Description
Summary (300-500 words)
For this task you will need to condense the article into only 3-4 paragraphs (or ~300-500 words). Identify the major points with only a few supporting details. Use the authors name and last name frequently. Avoid quoting and do not include your own opinion. Please label this section.
Rhetorical Analysis (500-750 words)
In the bulk of your midterm you will evaluate the author’s argument and how she wrote and developed this argument. You will write a Level 3 Analysis, which is a Rhetorical Analysis. Please use the guidance in the Backpacks vs Briefcases article to help, as well as the detailed questions in the Rhetorical Analysis chapter. Consider having 1 paragraph per question, and don’t feel like all questions need to be addressed. This should be 2-3 pages, double spaced, or around 4-7 paragraphs. In this section, you will analyze the effectiveness of the argument posed by the author(s). You should consider the effectiveness of the article, considering the author’s tone, use of evidence, persona, intended audience, etc. You are not agreeing or disagreeing but instead evaluating Tufekcis’ argument and her writing. Please label this section clearly.
Guidelines
Your midterm needs to be properly formatted according to MLA standards, including accurate in text citations for quotes.
This is not an essay. This is two separate sections that are clearly labeled as
Summary and
Rhetorical Analysis.
Include support from the article in the form of evidence in your Rhetorical Analysis. At least three quotes are needed for your Rhetorical Analysis section. Here is Quoting Review.
It’s okay to use “I” and your opinion in the Midterm as you are offering your assessment of the author’s rhetoric. But you are not agreeing or disagreeing with the author.
Be formatted appropriately with accurate in-text citations.
Be relatively free from error and relatively polished. This is a formal assignment and that should be reflected in the polish of the assignment
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Pre-Read “Do Protests Even Work”
1. Based on the title, what do you think the article will be about?
I think the article will be about whether people protest about something or someone
whether it be beneficial or work?
2. Skim through it a bit, what do you think her answer might be to her title question
Her answers are right to her title question. Sometimes they work and sometimes they do
not.
3. When you skimmed through it, did any specific terms, events or people’s names jump out
at you?
Yes, people protest on Black Lives Matter. Occupy movement in the United States saw
marches in 600 communities.
4. Did you notice any headings, bolded words, or images? What did you see?
I saw images of protests. I did not see any headings or bolded words, but some words are
underlined.
5. Have you ever attended a protest? Did you find it effective?
I never attended but I think most of the protests on bigger issues are effective.
6. 5) How much time do you think it will take you to read this article?
20 to 30 minutes
Do Protests Even Work?
It sometimes takes decades to find out.
JUNE 24, 2020 The Atlantic
By Zeynep Tufekci
Photo by Kate Sterlin
In a remarkable development in the midst of a pandemic, the United States is also witnessing one
of the most broad, sustained waves of protest in decades. It’s been three weeks, and nearly one in
five Americans says they have participated in a recent protest. Like many other academics
studying protests and movements, I am often asked if protests work—an especially important
question for the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests as they, like all crowded events, entail extra
risk during a pandemic. Will all this accomplish something? The answer is, yes, of course
protests work, but usually not in the way and timeframe that many people think. Protests
sometimes look like failures in the short term, but much of the power of protests is in their longterm effects, on both the protesters themselves and the rest of society.
In the short term, protests can work to the degree that they can scare authorities into changing
their behavior. Protests are signals: “We are unhappy, and we won’t put up with things the way
they are.” But for that to work, the “We won’t put up with it” part has to be credible. Nowadays,
large protests sometimes lack such credibility, especially because digital technologies have made
them so much easier to organize. When it can take as little as a few months or even weeks to go
from a Facebook page to millions in the street, as we saw with the Women’s March in 2017, a
protest doesn’t necessarily make the kind of statement it did in the past, when they were much
harder to organize. In comparison, the historic March on Washington, in 1963, took more than
10 years to go from being an idea to being organized, with many months dedicated just to the
logistics, and with many obstacles before and during. When it’s that difficult to do something,
just pulling off the march itself serves as an exclamation mark to those in power, whereas
something that’s easy to organize is a mere question mark for the future: Maybe it will go
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somewhere, but maybe it won’t. Unsurprisingly, low-effort things don’t communicate credible
threats. That’s also why things like apps that make it easy for people to contact their
representatives don’t do much to help anyone’s cause—if an action is easy to do, legislators can
also easily discern that it doesn’t necessarily represent a threat to their reelection. (Showing up at
their office in large groups, though? That still bites because it represents a lot more work).
Indeed, the past few decades in the United States have featured many large and widespread
protests without corresponding immediate change. Large numbers of people marched around the
country in early 2003 to oppose the impending invasion of Iraq, but the war and the occupation
proceeded anyway in March of that year. The Occupy movement in the United States saw
marches in 600 communities and 70 major cities quickly, and then went global, but inequality
has gotten worse since then. Neither numbers nor streets are by themselves magic wands for
change.
What about when protesters do things that are difficult? When protesters undertake acts that risk
jail time, like the Catholic pacifists who broke into nuclear-weapons facilities to smear them with
blood, or even death, like holding marches when a government or its paramilitaries will shoot
and kill? Clearly, high-risk actions, especially if they inspire mass participation, have the
potential to be more piercing in their impact. In 1986, millions of Filipinos protested attempts by
President Ferdinand Marcos, who’d been in power for 20 years, to continue his rule through a
marred election. They certainly risked being shot at, something that had happened before. This
time, though, Marcos realized he could no longer control the country and fled instead.
The current Black Lives Matter protest wave is definitely high risk through the double whammy
of the pandemic and the police response. The police, the entity being protested, have unleashed
so much brutality that in just three weeks, at least eight people have already lost eyesight to
rubber bullets. One Twitter thread dedicated to documenting violent police misconduct is at 600
entries and counting. And nobody seems safe—not even a 75-year-old avowed peacenik who
was merely in the way of a line of cops when he was shoved so violently that he fell and cracked
his skull. Chillingly, the police walked on as he bled on the ground. After the video came out to
widespread outrage, and the two police officers who shoved him were suspended, their fellow
officers on the active emergency-response team resigned to support their colleagues. Plus the
pandemic means that protesters who march in crowds, face tear gas, and risk jail and detention in
crowded settings are taking even more risks than usual.
Sustaining such widespread protests for weeks under these difficult conditions is no easy feat,
and there are indications that these protests are already having immediate impacts. In
Minneapolis, where the killing of George Floyd was the initial spark, the mayor called for
sweeping structural reform, the city council passed a resolution to disband the police force and
replace it with a community-led model, and the police chief pulled out of negotiations with the
police union. Many other localities have been considering similar initiatives to scale back police
departments.
Does that mean high-risk or difficult-to-pull-off protests can always work to scare authorities
into implementing change? We can’t just say yes, because the authorities have another option to
meet such actions: Make them even higher-risk through repression until the protesters give up.
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Sadly, repression works. No matter how brave the protesters may be, a state often has a lot more
capacity to inflict costs than ordinary protesters have to withstand them. During the Arab Spring,
about one-third of the citizens of Bahrain marched for months on end—a staggering number,
comparable to more than 70 million people marching in the United States. Instead of buckling,
their government responded with widespread arrests, torture, and executions, even of teenagers,
finally silencing the weary population. In Egypt, after a military coup in July 2013, at least tens
of thousands of protesters, including many women and children, camped out at Rab’a Square, in
Cairo, to oppose the coup. In response, the military and the police opened fire, gunning down an
estimated 1,000 people in a single day. Unsurprisingly, protests mostly died down, and the
country has since been ruled by a ruthless military dictatorship. These are not historical
exceptions. In 1989, the Chinese government killed hundreds or, by some estimates, even
thousands of protesters in Tiananmen Square, where about 1 million people had peacefully
assembled for months, crushing the pro-democracy movement.
So why don’t authorities always ratchet up the repression until people give up? Why do they
sometimes give in to protest movements? The key to understanding that is also the key to
understanding the true long-term power of social movements. Movements, and their protests, are
powerful because they change the minds of people, including those who may not even be
participating in them, and they change the lives of their participants.
Kate sterlin
In the long term, protests work because they can undermine the most important pillar of power:
legitimacy. Commentators often note that a state can be defined by its monopoly on violence, a
concept going back to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and codified by the sociologist Max
Weber. But the full Weber quote is less well known. Weber defined the state by its “monopoly of
the legitimate use of physical force.” The word legitimate is as important as the words physical
force, if not more. Especially in the modern world, that monopoly on violence isn’t something
that self-perpetuates. Violence doesn’t just happen; it has to be enacted and enabled by people.
The Soviet Union did not fall because it ran out of tanks to send to Eastern Europe when the
people there rebelled in the late 1980s. It fell, in large part, because it ran out of legitimacy, and
because Soviet rulers had lost the will and the desire to live in their own system. Compared with
Western democracies, their system wasn’t delivering freedom or wealth, even to the winners. If
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the loss of legitimacy is widespread and deep enough, the generals and police who are supposed
to be enacting the violence can and do turn against the rulers (or, at least, they stop defending the
unpopular ruler). Force and repression can keep things under control for a while, but it also
makes such rule more brittle.
Legitimacy, not repression, is the bedrock of resilient power. A society without legitimate
governance will not function well; people can be coerced to comply, but it’s harder to coerce
enthusiasm, competence, and creativity out of a discouraged, beaten-down people. Losing
legitimacy is the most important threat to authorities, especially in democracies, because
authorities can do only so much for so long to hold on to power under such conditions. Maybe
they can stay in power longer in part through obstacles such as voter repression, gerrymandering,
and increasing the power of unelected institutions, but the society they oversee will inevitably
decline, and so will their grasp on power.
In that light, focusing on legitimacy as the most robust source of power, it becomes clear that the
Black Lives Matter movement has been quite successful in its short life. It should first be noted:
This is a young movement, but it did not start this year. The current wave of high-risk protests is
a crest in a movement that goes back to the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, and that
spread nationwide after the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the 2014 killing of Michael
Brown. Understood in their proper historical context, Black Lives Matter protests are the second
civil-rights movement in postwar America, and measured in that light, they are more and more
successful in the most important metric: They are convincing people of the righteousness of their
cause. In the long run, that’s of profound importance.
Protests are a grab for attention: They are an attempt to force a conversation about the topic
they’re highlighting. By themselves, streets don’t magically hold any particular power beyond
their ability to start that conversation and frame questions for broader society. Successful protests
are the ones that win that conversation and in the framing of the issue, and by all accounts and
measures, Black Lives Matter protesters are succeeding. By 2016, 40 percent of Americans had
reported supporting the movement. Currently, two-thirds do, (compared to a mere 31 percent
who oppose it). Similarly, another poll found that 76 percent of Americans (and 71 percent of
white people) thought racism was a “big problem,” a striking 26 percent increase since 2015. For
the first time, a majority of the country also supports removing Confederate statues from public
places, a 19 percent shift since 2017, when 39 percent did. Conversation sparked by protests can
also move what is often called the “Overton window”—what’s seen as acceptable and reasonable
in the public sphere. Right now, major newspapers are publishing op-eds calling for abolishing
or defunding the police, while conservatives are publishing many pieces arguing that we should
instead focus on reforming the police, and that abolition would go too far. Reforming the police
as the minimal, conservative position is a striking shift in the Overton window in just a few
years.
Protests also work because they change the protesters themselves, turning some from casual
participants into lifelong activists, which in turn changes society. This is especially salient when
a movement opposing police brutality and misconduct is met with more police brutality and
misconduct. Peaceful protesters across the country have endured tear gas, rubber bullets, and
batons, and this is no doubt part of the reason people are changing their minds. If the police will
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do this to protesters in broad daylight with cameras in so many hands, what else is happening to
black or other vulnerable communities when nobody is around to film the interaction?
This gets to the final reason that protests work: Collective action is a life-changing experience.
To be in a sea of people demanding positive social change is empowering and exhilarating.
Protests work because they sustain movements over the long term as participants bond during
collective action. In scholarship, this is called “biographical impacts,” and research demonstrates
that, as one would expect, movement participation can be life-changing for many. The “new left”
protests in the United States in the 1960s may have involved as little as 2 to 4 percent of the
population, in contrast to the current ones, which are perhaps as high as 20 percent. Yet, those
protests had long-lasting effects on U.S. society through its participants’ lifelong impacts.
Black Lives Matter protests are also succeeding in creating a generational shift: Civiqs, an online
survey research firm, found that 65 percent of people under 34 support for the Black Lives
Matter movement, while just 19 percent oppose it. Such generational shifts are important not just
because young people are the future, but also because a shifting culture also affects people who
are older or in positions of power. Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart News, dubbed the
platform for the alt-right by Trump’s strategic advisor Steve Bannon, had once famously said
that all politics is downstream from culture. When Barack Obama started his first term, he had
not come out in support of same-sex marriage, but even by then, young people were broadly in
favor of expanding such civil rights to gay people. Just this month, without much fanfare, the
U.S. Supreme Court, where the majority of justices were appointed by conservative
administrations, voted to expand employment protections to gender identity and sexual
orientation—thus including LGBTQ rights in the broad umbrella of civil rights for workers, only
a few years after it ruled to make same-sex marriage the law of the land. Once culture shifts, the
rest can unravel quickly.
Do protests work? Yes, but not simply because some people march in the streets. Protests work
because they direct attention toward an injustice and can change people’s minds, a slow but
profoundly powerful process. Protests work because protesters can demonstrate the importance
of a belief to society at large and let authorities understand that their actions will be opposed,
especially if those protesters are willing to take serious risks for their cause. Protests work
because they are often the gateway drug between casual participation and lifelong activism. And,
sometimes, protests work because, for that moment, the question in the minds of the protesters is
not whether they work short term or long term, but whether one can sit by idly for one more day
while a grave injustice unfolds. And perhaps that’s the most powerful means by which protest
works: when the cause is so powerful that the protesters don’t calculate whether it works or not,
but feel morally compelled to show up and be counted.
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