Better Than A Bystander
Critique of Trump supporters’ platform from the last episode was met with some backlash. And no, it wasn’t from the people who *are* Trump supporters. It was from those who actively oppose him. I can’t say I’m surprised. Outspoken women have not been the ideal for, well, all of time. In this episode, I parse out which of us are ‘bystanders’ and draw on Black history to show the power of bystanders to drive social justice.
Topics Covered:
Diffusion Of Innovations: How many bystanders are there among us?
White middle class in 1960s’ role in the Civil Rights Movement
Why did a woman who refused to move to the back of the bus 9 months before Rosa Parks become an icon?
What ‘bystanders’ did for the Black Lives Matter Movement
Episode Transcript
(00:00):
If you're ever labeled as aggressive if you speak up for somebody, just to know that you have actually succeeded, because that person is clearly more concerned with maintaining the status quo as opposed to doing something right. So if someone calls you a bitch, you're doing right.
Okay, y'all, it has been about a month since I've been on here with an episode and I am so sorry about that. I think I'm going to blame it part on depression and part on dealing with some not-so-great feedback from people for my last episode, where I interviewed the president for the Texas Federation for Republican Women. If you didn't listen to that, you should check that out, so this whole thing makes a little bit more sense to you. I'll admit that that episode was the most opinionated one that I've had. My previous eight episodes were really just strictly facts and I didn't voice my own opinion or anything, but this last episode was honestly the most me. It was all thoroughly researched, but I did allow myself to express how I felt. If there were things that I thought were horrendously incorrect or immoral, I did express that.
Anyway, I feel like the most appropriate topic of this episode is going to be about bystanders. So we're going to go through the social mechanics of the part bystanders play in social change. You could turn off this podcast or you could hang on and learn why and how you should be a disruptor yourself. And I always choose the latter. So I hope you do too, but I will warn you. This will not be a path to making you the most likable person because out of personal experience, I will say that rejecting the bystander role doesn't make you very popular, but it's worth it. That is that. This is The World We Inherit. And I'm your host, Anita Kirti. Thanks for listening.
There is this idea in public health called the diffusion of innovation. It's a theory that explains how new ideas or technologies are spread and accepted by society. And it's this bell curve that is separated into four sections. And you can treat this as like a personality quiz if you'd like, as I'm describing these.
The very edge of the bell curve, you have the innovators. So there are about 2.5% of the population. Innovators are just, as they sound, they're the people who create new ideas and obviously they're not that many people who do that.
Following them are the early adopters and they make about 13.5% of the population. These are your opinion leaders. They take on leadership roles and are usually really comfortable with taking on new ideas as well.
Following that group is the early majority. These people make up 34% of the population. These people need a little bit more coaxing. They need a little more evidence to convince them of new ideas, but likely to take on new ideas than an average person. And they're a little bit skeptical of new things.
And then following them is the late majority, which is 34% of the population as well. They are the people who are only going to take on a new idea of technology after a majority of the population has done so. So, usually they look for other people to confirm whether or not they should accept an idea.
And then at the very end you have laggards and they make up 16% of the population. These people are conservative, they are very skeptical of new ideas, and are usually more fearful and are the hardest to convince to adopt something new.
Basically all of that to say that we can consider the early majority, late majority, and laggards as more likely to be or bystander people, the people who aren't going to really speak up when something wrong is being said or happening. And they make up 84% of the population. And it's really understandable. Evolutionarily, we want to create social cohesion. We want other people to accept us. If society doesn't accept us, our chances of survival are much less. So it's not surprising that it takes a long time for social change to occur. And it also explains why so many people are uncomfortable with disrupting the things around them. And this theory also explains why so many people are likely to criticize you if you are questioning established ideas.
The first point I want to make is that those empower, act as gatekeepers of social change, deciding whether or not a movement is going to be successful, or if it's going to fail. So to look at it from a broader perspective, in society, each of us has some amount of power, some more than others, but when you choose to not speak up because it doesn't affect you, you essentially forgo your power to the people at the top. The people who have the most power that will make consequential decisions for social movements. Let me explain that through the 1960s civil rights movement.
To set the scene, at this time, the civil rights movement of the '60s was mostly composed of black people. There were very few white people that supported the movement or even approved of it. In a Gallup Poll in May of 1961, they found that 61% of white people at the time disapproved of the freedom writers and only 22% approved of them. So white middle-class people were allowing for politicians and legislators to ignore the civil rights movement by not throwing their weight behind it, out of self-interest and prejudice, making it very difficult for the civil rights movement to make any progress. I actually want to tell a story that illustrates this really well.
Now, if I say, who was the person to refuse to go to the back of the bus? Everybody will think of Rosa Parks, but interestingly enough, a woman named Claudette Colvin had done the exact same thing nine months prior to Rosa Parks in the same exact city, in the same exact bus system. She was taken off the bus, handcuffed, and even put in jail, but nobody heard about it. And years later, she said that the NAACP at the time and other black organizations didn't think that Claudette would be a good icon because Rosa Parks image is more palatable to white people. She said, "Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle-class. She fit that profile." And that's a very telling story because that demonstrates that the civil rights leaders themselves were trying to convince white middle-class people to support their cause and how much it would mean for the strength of the movement if they had that support.
Only recently, in the summer of 2020, we saw what it would look like if people who have no skin in the game chose to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing. And I'm referring to the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. You had people from all races and classes supporting the movement, which strengthened the movement substantially. Though there was a difference in degree, people across the political spectrum did move closer to supporting the purpose of the movement. I think this was a great example of people taking back their power. In that people who previously didn't concern themselves with this issue, decided to reclaim their voice and speak up for the black community.
Previous to that shift, people from 2013 to 2019, allowed for those in power, like your legislators, politicians, corporations, all of these people to write the narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement and create a stigma around it. The women who originated the movement, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, they worked all of these years to expand local chapters and keep the movement running even when popular culture painted the Black Lives Matter movement to be extremists.
According to The New York Times, the Black Lives Matter movement actually had a net negative approval rating in 2018. And then later on when it starts becoming popular and more and more of the country starts accepting the Black Lives Matter movement in 2019 and 2020, you get to July 2020. And according to Monmouth University, 71% of Americans agree that the Black Lives Matter movement was critical to bringing attention to racial disparities, while in 2016, that was only 58%. And now more so than ever, because we were comparing the 1960s civil rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, that we have more variables in our favor. Now because of social media and technology, we are able to communicate with one another, which democratizes the conversation on race and many other issues, something that people in the '60s obviously didn't have.
My overall point is, I hope that you're inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and you see how impactful it can be when bystanders defend oppressed minorities. So the next time you think that what you're doing or saying doesn't matter, look to that. Like this podcast is not The Oprah Winfrey Show, but in a small way, I feel like I'm contributing to the larger picture. And frankly, I don't care if that upsets people.
I wanted to tack one last thing onto this. And this is for women specifically, which are the majority of my listeners. Hi, y'all. If you're ever labeled as aggressive or combative or annoying if you speak up for somebody, just to know that you have actually succeeded, because that person is clearly more concerned with maintaining the status quo, as opposed to doing something right. They don't have a logical repartee for anything you have to say. So if someone calls you a bitch, you're doing something right.
Okay, I'll end it there. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. Even if you didn't like it, please subscribe. This is The World We Inherit. And I'm your host, Anita Kirti.
Works Cited
Adler, Margot, and Phillip Hoose. “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin.” NPR,
NPR, 15 Mar. 2009,
www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-there-was-claudette-colvin.
Cohn, Nate, and Kevin Quealy. “How Public Opinion Has Moved on Black Lives Matter.” The
New York Times, The New York Times, 10 June 2020,
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html.
Izadi, Elahe. “Black Lives Matter and America's Long History of Resisting Civil Rights
Protesters.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 29 Apr. 2019,
www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/19/black-lives-matters-and-americas
-long-history-of-resisting-civil-rights-protesters/.
LaMorte, Wayne. “Diffusion of Innovation Theory.” Behavioral Change Models, Boston
University School of Public Health, 9 Sept. 2019,
sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/mph-modules/sb/behavioralchangetheories/behavioralchangeth
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Murray, Patrick. Monmouth University Poll, 2020, NATIONAL: PARTISANSHIP DRIVES
LATEST SHIFT IN RACE RELATIONS ATTITUDES,
www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/documents/monmouthpoll_us_070820.pdf/.
Sugrue, Thomas J. “2020 Is Not 1968: To Understand Today's Protests, You Must Look Further
Back.” History & Culture: Race In America, National Geographic, 25 Aug. 2020,
www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/06/2020-not-1968/.