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Comment by moduspol | Hacker News Reader

Virtually every meaningful task humans have accomplished has been a result of groups of us putting aside our differences to unite and focus on solving the problem at hand.

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??? Nice way to rewrite history. Would you say the civil rights movement was successful because it wanted to put aside differences? Or because they fought for their rights, their difference, and the privileged majority had to make concessions?

It's actually a perfect example. It's hard to imagine everyone fighting for civil rights was previously aligned on all fronts or agreed with everything that was done along the way.

In MLK's book "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community" he talks about some of the internal battles within the civil rights community and how they explicitly tried to forge alliances with other groups. That's when I learned just how brilliant MLK was in this political / social sense.

> Would you say the civil rights movement was successful because it wanted to put aside differences?

Absolutely. Everyone involved with the movement put aside their differences to focus on the same goal.

It would not have been as successful if everyone showing up for a rally was expected / coerced into supporting other political issues.

Yes very much so. They found the moral high ground and were able to persuade people on our shared humanity. No one “had” to do anything. People were compelled to as they were persuaded that we had immoral systems in terms of individuals civil rights.

A universal appeal to shared humanity is an approach that works. Shaming people into a type of morality will only invite pushback.

For some historical context, contemporaneously, the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular; it's exactly the kind of thing that would have been described as politics best left out of the workplace.

"In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mass demonstrations were more likely to harm than to help the movement for racial equality. In 1965, after marchers in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by state troopers, less than half of Americans said they supported the marchers."

(Taken from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/the-nex...)

I think we're conflating certain actions with certain messages. The words of that speech struck a nerve with people because of its universal appeal to humanity. It's oft quoted line of "...judged by content of their character, not the color of their skin" is still universally praised because of that.

Compare this to today's thoughtless and abrasive slogans or the writings of today's favored thought leaders on this and how divisive now only are the ideas but the tactics being used to coerce people into compliance.

So yeah, people at the time may have had a distaste for some of the tactics but the messaging was very popular. The riots that took place later on in the decade were a disaster and led to a new, mainstream form of conservatism led by Nixon.

I don't know if I understand your point. Are you saying that the 74% unfavorable view of civil rights demonstrations suggests that Americans disfavored demonstrations but nonetheless were strongly supportive of MLK's speech at such a demonstration?

That strikes me as a level of nuance that is frankly unlikely.

Within a year of that speech the 24th Amendment was ratified to the constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. He won the Noble Prize a little over a year later. I'd say people agreed with the message above all else because he truly appealed to a shared, universal humanity. This couldn't be done, especially in that era, without a large amount of people supporting this. An Amendment - think about that and what it takes! It almost has to be universal for that to happen. People supported these ideas. It is a myth they didn't and the evidence is the product of them.

I don't think these landmark legal events occurred because people demonstrated so much what the man and his supporters were saying. I believe people miss the forest for the trees and think if they just get a group of people together they're somehow right or will get their way. But it's about what you have to say and how you say it that matters. Peacefully organizing is a great vehicle for that but you still need the goods.

The violence that happened in the later 1960's set so much of it back IMO.

Hmm, to your first part: maybe. Adam Serwer (in that same article) argues that exposure to tales of southern violence, after the Civil War, was instrumental in changing northern Republicans' willingness to push civil rights legislation. So, similarly, in the 1960s.

Yet your conclusion is far too final: it's not a "myth" that people didn't support these changes; some people did and some didn't, as with anything. At one point in the end of 1964, a majority of people oppose the protests that led to these changes.

And in fact, the 24th Amendment faced substantial opposition from southern states; I'm not able to find contemporaneous opinion polls (and I'd be interested if you have any), but it's far from the case that it was without controversy!

I strongly disagree with your last line, however—not because violence is acceptable or productive, necessarily, but because your interpretation exculpates reactionaries who regrouped and pushed back against such changes, which I think is a highly relevant lesson for the Trump era:

Race is such a good predictor of a vote for Trump. The simplest explanation for Trump's rise is that he is a counterreaction to the election of the first Black President.

So too with the success of a cynical Southern Strategy following on the heels of the Civil Rights Era.

Why? If you asked the same question today about BLM you would also see a divergence between the two. Almost certainly not to the degree to which a strong majority favor the notion but disapprove of the demonstrations, but there's going to be a difference.

I don't know offhand of any high quality opinion surveys asking about approval of _demonstrations_ vs _BLM_ in general, so I don't know if your hypothesis is born out.

However, opinion polls _do_ show a _correlation_ between support for _BLM_ and coverage of demonstrations: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/support-for-black-lives....

I don't see how your statement "the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular" has anything to do with your reference.

You could still support the Civil Rights movement, but believe that mass demonstrations harm it.

Those two things are completely separate.

That’s not true. The CRM was deeply unpopular to the general population. King was seen as a rowdy agitator. The CRA was passed despite public opinion, not because the activists managed to convince the population that they were human beings. The CRA was so deeply unpopular that it caused a fundamental change in the structure of our political boundaries that has lasted for 60 years. King himself explicitly shamed the “white moderate” rather than courting them.

It’s pretty common for the problem at hand to be a group of violent extremists attempting to seize power.

What if the problem at hand is ending structural racism in the workplace?

>groups of us

not 'all of us'

"Structural racism" is a coded term. We have laws against discrimination and HR departments across the country bending over backwards to avoid lawsuits... but you're not asking about the problems those are intended to solve.

When you ask a question like that, what you're really asking is, "why don't workplaces have the outcomes I expect along racial lines when it comes to hiring, compensation, promotion, and more?" And implicitly, "why can't workplaces be forced (or force themselves) toward meeting the outcomes I expect?"

Those are different questions, but they're encoded in yours. And they don't really apply to the topic at hand.

Avoiding lawsuits is not at all the same as attempting to deal with the issue honestly as opposed to framing it in the same light as some new kind of competitive marketplace.

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