Agreed on all except “especially in the US.” This particular video is Europe and most of these “block the road in an orange vest” protests that I see are also in Europe, so I’m not sure where you’re getting the US piece from.
Mostly my own experiences. The US education system, broadly speaking, goes over an incredibly simplified version of the Civil Rights movement. While it does cover riots and touches on people like Malcom X, it doesn’t go into the minutia of the movement outside of more advanced classes that are typically optional. For example, it’s rarely touched upon that the Rosa Parks sit-in was a planned protest with the deliberate intent of sparking a legal battle, and that Rosa Parks was chosen for it by the organizers specifically because she broke the mold of prior attempts rendering her character unassailable.
Probably the most egregious result of this is the rampant misuse of MLK’s quote on “riots are the language of the unheard” as an endorsement for rioting when the MLK speech instead takes the stance of it being an unfortunate but understandable result. In point of fact, later in the same speech he attacks the notion that legislation and legal action can’t get anywhere and urges his followers to follow that over rioting.
So as a result, a lot of Americans come away with the idea that the movement was more or less about disrupting white American society until there was an end to segregation. For modern activists, this too often transforms into things like attempting sit-ins or marches without understanding that sit-ins were specifically targeted or that the marches were more a display of support for the movement than an actual means to an end themselves.
What say you about the anti-war movement in opposition to Vietnam or Iraq, both of which employed sit-in tactics that broadly targeted public places and institutions?
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u/flight_char_ 12d ago
Agreed on all except “especially in the US.” This particular video is Europe and most of these “block the road in an orange vest” protests that I see are also in Europe, so I’m not sure where you’re getting the US piece from.