LaGina Gause is an assistant professor in the political science department at UC San Diego and the author of “The Advantage of Disadvantage: Costly Protest and Political Representation for Marginalized Groups”
JUNE 5, 2022 6 AM PT
Although the act of people organizing and engaging in protest around issues that are important to them reaches far back in this country’s history, there continue to be collective misunderstandings about their usefulness, especially depending on who is protesting and how.
In her recent book, “The Advantage of Disadvantage: Costly Protest and Political Representation for Marginalized Groups,” LaGina Gause explores whether protest influences political representation and which groups of people seem most likely to benefit from this kind of collective action. She says this exploration started with a bit of frustration with how politics tends to overlook the same types of groups: low-income folks, Black and Latino people, and different racial and ethnic minorities. She noticed a particular narrative when groups who don’t typically receive representation do begin to receive it, and majority groups are credited with a kind of benevolence in granting that representation. She wanted to highlight times when marginalized groups have garnered that representation on their own, she says.
“A lot of my experience was that, a lot of times, these groups are often fighting for themselves and demanding the representation, but a lot of that effort is overlooked,” she says. “I wanted to use my research to highlight the times when those efforts pay off.”
Gause is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California San Diego, where she studies United States politics, with a focus on race, ethnicity, inequality, protest and representation. I spoke with her about her book last month, during an event organized by UC San Diego, and we revisited our conversation over the phone last week, where she took some time to talk about the perceptions of protests by different groups of people; what makes protesting more costly for some; and why the ways that we expect certain groups to respond to injustice can be seen as undemocratic. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: You open the book with the Boston Tea Party and this example in the collective understanding of protests in American history that involve destruction of property and other forms of violence when enacted by White people, versus non-White people. Typically, the Boston Tea Party is held up as an example of quintessential American strength and determination in the face of oppression. When non-White people engage in similar forms of this kind of collective action, those protests are characterized as criminal and illegitimate. What’s going on here? What did you find through the process of researching and writing your book about the difference between what happened then, and what seem to be similar forms of protest more recently?
A: Part of the reason why I started with the Boston Tea Party example is that, in a lot of this book, the argument is about how protests are beneficial for low-resource groups. I wanted to avoid the conversation around protests being illegitimate when we think about these groups, so I wanted to start with a protest that most Americans see as very patriotic and foundational for who we are as a country. I wanted to highlight how, even in this event that was very destructive, we look at it in a very honorific type of way. I wanted to start there to juxtapose it to these protests for similar types of equality and freedom that, when performed by people of color, are really demonized and criticized for being illegitimate and for being unpatriotic. Why is it that doing all of this property destruction and engaging in violence in the Boston Tea Party is praised, whereas, when it’s done by people of color, it’s something that’s looked at as illegitimate and undemocratic? Then, trying to put people in the frame of mind to understand some of the hypocrisy that I don’t think people are always aware of, even people who acknowledge the reasons for protests by people of color also sometimes engage in some of that criticism. I wanted to confront that early on in the book, to put people in the frame of mind that protest is actually a good thing, and we should actually think about the ways in which it can be beneficial and the ways that we are biased in the way we perceive different protests by different people.
Q: Can you briefly explain what you mean when you use terms like “low-resource groups”?
A: I think about resources as the things that make it easy to overcome the cost of participating in protests. Protest is costly: It takes time, it takes planning, being able to get across town to participate in an event, to get off work to be able to participate, to afford signs to put up at events, or have the knowledge or information about what the issue is, and who can be helpful in solving the concerns. Also, the public perceptions of protests, as well. We just talked about the different opinions that people have about protests based on who’s protesting, but also, those opinions help to justify different types of police actions. So, if a group is protesting and you believe that their protests, no matter how they do it, are illegitimate, undemocratic and criminal, then the public is usually more accepting of harsher police reactions — using rubber bullets, tasers, tear gas, and all of these crowd suppression techniques. If a group is perceived as protesting in patriotic or legal ways, those particular police tactics are less likely to be perceived as justifiable. A low-resource group is a group who tends to face higher costs of participation because of the perceptions of their protests, because of their monetary resources, because of their social capacity, as well. The ability to be in institutions that help you understand what political issues are and who to directly approach to address those issues, a lot of that we learn in school or in different types of community programs or those types of things. If you’re not in those spaces, you don’t know which particular council member, or which particular legislators are responsible for changing a particular situation. Those are the different types of resources that can help make protests easier, and groups who have less of those resources, I call those low-resource groups.
Q: You also mention some reasons why protests by Black, Indigenous and other people of color can escalate to violence. What were some of your findings?
A: There’s a lot of ways to think about violence in protests. One is the police reactions to protest. If you’re showing up to a protest and police are there in riot gear, that creates a very tense situation that can put people on edge and could invoke aggressive behaviors. One thing I think about is how, with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, there’s this narrative that they were violent and destructive. But there’s research by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman that shows that 97 percent of the protests that occurred in 2020 for Black Lives Matter were nonviolent. Even in that conversation about what a violent protest was, with property damage and destruction included, only 3 percent had any type of violence, including property damage. Those that did have violence, a lot of it was these intense interactions with police that were more oftentimes instigated by crowd suppression tactics. So, an event looks violent when tear gas is thrown into an audience and people start running off in many different directions, and injuries happen. That gets talked about as a violent protest, so that’s one way [of thinking about violence].
I also have research I’m working on that talks about how the perception of violence at an event is more likely to occur when it’s people of color versus when it’s a White population (and my research is focused mostly on race and ethnicity). The perception of violence is also more likely to occur when there are people of color participating, so this conversation about what a violent event is, I think, is very unhelpful sometimes because the perception of violence isn’t as accurate as what’s actually going on, on the ground. One way that people try to delegitimize protests, or try to justify police repression, is by calling an event violent. If you call it violent, then it’s OK that cops are engaging in these types of tactics, and it also tends to suppress protests. If you want to protest about an event, but then you’re concerned because you think the protest might be violent, you may not show up to participate as much. In one of the chapters of the book, I do talk about the Rodney King protests and how then-President George H.W. Bush, instead of talking about the issues that were being raised during the protests, focused on the violence and property destruction that occurred. In that case, it was pretty clear that there was violence and property destruction, but by focusing on the reaction of the people at the event instead of the actual issue, it helped to turn attention away from trying to resolve the problems that people were protesting about. U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters said that, yes, there was property damage and these other things, but why focus on that and not on all of these issues that she’d been trying to tell other elected officials about for so long. People were reacting, not because they were somehow irrational, but because they’d been dealing with very real issues in their neighborhoods. This one event was personifying all of the harm and frustration and injustice that they encountered on a day-to-day basis, but focusing on the violence was a way to avoid those conversations about the change that people wanted to have in their communities.
Q: In the book, you also talk about how then-President George H.W. Bush chose to focus on the property damage and violence during the Los Angeles uprising of 1992 (in response to the verdict of the trial of the police officers who brutally beat Rodney King). He characterized these forms of violence as having no place in civilized society, and you write that “… asking aggrieved populations not to express anger and outrage while confronting inhumane circumstances is unreasonable and perhaps undemocratic.” From a political science perspective, can you talk about how that call for calm and peaceful reaction in the face of violent injustice can be seen as undemocratic?
A: Part of this relates to the opening focus on the Boston Tea Party. The reason that they revolted was because they were facing unfair taxation, unfair governance from a body that was all the way across the ocean, and they had no representation in that government and they wanted more representation. That quote from the book came from talking about a time when there was footage of police brutally beating a man and then a failure to get convicted for those actions. People were very upset because here was a blatant example of the state abusing their power, and yet, there was still no justice for it. The immediate reaction [toward the people protesting] was “you should be peaceful, you should have calm, you should not be upset” and that’s not a reaction that has been universally expected of all people in a population. So, Juliet Hooker is a political theorist and author of “Black Protest / White Grievance: On the Problem of White Political Imaginations Not Shaped by Loss,” who talks about how Black people are asked to peacefully acquiesce to political loss over and over again, but the same is not required of White people. That is undemocratic because, in a democracy, losses must be distributed across groups.
Then, there’s also the fact that the demand for peace and calm is not something that is asked for from all people. One example that used to happen a lot was these sports events where a team would lose, and White people would burn cars and engage in property destruction, and there was no demand that they control their rage. The response was “these youthful kids are acting out”; but someone gets shot and killed, or attacked by police, and the narrative is immediately for people of color to be peaceful and calm. This comes not just from outside of the community, but even Black legislators and pastors and preachers are saying the same thing, that “you shouldn’t react to this, your reaction should be forgiveness, your reaction should be immediate acceptance, you should accept that this is just how things happen.” To trust the system even though the system has never really demonstrated that it will work in your favor, right? There’s a book called “The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics” by Davin Phoenix, who talks about this with lots of different data throughout U.S. history about how this happens consistently: When White people get angry, the response is to address their issues and figure out what’s wrong and how to fix the problem; when Black people get angry, they’re supposed to suppress that anger immediately and just accept the issues that are happening to them. That anger doesn’t need to be expressed violently; even in normal political participation, [that anger] is condemned and called something that shouldn’t be seen. That is the reason it’s undemocratic because it’s asking the same people, over and over again within the same democracy, to not expect justice, to not expect that the government will serve their interests; whereas, other people are expected, consistently, to get what they want and what they need without any concern for other people.
Q: Early in the book, you talk about how legislators can’t just ignore protests that don’t directly confront them or address specific legislation because that kind of collective action can still inform them about what’s important to their constituents and in the kind of representation they’ve been elected to carry out. That made me think about a lot of the anti-LGBTQ, and anti-trans, bills that are being passed in various states, as well as the anti-abortion legislation being drafted across the country. If legislators are typically more inclined to represent the interests of constituents who are wealthier and/or White, what’s your understanding of why some of these forms of collective action around these particular issues don’t seem to be resulting in the representation that polling has said those constituents want?
A: In a lot of these places, these are minority communities where they don’t have a big electoral voice, so they are overcrowded by a lot of people in the population. In the book, I do talk a bit about how, a lot of times, the reasons that these protests are effective for these groups is because these issues are very important to them and less important to the majority of the legislators’ districts, depending on the issue. A lot of the issues that you’re talking about are issues that are not just important to these populations, but there’s a lot of people in these districts who are also very supportive of these kinds of bills that are affecting a lot of minorities in these districts. The anti-LGBTQ bills are important to the LGBTQ community because they’re threatening a lot of members of those communities, but they’re also important to a lot of other people who also have strong opinions. So, when legislators are trying to decide whether to represent different groups, a lot of times they’re playing this electoral strategy of which groups are going to be the most critical for their reelection. In some of these places, the people [living] where these bills are being passed, are places where there’s a large population of people who are very supportive of these bills, which makes it really hard. If a legislator decided to oppose it, they risk electoral challenge. While this book talks about how protest is much more effective for low-resource groups than high-resource groups, it also talks about how part of this is an electoral strategy for legislators, where the reason they want to represent these groups is to avoid the kind of reelection challenges where these groups can cause them to become unelected. The places where we’re seeing more of these bills are places where legislators are less concerned about more liberal or progressive constituents being able to have a voice in their district because there’s just not enough of them to really challenge their reelection.
Q: What does your research tell you about what the potential legislative result could be of the recent protesting at the National Rifle Association conference in Texas last week, because of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, that killed two teachers and 19 children?
A: With this type of event, something that could be a big shift in the way that people think about gun legislation, there were a lot of things that went on that made it really look like the police, who are supposed to be able to handle more aggressive guns, should have been able to handle this situation and they weren’t. There’s a very vulnerable population of kids who were killed in schools and all of these other factors.
One of the things that’s been interesting is the narrative shifting that’s been happening in trying to reframe the issue. Conservatives seem like they were losing the issue and they were talking about gun control and gun legislation in ways that they haven’t in the past. They’ve been focusing more on having a single door entry because if there were a single door entry then maybe this wouldn’t have been an issue. Or, they’re talking more about how this is a failure of culture and not of guns. That, we have a culture where people don’t go to church as much as they used to, they’re being told that gender roles are different than they always thought, and that they’re acting out because they don’t have the foundation that they need. The argument is that a conservative ideology and religion and all of those things would give them that, and that’s the problem. It’s the argument that “we need to fix those issues and that’s why we’re banning books and getting rid of critical race theory because if we do those things, then gun violence is going to decrease.”
These are narratives that I hadn’t heard before in talking about gun control legislation, which, to me, makes it seem like they were losing the fight and needed to reframe. I’m not sure how successful they are in doing that right now, but if they were winning that conversation, that policy issue, they wouldn’t have needed to shift the narrative as much as they’re trying to do now to get people to focus less on changing gun legislation. I do think that shooting, as well as the ones in New York and also near L.A., have been getting a lot more people who were concerned about gun violence, but not as active in wanting to see change to speak out about it. I think we’ll still need time to figure out how this works, but I do think that a lot of the protests are putting conservatives on their heels because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be trying to shift the narrative.
Q: Later, you talk about how electoral insecurity makes legislators most responsive to Black and Latino protesters compared to White protesters, and that they’re concerned about the potential pushback at the ballot box from groups with salient issues. You go on to say that “legislators may have less constraining reelection concerns when representing constituents with similar preferences, for example, when districts are racially and ideologically homogenous.” Can you talk about the role of redistricting in achieving more equitable representation and in legislative responses to the concerns of constituents?
A: On a local level, that can be helpful. If you have people who have similar concerns, similar issues, then it’s easier to represent them consistently because there’s not a concern about angering other people. So, a legislator who’s dealing with a district that is pretty homogenous and has pretty similar concerns, is less concerned about frustrating any other people in their districts because there are fewer people who disagree. I wouldn’t necessarily say that gerrymandering is always a good thing; it works well on a local level, but on a national level, it tends to lead to less representation for a lot of different groups. If you have legislators who are representing minority groups, then when they get to Congress and they’re only accountable to the districts that they’re representing, you have this kind of tyranny with the majority again where the people who have a voice are the ones who are able to represent or be present and in more districts across the U.S. It does make it harder, on a national level, for a lot of these issues to be represented if you have fewer people in Congress who are accountable to those groups.
Q: Did your research lead you to any takeaways on what successful strategies for protest may look like going forward?
A: I don’t know, part of that is because I highlight one aspect of protests that makes it costly in a way that helps people understand why people care. That’s not the only aspect that people care about. Having a lot of people protest at an event is another indicator of people willing to pay a lot of costs to participate. If thousands of people participate in an event, you can’t really say that no one cares about the issue. Also, protesting for a really long time, spending weeks protesting about something, I think, is a stronger signal than something that only happened once on one day.
I think one strategy would be trying to think about ways to demonstrate how much a group cares about an issue and doing that in a creative way. I don’t think this is new in the protest and social movement literature. Being able to creatively come up with a novel way of demonstrating that you’re really interested in something is even more capable of catching the attention of the media or the public or legislators. I just think one of the major benefits of this book is highlighting that there are these groups of people who we overlook often, who are able to speak out for themselves and voice their opinions, and actually be heard in ways that can be effective. People who care about these issues shouldn’t look at those protests and immediately condemn them out of a misperception of what protest means.
