U.S. Political Protest

People can articulate new values through their dress, lifestyles, music, and consumption patterns. In the 1960s and 1970s, the way young people wore their hair made symbolic statements against the dominant value system. When African-American youth wore their hair naturally in "Afros," they were asserting race pride and protesting the power of the dominant white culture to prescribe what was "good" or "pretty" hair (i.e., straightened). Men and women can perform gender in ways that protest dominant images. During the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s, men wearing their hair long was in part a symbolic protest against corporate dress styles and the close-cropped heads of the military.

Political cartoons, some quite scatological, have often lampooned government officials and corporate tycoons. While often humorous, political cartoons also protest in line and ink the transgressions and foibles of the powerful. Making fun of powerful people in this way "brings them down to size," so to speak, and helps citizens conceptualize that the people in power are just like them. Tyrannical regimes, then, expend a lot of energy trying to silence the free press, artists, and performers who dare to poke fun at them and thus make them seem simply human.

In addition to visual art, music has the potential for unobtrusive mobilization and dissent. For instance, some slave songs tolerated by slaveholders as innocent and benign were actually songs of pride, solidarity, and liberation. Drawing upon the Jewish people's escape from slavery in Egypt as told in Exodus, one powerful slave song states, "When Israel was in Egypt's land—Let my people go—Oppressed so hard they could not stand—Let my people go." Here religious beliefs and subversive speech are intertwined within a song. One scholar explains, "Thus in the Christian as well as the Jewish tradition the embedded heritage of God's implacable opposition to oppression gave subordinate groups a strong claim for rectification of wrongs rooted in the unjust power that one group could wield against another" (Mansbridge, p. 3). When regimes officially repress dissent, it often goes underground into clandestine newspapers, songs, legends, art, jokes, and satire that skewer the powerful and build a community of dissent and networks for protest and political challenges when the opportunities arise.

Examples of songs with political messages include Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land"; Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changing"; James Brown's "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud"; "Bread and Roses," written by James Oppenheim in 1912 and adopted by the labor movement; "We Shall Overcome," a gospel song adapted as a civil rights anthem; and "Jesus Loves the Little Children," an innocent indoctrination in human equality.