An Important Point About Criticizing Protests

On this episode of Examining Ethics, the producers talk about the ethics of protests. Political protests were popular during the civil rights movement (e.g., the Freidmann Airfield protest, Martin Luther King Jr.'s protests, etc.) and have recently gained attention through Black Lives Matter. Many of these latter protests took heat from the media because of some of their disruptive elements, raising important questions about the appropriateness of criticizing protests. Here was an important point from the above episode that provoked my thinking (and engaged my heart):

Even if there are legitimate reasons to criticize the methods of some protests, we have to be careful that those reasons do not overshadow the justice of the cause and the legitimacy of the grievance. It would be easy to fixate on questions about the appropriateness of certain forms of protest and forget that there are unjust social circumstances creating an impetus for protest. While it seems undeniable to me that there can be moral grounds for criticizing certain forms of protest (some of the producers of the podcast are dubious about this point), it is the unjust social circumstances that demand our fullest attention. Let your attention be drawn to what matters most. 

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