Nonviolent Protest and the False Flag of Civility | Talia Trigg ’22

Nonviolent Protest and the False Flag of Civility

Talia Trigg ’22

At 8:39 a.m. on April 12, 2015, Lieutenant Brian Rice made eye contact with Freddie Gray. Within an hour, Gray’s spine was mostly severed. Within seven days, he was dead. His crime? Running away when he saw the police and having a legal pocket knife in his jacket.

Soon after Gray’s imprisonment and subsequent death, mass protests began in downtown Baltimore, the site of the incident and Gray’s home. By April 25, some of the protests turned violent in response to the heavy police presence, leading to the destruction of two police cars and a CVS pharmacy, as well as many injuries. This turn of events was met with public statements of disapproval from those in power and calls for protestors to “remain peaceful” and nonviolent. 1

But what is nonviolence, in this context? Historically, nonviolent noncooperation with the demands of those in power has been harnessed to great effect. It is a powerful tool available to even the most oppressed, which is rooted in the temptation of violence and the belief that a human life — and its potential for sacrifice — is stronger than the ability to kill. But the calls for nonviolence following Freddie Gray’s death were not calls for resistance; they were calls for compliance. They were, in essence, calls for civility.

The term “civility” may seem to be similar or in line with nonviolent protest — and by extension, noncompliance and protest — but it enforces norms that are antithetical to the radical resistance that characterizes nonviolent noncooperation. That is, civility and nonviolence are not synonymous, but rather antonymous. To understand the deeper problem at hand, one must dive into the violent and oppressive past of the notion of civility.

Since the fifteenth century, with the birth of the idea of races as broad social groups defined by skin color, one of the primary motivations and justifications for European colonization was the “civilization” of lesser peoples. This stemmed from an understanding of non-white people as inherently inferior and bestial, an idea first put into print by Gomez de Zurara in 1453. 2 The white man’s burden — the belief that white men held a divine duty to colonize, convert, rule, and oppress other races in order to bestow the gift of European civilization upon them — evolved based on this narrative. Its primary function was, and continues to be, the justification of the economic and material exploitation of colonized nations, as well as the creation and continuation of the institution of slavery.

1 Baltimore Police Department 2 Kendi

From this history comes the concept of civility: literally, being civilized. In the historical context of life in colonized nations, it was functionally synonymous with conformity to the ideas and practices of European colonizers, who brought with them their own conceptions of “civilization,” which they imposed on the colonized population. Although the word has evolved to signify a general politeness and courtesy of speech and interaction, it still carries with it the connotation of compliance with societal norms.

These norms continue to be those put in place by the dominant groups in society. As researcher Gaye Johnson explains in an interview with NPR, “[p]eople of color don’t get to orchestrate the terms of civility… Instead, we’re always responding to what civility is supposed to be.” 3 Civility is generally perceived as a positive, healthy element of successful interactions, but the ways in which the societal values that form the basis of civility are dictated make it a vehicle for containing oppressed groups and preventing social mobility. So, “the relationship between alleged civilizers and the people they’re ‘gifting’ with civility,” Johnson points out, “is inherently undemocratic, unequal and racist.” 4 As a result, it is inevitable that any resistance to the status quo will be seen as inherently uncivil, because civility is characterized by conformity to societal norms and the status quo.

Nonviolent noncompliance is, on the other hand, far more radical than most realize. To truly understand mass nonviolent protest, one must understand the ideology of Mohandas Gandhi, its most famous practitioner of the past several centuries. In contrast to popular beliefs, Gandhian ideology is far more than the romanticized view of peace and love that it is often understood to connote. In Gandhian thought, nonviolence is not simply a tool to be harnessed or used; it is an innate, elemental force whetted on violence and fueled by sacrifice. This last part is key, because if we are to understand Gandhi we must leave behind the notion that his model of protest was one that avoided violence at all costs. As Oxford professor Faisal Devji explains in The Impossible Indian, “Gandhi had always been clear about the fact that his movement had nothing to do with avoiding violence, but was meant rather to invite [violence] and in so doing convert it.” 5

To Gandhi, nonviolence was not an alternative to violence, but rather a process by which the immediate, qualifiable power of violence could be appropriated and sublimated. This process of deriving power from the violence of others is based upon the bisection of the idea of sovereignty, in this sense defined as any authority that can ask people to kill and die in its name. As Devji describes Gandhi’s approach, “by separat-

3 NPR 4 Ibid. 5 Devji

ing dying from killing and prizing the former as a nobler deed, he was doing nothing more than retrieving sovereignty from the state and generalizing it as a quality vested in individuals.” 6 To understand this, one can imagine violent exchanges as net-zero interactions, in which the perpetrator of violence generally possesses a higher level of power than the victim, by virtue of the power of determination of life and death that they wield. By Gandhian thought, the power resident in a violent exchange lies not with the individual perpetrating the violence, but with the individual who willfully sacrifices themself. Thus, the power that one wielding violence exerts over their victim is taken from them, and that power — the power of determination of life and death — belongs instead to the sacrificer.

The sublimation of violence does not have to involve the death of the sacrificer to be effective. An apt example of the concept of individual sovereignty and power in violent interactions is the case of Aleksei Navalny, leader of the Russian political opposition and nemesis of President Vladimir Putin. 7 In August of 2020, Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a deadly nerve agent developed in Russia during the Cold War. The nerve agent was also recently used in the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in Britain, implicating Putin with near-certainty in Navalny’s attempted assassination. Navalny recovered in an induced coma after an emergency medevac to Berlin, but it is important to think about what would have happened if the poison had worked as intended and he had not survived. In that alternate scenario, Putin (the perpetrator of violence) holds all the power. Navalny (the victim) does not have any agency whatsoever in his life or death; that determination lies solely in Putin’s hands. This is what happens in the vast majority of violent conflict; the aggressor holds power while the victim is left a casualty, the complexity of their existence flattened in their death.

But that is not what happened. No, Navalny recovered from his poisoning and immediately decided to return to Russia of his own volition, where he knew instant arrest followed by lengthy imprisonment and possible death awaited him. Indeed, he was detained upon arrival and has spent the last year in a notoriously harsh prison, twenty-four days of which he spent in a hunger strike. The obvious question is: why? And the answer is: Gandhi. Perhaps not directly, but Navalny is demonstrating the concept of individual sovereignty that forms the basis of Gandhian doctrine. By choosing to return, he is taking his fate into his own hands. By choosing to refuse food, he is stating that he is willing to die for his cause, on his own terms. In so doing, he has robbed Putin of the power of determination of life and death, and reclaimed it for himself.

6 Ibid. 7 For the purposes of this essay, Navalny is a clear contemporary example to demonstrate a principle of Gandhian thought, but the comparison is not intended to extend to the complexity of his impact on global politics.

This is nonviolent noncompliance. It is a belief that is wildly radical, bordering on philosophical anarchism in the way that it divests sovereignty from the state and bestows the same power of sacrifice on every person, regardless of their station in life or ability to perpetrate violence. Whether all the intricacies of Gandhian thought are accepted or not, this idea of the fundamental strength resident in every human life, the ultimate equality in life and death, is part of the legacy of nonviolent protest. With this in mind, it should be evident that nonviolent noncooperation is the antithesis of civility. It is not compliance at all; rather it gives the oppressed the ability to claim their own freedom at an individual level, and in so doing to reject the standards of civilization that contain and criminalize them.

Civility and nonviolent noncompliance are not just etymological opposites; they are ideas that are ideologically in conflict with each other. One represents the status quo, while the other turns the status quo on its head by refusing to yield to the hollow authority of an unjust state. Thus, there is a real danger in repeatedly equating the two. When the word nonviolence takes on the meaning of civility, it is agreeing to the oppressor’s terms. Such a conflation leads to the pacification and suppression of the voices of the oppressed because civil nonviolence is, by definition, compliance with societal norms of credibility, legitimacy, and value. And while civil behavior is a threshold for basic respect and consideration, nothing can change.

Sources

Baltimore Police Department official Twitter account, Twitter post, April 27, 2015, 3:02 p.m., https://twitter.com/BaltimorePolice . Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Bold Type Books, 2017. Bates, Karen Grigsby. “When Civility Is Used as a Cudgel against People of Color.” NPR. NPR, March 14, 2019. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/03/14/700897826/when-civility-is-used-as-a-cudgel-against-people-of-color . Devji, Faisal. The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and The Temptation of Violence. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 2012.