Analyzing Protest Rhetoric
Comparing Ingroup & Outgroup Identities in Protest Rhetoric: Trayvon Martin and The Walk A Mile In Her Shoes Campaign
In response to Kristen Ann Hungerford’s essay, The Hoodie and Other Protest Strategies Following the Death of Trayvon Martin
Hungerford argues that protest rhetoric is most effective when the ingroup, comprised of those who have directly experienced or are affected by marginalization, participates in demonstrations and displays symbols of protest. While it is not necessary for all marginalized persons to participate in acts of dissent, she notes an important distinction in the participation of the ingroup versus the outgroup, the former of which is able to create a more powerful message through their knowledge of specialized experiences, thus evoking a sense of solidarity that cannot be felt by members of the outgroup. However, the Walk a Mile in Her Shoes campaign challenges this claim. It strongly encourages participation by members of the outgroup, those who do not have specialized knowledge of or personal experience with social injustices, to create a more powerful message of solidarity, act as catalysts for critical conversations needed to alter the status quo, and to use outgroup privilege to intensify the issue for a wider audience. The inconsistency between the Trayvon Martin protests and WMHS is due to the degree of specificity to which each article of clothing, the hoodie and high heel, is associated with each group, as well as the degree of recognized privilege achieved by each protest’s outgroup. Although WMHS confronts Hungerford’s initial claim, both protests promote the idea that participants’ identities, and their acknowledgment of these identities, directly affect the level of solidarity achieved by the outgroup’s participation, which in turn determines the overall effectiveness of protest rhetoric.
Hungerford builds a foundation for her claim by referencing the use of the hoodie by black Americans as a symbol of racial injustice. In this case, black Americans are the ingroup, while white protestors are the outgroup. The death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, at the hands of George Zimmerman, a middle-aged white man, sparked nationwide marches and rallies of predominantly black protestors who claimed that Martin had been a victim of racial profiling. There were, however, a number of white protestors who attempted to stand in solidarity with black Americans who feared that they or their children were at risk of becoming “the next Trayvon Martin.” Many of these white protestors participated in the same acts of protest as their black counterparts, wearing hoodies and holding signs that read “I Am Trayvon Martin” or “Is My Child Next?” In response to this phenomenon, Hungerford argues that although these white protestors had honest intentions, their participation in these acts undermines the legitimacy of black protestors’ fight against racial injustices in America. She states that while black Americans’ have a “critical memory” of slavery and a history largely characterized by racism and discrimination, white Americans are unable to personally relate to such prejudices, and thus cannot truly identify with Trayvon Martin and black Americans through the hoodie protests (Hungerford 2015). For this reason, Hungerford claims that white protestors work counterproductively to the cause.
Despite the outgroup’s intentions to raise awareness and stand in solidarity with the ingroup, their participation only diverts attention away from real efforts for social change and enhances the notion of their white privilege (Hungerford 2015). An unarmed white person wearing a hoodie walking home at night would never be subjected to negative racial profiling or in the case of Trayvon Martin, death. This absence of vulnerability completely transforms the perception of a hoodie when worn by a white person. When donned within a crowd of black protestors, the hoodie only highlights the notion of their white privilege and the drastic discrepancies between the susceptibility of white people versus black people to racial injustice. For this reason, Hungerford claims that white protestors must acknowledge their own white privilege by dissociating themselves from the black ingroup in order to expose such discrepancies on a larger scale. Only then can participation by white protestors spark true conversation about racial injustices and catalyze social change that is in accordance with the message portrayed by black Americans wearing hoodies (Hungerford 2015).
The Walk a Mile in Her Shoes campaign acts as an opportunity for men, the outgroup, to raise awareness about sexual violence against women, the ingroup, by walking one mile in high-heeled shoes. An application of Hungerford’s understanding of protest rhetoric to WMHS would determine that like the hoodie protests, the participation and wearing of high heels by men, in the context of raising awareness about social injustices affecting women, does more damage than good to the ingroup’s cause. Hungerford would argue that because the large majority of men do not have experience with or specialized knowledge of sexual violence, their participation would only decrease the effectiveness of WMHS’s protest rhetoric by diverting attention away from the ingroup’s message and extending the gender-based privilege of all males, which derives from the imbalance of power between men and women, and consequently makes men much less vulnerable to sexual violence.
Contrary to the notion that male protestors are damaging to demonstrations for women’s rights, the Walk a Mile in Her Shoes campaign instead serves as an instance wherein protest rhetoric is strengthened and made more effective by the participation of the outgroup. The choice to wear women’s high heels by cisgender heterosexual males is a conscious action that realizes the phrase: “You cannot understand another person’s experience until you have walked a mile in their shoes” (Walk a Mile in Her Shoes 2017). The WMHS campaign bases the entirety of its protest rhetoric in this phrase by allowing men to literally step into a pair of women’s shoes as a symbolic action of trying to understand sexual violence from the perspective of the female gender. In doing so, the WMHS protest highlights the drastic gender-based differences between the experiences of men and women with regards to sexual violence, most notably the imbalance of power that favors men over women, and the alarming disparity between the amount of sexual assaults against each gender, with those against women reaching significantly higher numbers than those against men. WMHS teaches men to recognize these differences, and more importantly to recognize the privilege that the male gender enjoys as the less sexually vulnerable outgroup. This recognition of gender-based privilege by the outgroup, which maintains a higher position of power over the ingroup, may be correlated to Hungerford’s claim that only when white protestors acknowledge their white privilege and dissociate from Trayvon Martin and the hoodie do they truly work to expose racial injustices in America. The simple act of wearing high heels by cisgender heterosexual men, however, is inherently more powerful and effective than the simple act of wearing hoodies by white people in America.
Because the high heel shoe, as a singular article of clothing separate from any person’s body, is directly linked to the female gender as a prominent symbol of femininity, its wearing by cisgender heterosexual men creates an unmistakable clash between traditional societal gender norms. The WMHS campaign ensures that male participants, who represent the overwhelming majority of their gender that do not normally wear high heels, acknowledge that by doing so, they are physically and symbolically taking on an identity different from their own and stepping into the ingroup’s experiences. Through this, male participants are inherently forced to understand the role that their gender plays in sexual violence against women. The overtness of the high heel as a gender-specific item of clothing draws an immediate distinction between the ingroup and outgroup, symbolically separating the experiences of men and women in terms of sexual violence upon first glance. As a result, the visual imagery of a high heel shoe on a cisgender heterosexual man creates an immediate and inherent recognition of male sexual privilege, needing no verbal or written explanation other than the simple act of wearing the shoe.
On the other hand, the hoodie is a universally worn item of clothing that has no specific association with any particular social group. Although the hoodie has been racialized in certain contexts to negatively affect the treatment of black Americans as Hungerford argues, it draws no immediate connection, racial or otherwise, to any one group of people as a singular garment, separate from any person’s body (Hungerford 2015). This creates a distinction between the hoodie and the high heel, which standing alone, is an explicit symbol of the female gender. Because of this, white protestors who don hoodies in attempts to stand in solidarity with marginalized black protestors do not automatically recognize the racial separations that divide the two groups’ experiences of injustice. Due to the universality of the hoodie, its visual impact is not characterized by the inherent recognition of discrepancies in power like the high heel, and thus plays little to no role in the recognition of white protestors’ racial privilege. Thus the imbalance of power between the ingroup and outgroup is most often overlooked by the large majority of white protestors, who continue to believe that their participation in the Trayvon Martin protests is an act of true solidarity with the marginalized ingroup.
Although some white protestors succeed in acknowledging their white privilege through verbal or written language, by using signs that read “I Am Not Trayvon Martin” or “I Buy Candy and Don’t Get Shot,” the large majority fail to recognize the distinctions between the meaning of “racial injustice” to white versus black people (Hungerford 2015). Most of the Trayvon Martin outgroup could not automatically recognize their privilege through the simple act of wearing a hoodie, and thus, white protestors were unable to stand in true solidarity with the marginalized black population. The Walk a Mile in Her Shoes campaign, however, utilizes an item of clothing that draws an immediate connection to the female gender, and by consequence, an immediate dissociation from cisgender heterosexual men. This distinction causes an automatic recognition of gender-based privilege by the outgroup, allowing all male protestors to don a powerful symbol of solidarity alongside women who have experienced, or are at a disproportionate risk of experiencing, sexual assault.
By specifically targeting men to participate in the WMHS march, the campaign brings the outgroup into an inherent and direct conversation with the traumatic experiences of women who have been raped or sexually assaulted. Rather than shame men for the atrocities perpetrated by those of the same gender, WMHS allows them to become a part of the solution to the problem, and to act as representatives and catalysts for social change by using their gender-based privilege to further preventive education of the male gender. In this way, Hungerford’s initial claim that protest rhetoric is most effective when participants are directly affected by social injustice becomes questionable. Although men are the outgroup, their participation in WMHS and wearing of high heels creates a sense of true solidarity rooted in the inherent recognized privilege men acknowledge by using the high heel to step into a different gender identity. This solidarity ultimately strengthens the effectiveness of WMHS’s protest rhetoric by binding protestors together to create a more powerful, coherent message and ensuring that the diversity of individual participants’ identities do not work to undermine the validity of the protest itself. The unification of the ingroup and outgroup by WMHS may serve as an example for other protests who wish to take steps in the right direction by allowing the outgroup to become part of the solution, thus creating a more diverse participatory platform that may extend awareness to new groups of potential supporters.
Despite the inconsistency between the Trayvon Martin and WMHS protests, the effectiveness of both campaigns’ protest rhetoric is centralized around and determined by the identity of its participants. Because clothing must necessarily be worn by an individual person, the meaning that is drawn from the visual impact of the combination between clothing and individual differs, according to the specific social group that the individual identifies with. The acknowledgement of these identities not only gives greater purpose to the individual’s intentions in protest participation, but also strengthens protest rhetoric by addressing the discrepancies between the ingroup’s and outgroup’s experiences with social injustice.
Sources:
- Hungerford, Kristen. “The Hoodie and Other Protest Strategies Following the Death of Trayvon Martin: Conflicting Discourses of Social Change and White Privilege.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, vol. 5, no. 3, 2015, pp. 99–110.
- “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes: The International Men's March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault and Gender Violence.” Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, Venture Humanity, Inc., 2001-2017, www.walkamileinhershoes.org/.