Nonviolent Protest and Resistance Privileged

[Exian]

It's funny that you'd be accused of white privilege for advocating non-violent protest, when John Lewis and his Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee are the gold standard. What more proof do you need? No, it seems to me that they're just trying to justify their urge to use violence to get a message across, which is counter productive. Being non-violent is not the default position. It requires ideology and practice to preemptively counteract your natural violent reaction to oppression.

Is there a limit to non-violence? Did the SNCC take it too far when they practiced maintaining eye-contact with their attacker while they were being beaten to humanize themselves and their attacker, or when their reaction to the murders and bombings were to quickly organize a new march for the next day, instead of quitting or retaliating? There they were in a system, whose solution to the marches and sit-is and bus rides was to have cops standby as mobs of angry white people beat them for a while before stepping in, if not doing the beating themselves, and they stayed on message. Well, they couldn't know how far to take their non-violence, but luckily we can look back at them as an example and see it works.

People were murdered in response to the sit-ins, marches, and freedom rides, so could you imagine the response if they resorted to violence? How justified the rasicsts would feel to kill even more people, while the authorities stood by? They couldn't afford the privilege of violence.