Why We Protest - Paying attention is the first step toward justice.

“In the United States, we tend to call such events “protests,” “demonstrations, or “marches” when we like them—and “riots” when we don’t.”

“I’ve attended just three protests in my life: that March for Life in New Haven, a graduate-student unionization rally in New York City, and the Black Lives Matter protest in Irving, Texas. Public protests for racial justice are sometimes dismissively compared to religious rituals as a way to write off protestors as deluded followers of “woke religion.” But in fact there is something to the comparison between a protest and a religious ritual, as I discovered at the three I attended.”

“It can be hard to make reparation for such sins. If I carelessly break one of my wife’s tea cups, I can repair the damage by replacing the object. But how can I repair the damage caused by these sins of omission—failures to notice, to look, to remember? To repair these sins would seem to require, at the very least, a corresponding act of noticing, looking, or remembering. And this is one of the things that a demonstration can do.”

Read the whole article here: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/why-we-protest