessary for knitting together a broad social movement.

Today, we cannot gather to express our collective strength and experience the commonality of our endeavor. Instead, the rapid collapse of the economy and the immediate immiseration of millions of people highlight our mutual bond. This doesn’t mean that this crisis is experienced in the same way across lines of race or class. But even as African-Americans and undocumented immigrants prepare to experience the worst of this crisis, social distance may illustrate a new social connection.

Because of the dithering response of the federal government, the suffering will be exponential for millions of working-class people, some of whom haven’t experienced the systematic discrimination and victimization faced by oppressed populations. As Congress bails out some of the wealthiest businesses while doling out checks that cannot even cover a month’s expenses, the potential for solidarity lies in this common experience.

At the same time, however, there is a suffocating fear that must be overcome. The fear of falling even further behind disciplines people to expect little and prepare for even less. This mind-set was so evident in the disconnect between people’s professed support for Bernie Sanders’s proposals in polls and their decision not to vote for him in the primaries.

Instead, Democratic voters fell back on the predictability of a conventional politician like Joe Biden, whose ideas are as familiar as they are ineffective. When tried-and-true elected officials still insist that universal health care is an impossibility, even as millions upon millions of workers lose their health coverage as a pandemic climaxes, a cynical pragmatism stands between the status quo and substantive change.

We can overcome fear with imagination and hope. Hope, not as a wish for things to be different, but a deep desire for change rooted in the belief of human potential, solidarity and mutual generosity. The cynicism of the status quo is not new. It was the belief that American slavery couldn’t be ended. It was the scoffing at the hope that Jim Crow would fall. It was the sneer at the idea of women’s suffrage. It is the same chortle we hear today.

No social movement begins with the question of what is possible; it is typically fueled by imagining what could be. This will be the challenge of the new movement that emerges to challenge the vast inequalities that Covid-19 has exposed.

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