When protests aren't for yourself

Week 5 blogpost

In the film Crip Camp, the activists demonstrated the importance of visibility for a movement to gain any sort of success. Their issues weren’t being taken seriously until they grouped together in one place and caused enough of an inconvenience to finally be noticed by the apathetic public and lawmakers. Like many movements based around civil rights, by gathering in protest the activists are fighting for themselves as people who are directly affected by unjust laws. Other types of activism on issues with less straightforward, direct impacts on the activists involved, or based around the rights and protections for groups other than themselves face various issues when utilizing the same strategy of protest. For climate movements the activists are covering an issue that impacts the planet rather, so even when they draw eyes to the movement, it is more difficult to humanize the issue. For movements centered around fair labor regulations, the affected people are often overseas or in situations where they themselves can’t afford to be protesting. While something like a sit-in can draw attention to the issue, it is much harder to create solutions when often the people who have anything to do with the labor might not even know there’s a protest happening. In 2000, students at the University of Pennsylvania held a sit-in to protest Penn U clothing being made in sweatshops. The University President capitulated to the demands and withdrew from the Fair Labor Association and joined the Workers Rights Consortium which better ensured a lack of sweatshop labor. It was a success on the scale of the school, but one student put it well when referring to protests of the sort, “I think protesting sweatshops is a good cause and all, but I wonder how much Penn can really do to effect change. And I wonder if the people in charge of the sweatshops even know that Penn is protesting.”

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/node/148790