In June 2015, a white supremacist opened fire inside the historic African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine black congregants, including the minister. The massacre sparked a crescendo of anti-racist protest, including often successful demands for the removal of statues of Confederate Generals from public spaces throughout the South.
Two years later, a coalition of white nationalists arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a “Unite the Right” rally aimed at protesting and reversing the local City Council’s decision to remove from the city’s center of a hundred year-old statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Also gathered in Charlottesville were civil rights activists who sought to support the city’s resolve in removing the statue, and to press for further reforms aimed at dismantling institutional white supremacy. The event turned violent after the white nationalists attacked the racial justice advocates with tiki torches, pepper spray and lighter fluid. Fights erupted, injuring at least 30 people. The weekend of protest ended when one of the white nationalists deliberately rammed his car into a crowd of antiracist counter-protesters, injuring 19 and killing one. Refusing to condemn either the goals or the actions of the white nationalists, President Trump commented that there were “very bad people … and very fine people on both sides.”
Trump was correct about that. In this encounter between white nationalists and civil rights activists, there were undoubtedly good individuals and bad individuals on both sides. How, then, can we judge which movement was the “good” one and which the “bad?”
The answer can be found in the sociological study of social movements. Over decades of focused research, the field has demonstrated that evaluating the moral compass of individual participants does little to advance our understanding of the morality or the actions of a large movement. Only by assessing the goals, tactics and outcomes of movements as collective phenomena can we begin to discern the distinction between “good” and “bad” movements.
