After “Daily Show” senior protest correspondent Roy Wood Jr. attended the Justice Or Else March marking the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., Wood asked white people what the march’s slogan “Justice Or Else” meant to them.
The answers were a mixed bag of violence and concern on Monday’s night “Daily Show.”
Wood’s man-on-the-street interviews told him the slogan’s “or else” could mean “violence,” “brutality, blood, gore, death,” or “America better get it together.”
“You get all that from ‘or else’? No wonder white people write all the horror movies,” Wood said.
But, Nuri Muhammad, one of the Nation of Islam organizers, told Wood it was a financial boycott — not a violent event.
“This is going to be a peaceful gathering, just as it was 20 years ago in 1995,” Muhammad said.
Watch the report, from Comedy Central, below:
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“Or Else” is too vague of a demand. It’s like what the OWS movement screwed up: no clear one demand or two demands that everyone rallied around. If you can’t be clear what you really want to see changed, you can’t expect the change to happen.
It was a 20,000-person meetup.
In order to have a successful movement one needs a lot of things including a coherent and focused message, a counter-argument that is more than “it’s the right thing to do” or “because X says so” (most in the GOP couldn’t give a rat’s fart about civil rights), and so much more. Unfortunately, a lot of those elements get lost on people who have largely been taught that protests and marches work.
I bet a lot of white folks are hoping it means, or else we’ll go back to Africa.
“Or else” means: or maybe not.
The demand is for justice, obviously, not for something called “or else.” Sheesh.