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WE NEED “OUTSIDE AGITATORS”  
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Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix
May 4, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Pro-Palestine student protesters are being smeared as puppets of
shadowy “outside agitators.” The presence of community members and
experienced activists in the protests is nothing to be ashamed of: we
need outside agitators to build a better world. _

Columbia University student protesters, Photo: Gabriella Gregor
Splaver

 

These days, outside agitators are everywhere. According to
politicians, police commissioners, university administrators, and
mainstream journalists they lurk on every campus where there has been
resistance to the unfolding genocide in Gaza, especially at the
solidarity encampments. Emory University president Gregory Fenves
complained that “highly organized, outside protesters” were behind
the school’s pro-peace demonstrations. The University of Texas at
Austin followed suit, releasing a statement expressing “concern that
much of the disruption on campus over the past week has been
orchestrated by people from outside the University, including groups
with ties to escalating protests at other universities around the
country.” In a story that ran under the headline “Professional
protestors of Texas unmasked,” the _Daily Mail_ salaciously
reported that the infiltrators included an elementary school teacher,
a Palestinian shopkeeper, an interpreter, and a costume designer.

No one has sounded the alarm louder than New York City’s compulsive
liar mayor, Eric Adams, who has complained that “outside
agitators” are out to “radicalize our children” — the
implication being that young people would be quiescent in the face of
mass starvation and bombardment if not for some nefarious external
influence. Recently, the city released data that purportedly bolstered
his claims: approximately a third of the people arrested during
protests at Columbia University and 60 percent of those arrested at
City College of New York were not “affiliated” with those schools.

Encampment sympathizers understandably responded to these accusations
by arguing that allegedly “unaffiliated” outsiders are, more often
than not, actually insiders of a kind. Progressive journalists and
online commentators have highlighted how students from other schools,
alumni, community members, curious onlookers, veteran activists, and
the like all have legitimate ties to local campuses, and thus their
presence hardly merits concern, let alone panic (particularly at City
College, which is only one of twenty-five colleges in the City
University of New York system, and students of the other twenty-four
schools could be included in the city’s number of allegedly
unaffiliated arrestees).

Without a doubt, there’s truth to such retorts. But they also risk
playing into the hands of our opponents. To affirm that the majority
of protesters are “insiders” as opposed to “outsiders” only
aids those who want to create fissures and foment distrust in order to
divide and conquer our movements. It’s a way of denying the rights
of activists to share lessons, learn from movement elders, and
collaborate across communities — in other words, to properly and
effectively organize.

The “outside agitator” charge is a way to isolate individuals and
create social separation, when the reality is that injustice of any
kind, but especially war, necessarily concerns us all. On the issue of
genocide, there should be no outside.

Nobody Is Outside Solidarity

Of course, outsiders of a certain ilk can occasionally be destructive.
They might be real infiltrators (e.g., undercover cops or federal
agents) or people acting in bad faith and looking to hijack a cause
for their own purposes. But these aren’t the outsiders that we are
being instructed to worry about by today’s pundits.

Consider the _Wall Street Journal_’s reporting on the fact that
some Columbia students had consulted veterans of the Black Panther
Party, as though this were scandalous. The fact that protesters share
knowledge and expertise with each other or seek out the wisdom of
their elders is galling to the authorities, who respond by painting
the demonstrations as not only overrun by outsiders but also corrupted
by “paid” activists or “chaos professionals.”

The _New York Times_ beat this drum when it ran not one
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discussing “professional agitator” Lisa Fithian, the legendary
nonviolent direct action trainer, who was filmed outside Columbia’s
Hamilton Hall as it was being occupied. Fithian was there providing
nonviolent direct action training to the students, as she has done for
activists from a range of movements going back decades.

Why are outside agitators so threatening to the powers that be? The
answer is that outsiders are a special kind of solidarity builder,
even when they remain at a distance and lack any particularly useful
skills or insights. Anyone who has been part of a movement knows how
much displays of solidarity matter.

For example, we will never forget the hundreds of pizzas people from
across the country purchased and delivered to the Occupy Wall Street
encampment, each box a reminder that someone, somewhere believed the
uprising mattered. Something similar happened in 2014 when Palestinian
activists advised Black Lives Matters protesters in Ferguson,
Missouri, on how to cope with state violence (“Always make sure to
run against the wind / to keep calm when you’re teargassed, the pain
will pass, don’t rub your eyes! #Ferguson Solidarity”). Being
buoyed by people you don’t know is emboldening and galvanizing, and
helps weave local acts of resistance into larger, more powerful
narratives and coalitions.

A Black Lives Matter protester in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 17,
2014. (Wikimedia Commons)

This is something to celebrate, not shy away from. Outside agitators
are a necessary part of progressive social transformation. People
supporting and joining far-flung movements, acting responsibly and
with a good dose of humility, is a wonderful thing — as is younger
organizers learning from people who have more experience.

As we detail in _Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a
World-Changing Idea,_ outside agitators have always played a pivotal
role in struggles for a more just world. Historically, solidarity has
been sabotaged by elites who sow division to maintain their power,
including by splintering and segregating people spatially and
socially. A lack of regular social contact across differences inhibits
solidarity in obvious ways: physical separation abets psychological
separation. And yet solidarity can also thrive as a result of the
perspective distance brings. This is particularly true when divides
are intentionally breached.

Over the centuries, committed outsiders have advanced the cause of
solidarity, often at great personal risk, overcoming social barriers
and expanding people’s conception of the “us” to which they
belong. Roaming visionaries and organizers have served as bridges,
uniting far-flung individuals and communities.

In nineteenth-century Britain, itinerant activists promoted Chartist
principles, building a national movement that demanded basic
democratic rights. In the United States, abolitionists, including
Frederick Douglass, traveled far and wide promoting a vision of a
multiracial society to all who would listen. “Wobblies,” as
Industrial Workers of the World organizers were called, hopped freight
trains to lend a hand to working people in remote regions, aiming to
organize them into one big union. Civil rights Freedom Riders rode
buses across state lines, visiting towns across the South to encourage
people to challenge Jim Crow and register to vote.

In every instance, the powerful have insisted that, without such
meddling by strangers, local people would have remained complacent and
content — or, in Eric Adams’s terminology, the children would not
be radicalized.

Adams’s hostility echoes a long-standing reactionary refrain. In the
twentieth century’s early decades, anarchism and socialism were
portrayed as dangerous imports from Eastern and Southern Europe. As
Red Scare tactics evolved, movements for peace, labor rights, and
racial equality were figured as Soviet plots. Simply holding left-wing
ideas made one a subversive, un-American presence — an “outside
agitator” subject to forcible separation and removal. The first Red
Scare and then McCarthyism trampled basic liberal tenets as a
political witch hunt sought to identify and expel radicals. Tens of
thousands of people, both foreign and native-born, were threatened
with or subjected to imprisonment, deportation, job loss,
blacklisting, and sometimes worse.

Along with new laws and institutions to root out “subversives,”
Cold War conspiracism painted every progressive ambition, no matter
how milquetoast, as alien and unacceptable. Representative John Rankin
of Mississippi denounced the civil rights movement as “communistic
bunk” — as though black people could not demand equality and
liberation without a prompt from the Soviets. The notoriously bigoted
Alabama governor George Wallace took a similar tack when civil rights
organizers decamped for his state. In 1965, he signed a resolution
calling on loyal residents of every “race, color, and creed” to
stay home and not participate in “continued agitation and
demonstrations, led and directed by outsiders” aiming to “foment
local disorder and strife among our citizens.”

Participants sit on a wall during the civil rights march from Selma to
Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. (Wikimedia Commons)

The demonstrations in question had intensified after a state trooper
killed a twenty-six-year-old activist named Jimmie Lee Jackson and
included the now-famous series of marches from Selma to Montgomery
that culminated in “Bloody Sunday,” when police attacked
protesters with tear gas and truncheons. The resolution implied that
local people did not support the protests, which was not true. Yet the
fact that some of the activists were outsiders was undeniable: rather
than discrediting the demonstrations, the presence of non-Alabamans
and non-Southerners spoke to the ways the movement had built
effective, and powerful, solidarity. The presence of Communists was
undeniable as well, and though Wallace and his ilk made it seem
unthinkable, homegrown Communists, born and raised in the American
South, had been some of the boldest anti-racist organizers since the
1930s.

In the decades that followed, the phrase “outside agitator” came
into common usage as a way to smear the civil rights movement. But
outsiders were crucial to the fight.

For example, as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), young people from across the country, many of whom had
experience supporting sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, set up
shop in rural Southern towns, where they registered residents to vote
— a dangerous task given the constant threat of vigilantism and
police violence. As sociologist Francesca Polletta shows in an
analysis of their efforts, these young people brought more than
courage and organizing know-how. They also brought a sense of
connection to the wider world that punctured locals’ sense of
isolation and vulnerability. The presence of activists from other
parts of the country was a visceral sign that local people were not
alone in their struggle against white supremacy.

As a result, new self-conceptions, associations, and possibilities
emerged. SNCC youth “created obligations to a movement with which
residents had little contact, and they created obligation to a nation
whose promises lay, always, in the distant future.” Linked to the
broader movement, locals were emboldened and empowered; their “we”
was widened thanks to the presence of outsiders.

As Polletta details, outsiders have various attributes that can make
them effective cultivators of solidarity and catalysts for change.
Being removed from the social and familial commitments and petty
conflicts and rivalries that characterize daily life can help
activists open space for people to see themselves and engage in new
ways. While some scholars of social change emphasize the importance of
deep bonds and a sense of collective identity, Polletta points out
that what she calls “dense ties” and a “mobilizing identity”
can be at odds with each other.

“Participating in disruptive action requires seeing oneself as
different than one was. And that is difficult to do, perhaps most
difficult to do, in our closest relationships,” she explains. “Our
families and friends want us to be the person we were. This is surely
the case when they know that participating will jeopardize our safety,
and, for the families and friends of black people in the Deep South,
their safety as well.”

Agitators for Racial Justice

Today the term “outside agitator” remains a potent insult, one
regularly lobbed at anyone seeking to bend the moral arc of the
universe toward justice. In 2020, when millions of people took to the
streets in grief and outrage over the murder of George Floyd in
Minneapolis, political leaders dusted off the old bromide.

“Groups of outside radicals and agitators are exploiting the
situation to pursue their own separate and violent agenda,” Attorney
General Bill Barr said in a statement, conjuring shadowy anarchist
evildoers. As is the case today, it wasn’t just Republicans who cast
aspersions.

“They are coming in largely from outside of the city, from outside
of the region, to prey on everything we have built over the last
several decades,” Democratic Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared.
The state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, gave a “best
estimate” that 80 percent of the rioters had arrived from out of
town.

Patently absurd, both assertions would quickly be walked back. _USA
Today _did an analysis of protesters’ social media data and arrest
records and found the overwhelming majority of them were, in fact,
from the region. As for those other 20 percent, good for them. In the
immortal words of Bernie Sanders, they traveled to fight for someone
they did not know.

That’s what Martin Luther King Jr did before he was assassinated for
trying to build a multiracial working-class movement that could
effectively challenge the evils of poverty, racism, and war — the
same problems we must tackle and overcome today.

King, too, was reviled as an outside agitator as he traveled to the
front lines of the struggle for racial and economic equality. It was a
charge he reflected on in his celebrated “Letter from a Birmingham
Jail” composed in 1963, offering words of wisdom that can still
guide us.

“I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and
states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about
what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere,” King mused. “We are caught in an inescapable network
of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects
one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to
live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone
who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider
anywhere within its bounds.”

_Astra Taylor is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and organizer. Her
latest film is What Is Democracy? and her latest book is Remake the
World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions._

_Leah Hunt-Hendrix is an activist, political theorist, and movement
builder who has cofounded three organizations, including Way to Win._

* Student protests
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* pro-Palestine protests
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* Outside agitators
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