Masses of African-American men from around the country converged on Washington, D.C., in October of 1995 for the Million Man March. Speakers included Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Dick Gregory, and Maya Angelou.
Unable to afford the trip to the nation’s capital, 15-year-old Daniel Q. Gillion attended a protest event in Miami that coincided with the March, and was organized by local churches and chapters of the NAACP. Hundreds of similar demonstrations were held across the nation.
A south Florida native, Gillion walked for hours in the autumn rain, calling for action and demanding justice and equality. The protest, he says, had an enduring impact on him. Although physically draining, it was emotionally fulfilling—but he left wondering if the chorus of speeches, remonstrations, and rallies made any sort of difference, or if anything had changed.
“I didn’t know what had changed because it wasn’t tangible for me,” says Gillion, the Presidential Associate Professor of Political Science in the School of Arts & Sciences and a Penn Fellow. “And that stuck with me. That moment definitely motivated me to get the answer.”
In the course of his undergraduate and graduate studies at Florida State University, where he majored in international political affairs and received his master’s in applied American politics and policy, and his graduate work at the University of Rochester, where he received a second master’s degree and a Ph.D. in political science, the question lingered. Some of his doctoral professors claimed that protests had no influence, which only intensified his search for a definitive answer. He found one while earning his doctorate. He completed his dissertation on how protests can have an impact, using empirical mathematical skills to put forth quantitative, quantifiable, and conclusive proof that protests do indeed matter.
“Now I feel like I do have the answer, and I have it in a way that’s coherent, very detailed, and not only theologically grounded, but it’s also grounded with empirical evidence,” he says. “Especially nowadays, when you see all these protests taking place, if there’s another young man or woman like me who’s engaged in these activities who wonders if they’re making a difference, it feels good to say, ‘I have the answer to that.’”
The Current sat down with Gillion in his office in Stiteler Hall to discuss his interest in political science, the power of protest, online activism, the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter, presidents and race, and African Americans’ support for the Democratic Party.
How did you become interested in political science? Were you always interested in politics?
Not initially. To be honest with you, I wanted to do medicine. I was in a group called Health Occupations Students of America in high school and I liked that component, but then when I got to college, I wasn’t a huge fan of the hard science STEM courses. I actually spent a year in València, Spain, and it just opened my eyes to the world around me. When I came back, I had a different focus, more on sociology, more on politics. At the end of the day, I decided to apply to law school and to a graduate program in political science, and I decided to go with political science.
Was there something you experienced in Spain that made you shift your focus?
I think I got really caught up in the perceptions of racial and ethnic minorities in Spain. There are a lot of things that I liked about Spain and I still love about Spain, but in terms of the racial component, it wasn’t all that great. There’s a lot of discrimination that exists. It’s a really interesting dynamic: You’re in Spain and people see your color and they think negatively about that, but they hear you’re an American, and they think positively of that, so it’s almost like this competing force. Many times, the negative aspect of my skin tone resonated with them, and it got me really involved in racial and ethnic minority concerns in Spain. When I came back to the States, I was very much involved in racial and ethnic minority concerns in the U.S. I already had a fire in me for those things, but seeing them not only on the domestic level, but on the international level, rekindled that flame.
Is there a lot of racial discrimination in south Florida?
It has a rough history. I will say that once you pass West Palm Beach and you’re going down, it’s a new type of Florida. Above West Palm Beach is really like southern Georgia. Central Florida and northern Florida have many issues with race. The infamous Rosewood town [a white mob massacred and burned down a black community in 1923] is located there, and more contemporarily, there was the Trayvon Martin shooting. In Miami and Fort Lauderdale, where I grew up and was born and raised, less so. It’s more of a melting pot or a fruit bowl, or whatever you want to call it. It has a diversity that isn’t seen throughout the nation. But I went to school in Tallahassee in northern Florida, and there for sure was a decent amount of discrimination. We would have to drive through central Florida to get up there. I never received a speeding ticket, but I’ve been stopped about six times.
Your first book, published in 2013, was ‘The Political Power of Protest: Minority Activism and Shifts in Public Policy.’ You mentioned the influence of the Million Man March. What other factors contributed to your interest in protests?
I went to a Ph.D. program that was a highly regarded political science program, especially at the time, that focused a lot on quantitative analysis. But while I was there and I’m learning about these different subject matters, I learned that people didn’t believe—especially in that department and outside of the department—that protests mattered. They didn’t believe that it had an effect. I shouldn’t put forth this critique only to Rochester because I think the critique exists within political science as a whole. The byline is that voting matters because it’s connected to the political system. It’s actually institutionalized. Anything outside of that institutionalization is nothing but white, random noise, if you will. Now, I’m hearing this knowing that I have a grandmother who taught with Coretta Scott King and who was very much involved in the Civil Rights Movement. I have a father who was very much involved in political activism. And in the black community in general, individuals are engaging in protest activities with the belief that it matters, it’s bringing about change. So I had that background coming in and I was listening to these academic professors who were, in many cases, my advisers, telling me that protest doesn’t matter at all. That’s what motivated me.
There are people who argue that the Civil Rights Movement had no effect?
Yes. They would argue that the protests in the Civil Rights Movement, the actual actions of engaging in protest, didn’t have an effect, but rather, the violence being seen on television might have had an effect. They argue that it’s not the actual people marching on the streets that are moving people to the left, or to the right, or what have you. They will argue as well that the likelihood for Lyndon B. Johnson to put forth the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was something done because he was putting forth the dying wishes of John F. Kennedy. They would say it’s international pressures, that the international community saw people having dogs sicced on them and water hoses put on them, and as a result, they wanted to appease the international community. They have every single excuse you can think of.
Am I correct that in ‘The Political Power of Protest,’ you were able to show a correlation between the amount of protests and the number of times a Congressperson votes for a particular bill?
Protest is related to not only the frequency in which politicians support bills that mirror the concerns of the protestors, but also the direction in which politicians vote, Congressional leaders in particular. That’s for Congress. For the president, protest activity is correlated with the frequency in which presidents offer statements and put forth executive orders that mirror the concerns of protestors. And for the Supreme Court, it’s correlated to the number of cases in which the Supreme Court takes that deal with what the protestors are espousing. And these are all around race, so protest increases the number of racial and ethnic minority cases, it increases the racial and ethnic minority dialogue for the president in the executive orders that deal with race, and for Congressional leaders, it increases the number of bills that deal with race. That’s sort of the simplistic connection. The theoretical foundation of that is protests serve as a signal for politicians. What protest does is allows politicians to gauge what the concerns are in the district, what the concerns are in America. One major component of the book is that I look at protests within a representative’s backyard. If we study protests within individuals’ Congressional districts, we find a huge impact. The more we see protests in a Congressional leader’s district, the more likely he or she is to put forth a bill that supports the protestors’ concerns.
Does a protest need to take a certain size, shape, or form in order to be effective? How do you define a protest?
When I say protest, I’m not saying an event occurs or an event doesn’t occur. It’s not simply that we see protests and that’s it, and protest is this sort of bubble. I don’t refer to protests as just simply protests, but rather I capture the contexts of protests. By that I mean I look at how many people are involved, how long did the protest last, was there an interest group, like the NAACP, that was involved, was there an arrest made, was there a death? These various factors give protests some contexts, and that’s exactly what a politician is doing. They’re looking at these things and they’re seeing the context of these protests. I aggregate each of those attributes so a protest can have a score that ranges between zero and nine, based on the nine different attributes.
How would you score a protest like the recent Women’s March?
We would have to look at the Women’s March and see. Was it a large protest event? I would say that it was. Did it persist over time? In this case, I think it occurred in one day. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was 381 days so it’s not on that level, but there were interest groups involved. I didn’t see it get violent. The police were present. We didn’t have any deaths. It’s not scoring high on that scale. What also dampens the effect of these protests is that a few days later, we saw a conservative protest. I view the women’s rights protest as more of a liberal protest. You have this liberal protest that takes place, and then a couple of days later, you have a conservative protest that pushes back, so individuals in office can gravitate toward the more conservative voices and say, ‘Even though you have these liberal voices that are talking, we still have these conservative voices.’ So even if it moves the needle, it’s not moving the needle as much. If the conservative voices begin to die out, or the liberal protests, such as the women’s rights protest, become more contentious and last for a longer period of time, it’s going to have a stronger impact. It’s difficult to assess the impact today, but we’ll know soon enough over the next couple of months whether or not it should have an effect. These women’s rights protests might not be effective at changing, let’s say, the opinion of President Donald Trump, but they might be effective at putting more Congressional bills on the table that deal with women’s issues, or the Supreme Court might be more likely to take on transgender issues or issues that deal with reproductive rights.
What about Black Lives Matter protests?
One of the important things about Black Lives Matter protests is that they were able to set the agenda. Once again, it’s this signal that protest sends that allows individuals to say, ‘This issue is important.’ What Black Lives Matter did was it allowed the issues dealing with race to become more salient. This was important even when you had a black president in office. Some might assume that he’s automatically thinking about these things on a daily basis and that’s just not true. Black Lives Matter made it into an issue in a way that was greater than what President Obama had thought about, and also other actors like [California Congresswoman] Maxine Waters or other representatives in office. They began to pay attention to these issues in the same way that the Rodney King riots pushed Maxine Waters in a direction in which she started to focus more on racial and ethnic minority concerns in south central Los Angeles. Before the Rodney King riots occurred, she was very much concerned about issues in Africa, issues around women’s rights on an international platform. Even though some might think that minority representatives in office are already thinking about race, this notion of protests signaling and informing politicians works not only for non-minority representatives, but it also works for minority representatives.
A lot of protests or activism these days seem to take place online. Do you think online protests are an effective way to protest?
I’m actually in the process of writing a third book on protest and I’m talking about these things right now, connecting protest activity with Tweets and Facebook posts by members of Congress. I have put forth a term called the ‘electronic constituency,’ and I believe that’s a real thing where you have a constituency that might not be in a Congressional member’s backyard, but might be the group of people that follow them on Twitter, or the group of individuals that look at their Facebook posts. Clearly, we’re seeing the electronic constituency with Donald Trump. He is literally going to his electronic constituency when he wants to say something, when he wants to do something. Protests, I think, can be equally effective. If something takes place in the world around us and politicians have Twitter accounts and Facebook—and a majority of them do—if they get enough pushback, enough comments and critiques about what they’ve done, they’re likely to change their opinion, they’re likely to change their stance. If nothing else, they’re now aware of the issue. Once again, it’s that signaling that informs politicians of what’s taking place, and that’s what the electronic constituency is doing. It’s now putting the issue on the table. I very much believe that the electronic constituency is important, it matters, and it’s having an effect, and it’s having even more of an effect as society begins to embrace these media platforms as ways of normal communication.
Your most recent book is ‘Governing with Words: The Political Dialogue on Race, Public Policy, and Inequality in America.’ Can you talk about the book?
What this book does is it first revisits an old debate that exists not only in political science, but in sociology, history, and other fields, and that is whether talking about race to try and pass public policy is helpful or hurtful. That has been the debate for a long time. It’s race-conscious policies versus race-neutral policies, and what’s the best approach? This debate, I think, within the last 10 years, has come back to the forefront because I believe we had a president in office who felt that the best way to address issues and concerns was to take more of a race-neutral rhetorical approach to things. Especially in his first term in office, President Obama moved away from talking explicitly about race. It’s all this fear of talking about race, and that fear is alive. This is the reason why President Obama didn’t speak as much about race. He felt like if he spoke about race, he would ostracize individuals and he would receive a negative blowback and a pushback, and that would hurt his approval rating and hurt his ability to pass policy. That’s the setup for the entire book. I come in with that notion and I say, ‘What’s the evidence for this?’ Every academic with an argument provides rich theories, and they even provide some historical context, and maybe one or two case studies, but there’s no real live, empirical, quantifiable data that backs up what they say. Theoretically, I don’t believe that it’s the case that discussing race in government leads to a negative result because I believe that words can be empowering; you can persuade colleagues and you can persuade individuals.
I looked at every single statement made by presidents going back to 1955, and every single statement made by Congressional leaders going back to 1990, and then I looked at the effect that these statements have on a policy’s success. I literally track every single discussion, every State of the Union address, every television interview that the president put forth, and every single statement that Congressional leaders put forth on the House floor. If you look at the influence, when presidents speak about racial and ethnic minority concerns, they’re able to influence minorities’ discussions of issues like health. If the president talks about race and health, minorities are more likely to pay attention to health, and it’s more likely to change their opinion on health, and change their behavior. It increases health awareness in the minority community. Congressional leaders who speak more about racial and ethnic minority concerns actually have more co-sponsors on their bills, and their bills are more likely to pass.
You teach a graduate course called ‘Modern Presidency and Race.’ What does the course entail?
It looks at how contemporary presidents address issues of race. We’ve looked at presidents from Eisenhower on up to President Obama. When I teach it again, for sure we’re going to include Trump in the mix. The course looks at their unique approaches to addressing race.
Do any presidents stand out?
If I was quantifying their successes, I might give it to Johnson. Johnson had pieces of legislation that really made a major impact. We could say it was Congress that passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but Johnson was instrumental in getting that bill passed. That fact that he had been in the House and Senate for a while was very much helpful in getting it to pass. He knew how to wheel and deal, and talk to certain people. But then he follows that up with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, so it’s not just a one-off. He’s continuing to push forth policies. That’s in terms of actually policy action. In terms of rhetoric, I have to give it to Clinton. This was somebody who woke up talking about race, he went to sleep talking about race. He was someone who was very much an advocate for racial and ethnic equality, but it’s harder to find the policies that brought about change.
What about President Obama?
President Obama will be viewed as someone that is an inspiration to the black community. I felt he was an amazing president, but if we’re talking just about racial and ethnic minority concerns, I thought he was good, but I felt there was more he could have done. Some say there’s less he could have done because he’s black; I think there’s more he could have done because he is black, and the opportunity wasn’t taken up. We see with Trump, he’s taking advantage of every opportunity he can to roll back some of the advances we’ve seen over time.
Along with colleagues Jonathan Ladd and Marc Meredith, you are conducting research for working paper tentatively titled, ‘The Push and Pull of African Americans’ Support for the Democratic Party.’ What has your research shown so far?
It’s a very interesting piece, and that piece is very simple: African Americans have what is called a Democratic crutch. They go toward the Democratic Party when times are bad, and then they leave the Democratic Party when times are good. We track party identification of African Americans for 50-60 years, and we look at the time periods when blacks had strife and contention, so during the Civil Rights Movement, more individuals were willing to identify with the Democratic Party, but then immediately after that, we saw identification with the Democratic Party begin to slow down a little bit. Under President Obama, many people went away from the Democratic Party; now under President Trump, people are moving back toward the Democratic Party, so we argue that it’s the Democratic crutch. There are ebbs and flows in how people identify with political parties. Most people think African Americans just always support the Democratic Party. That’s not true. A lot of times they say that because they’re looking just at the electoral outcomes, and it is the case that African Americans are very much supportive of the Democratic Party during presidential elections, but even there, there are some ebbs and flows if you look down ballot, if you look at Congressional races and things like that. The ebbs and the flow, we know, are related to the good times and the bad times, which is understandable because now you have an institutional mechanism that can bring about change when you take on that party banner.
By and large, African Americans have been the Democratic Party’s most loyal supporters for more than half a century. Do you think African Americans’ seemingly steadfast support for the national Democratic Party is a negative or unconstructive thing in terms of politics and influence?
I’ll say this: It is a good thing if the Democratic Party is willing to be supportive of minority issues—and black issues in particular. I think it’s a good thing because you need those numbers, you need that solidarity. It’s not a good thing if the black community blindly follows the Democratic Party, regardless of what they do or they don’t do. It’s not a good idea to simply give the Democratic Party a pass when they don’t have the best interests in mind for the African-American community, and that’s regardless of who the leaders might be. I was somewhat critical of President Obama’s tacit approach to talking about race in his first term. He’s in the Democratic Party and he happens to be an African American, but at the end of the day, it’s not about him, it’s about government trying to improve the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, and any way we can bring that about is fine with me. I think when the Democratic Party has the black community’s best interests in mind, I think individuals should coalesce around that particular group. But when they don’t or when they’re lackadaisical with their support, there should be this sort of threat to leave, or even a willingness to hear whoever is willing to act in the best interests of the black community.
