In a 2011 interview in the magazine Complex, Omar Wasow—then a former tech entrepreneur turned Harvard graduate student—was asked why, exactly, he chose to pursue his field of study.
“I’m interested in the intersection of race and politics. In particular, what went wrong for African Americans after all the victories of the civil rights movement,” Wasow said. “I wanted to try and make sense of how, on the one hand, things are a lot better, and on the other hand, particularly for low-income communities, things have gotten a lot worse.”
These are heavy questions from a man whose previous claims to fame included teaching Oprah Winfrey how to use a computer and being named “sexiest internet entrepreneur” by People magazine.
But Wasow’s previous life as a minor tech celebrity is quickly being overshadowed.
Now an assistant professor of politics at Princeton, Wasow’s star took off this spring when his research on violent and nonviolent protests was published a week before the death of George Floyd. Since then, he’s been interviewed by prominent journalists like Isaac Chotiner and Yascha Mounk, while his work has been debated in publications from the New York Times to Jacobin.
“It’s just pure chance that it should get published in an academic journal on the eve of what became, by some measures, the largest social movement in American history. There’s just no way I could have anticipated the level of interest in the work,” Wasow told Blue Tent. “I think the modal social science paper gets cited something like once, so you’re hoping that anybody pays any attention at all, let alone that it becomes part of a national conversation.”
His work has sparked important debates on the left about the connections between activism and electoral politics, violence versus nonviolence, and the parallels between the current moment and the 1960s civil rights movement.
Leaving "a good life" in pursuit of answers
Omar Wasow was semi-famous once before. As the founder of BlackPlanet, an early social media site for the Black community, he was profiled by magazines and newspapers, which he parlayed into tech-focused TV gigs; one can still find video of a young, rail-thin Wasow, sporting a dark suit and long dreadlocks, walking Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King through email and online shopping.
“I had a good life as an entrepreneur and on-air technology reporter, but found myself puzzling over questions that just didn’t have a natural business model,” said Wasow.
So Wasow did what had seemingly always been his “family calling” (Wasow comes from a family of academics and educators, including both parents, his grandfather and an uncle) and headed to graduate school at Harvard, where he studied technology, identity, race and politics.
“One of the defining moments of my parents’ coming of age was the civil rights movement, which they both, in different ways, were involved in. And when I was coming of age in New York, the dominant politics was law and order and ‘tough on crime,’” Wasow said. “And I was trying to understand, how did we go from the successes of the civil rights era to the repression of the law-and-order era?’”
In trying to answer that question, Wasow noticed spikes in public opinion regarding fear of crime and disorder in the late 1960s and early ’70s, around the same time that the U.S. incarceration rate first skyrocketed. This was the same period when the nonviolent civil disobedience of the early 1960s gave way to a wave of more violent protests in major cities. Wasow saw a possible connection between shifts in public opinion and protests, opening up a further series of inquiries about the moral and strategic implications of protest tactics.
A multi-year project meets unprecedented actions
Some 15 years of research eventually led Wasow to publish his article, “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting” in the American Political Science Review in May of 2020. The paper examined the connection between protests and electoral politics throughout the civil rights movement, finding that major nonviolent protests resulted in increased support for Democrats in nearby counties. In examining the violent protests (often referred to as riots or rebellions) that followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death in 1968, Wasow found that nearby counties saw a swing toward Republicans.
While limited in its scope like any other peer-reviewed paper, Wasow’s article landed like a brick through a window. George Floyd was killed by police one week later, and thus commenced the largest racial justice demonstrations in American history. Crime and law enforcement were at the center of the conversation, and some police confrontations with demonstrators turned violent. Wasow began giving interviews on his work almost immediately, which quickly spread his name and his paper all over the web.
Days later, on May 28, a progressive data analyst named David Shor tweeted excerpts from Wasow’s article, hinting at the potential backlash effects of violent protests. Shor faced a backlash of his own, with an onslaught of angry responses, accusations of racism, and calls for him to be fired. Civis Analytics, his employer, parted ways with Shor shortly thereafter, but denied that he was let go for sharing the study. Wasow has communicated with both Shor and Civis Analytics privately; he reached out to Shor to check facts for an unpublished piece of writing, while Civis Analytics contacted Wasow to say they admired his research.
“In that conversation with David Shor, and with his employer, my main takeaway is, at the heart of it was how he was treated on Twitter by people who essentially shot the messenger because they didn’t like the message,” said Wasow, dismissing accusations that Shor was being racist or otherwise acting improperly as “baseless.”
Civis Analytics declined to discuss the incident on the record, while Shor did not respond to requests for comment.
Shor’s firing brought even more attention to Wasow’s work, though he admits that the paper was truly not meant as a veiled piece of advice to Black Lives Matter activists. That being said, he also understands that his work could never exist in a vacuum.
“It has definitely been a learning experience for me, even as someone who has done a lot of media, to figure out how I help this work inform a national conversation, but at the same time, not just play to partisan dynamics, which were not my project,” Wasow said. “I’m still learning a bit how the work has entered this national debate.”
Wasow also noted that in the arguments about his research, one detail relevant to current politics that seems to have been lost in the shuffle was its findings on the success of nonviolence, especially when met with state or vigilante repression.
“That particular tactic of being the object of state violence manages to generate a real groundswell of sympathy without generating a symmetric counter-mobilization among the opposition,” said Wasow.
Historical and contextual disputes
While Wasow’s work has largely been praised and cited positively by mainstream press and intellectuals, the paper’s conclusions and broader implications faced substantial pushback, especially on the left.
In Jacobin, William & Mary Professor Paul Heideman cited numerous statistics and scholarly works connecting riots to positive political outcomes not directly tied to elections. These include the numerous Black-led uprisings of the 1960s, where scholars point to higher welfare expenditures, changes in policing and increased attention to the needs of urban Black populations.
Auburn University historian Austin McCoy, whose scholarship focuses on social movements, activism and the left, told Blue Tent that while Wasow’s scholarship is strong, it elides certain vital points about the civil rights era. One of these omissions is the connection between civil rights protests of the time and the anti-Vietnam War movement, which was arguably the defining issue of the 1968 election. McCoy also critiqued Wasow’s linkage of law-and-order politics to the riots of the mid-to-late ’60s, arguing the trend goes back much further.
“You have places in the South that were criminalizing protest before the 1960s, and that was sort of a tactic that white southerners were using to even stop organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, dredging up these old laws saying people can’t assemble in certain circumstances. And this sort of goes back to the 1920s, where, if you’re trying to organize people around ‘communist politics,’ you could be sanctioned or jailed,” said McCoy.
McCoy credits Wasow for acknowledging relevant literature on those trends, but believes “a longer view” on the relationship between Black-led protests and legal repression is warranted. Like Heideman, McCoy also cited the mixed aftermath of major violent protests, particularly the 1967 Detroit rebellion, which led to both heightened policing as well as a push for more economic development and jobs for Black Detroiters.
Contextualizing current unrest and searching for peace
Wasow is now at work on a book project related to his study on protests and what went wrong after the civil rights era. He’s also pursuing separate research into what allows other multi-ethnic democracies to thrive without such sharp divisions. Wasow seems once again to have picked an issue in desperate need of more rigorous study, as illustrated by the mob violence in Washington on January 6.
“The insurrection by a group of mostly white men opposing the legitimacy of a free and fair multiethnic election is quintessentially American,” Wasow wrote in the Washington Post in an attempt to contextualize the violence.
Rather than a unique break from the nation’s grand, egalitarian traditions, Wasow framed the Capitol Hill riot as one of many attempts to violently enforce a competing vision on the country, one defined by ethno-nationalist hierarchy. But like Wasow’s findings on the success of nonviolent protests, he sees a silver lining in the events of recent weeks.
“[January 5th’s] Senate races in Georgia speak to the power of the other American tradition,” Wasow wrote, comparing the triumph of the multiracial coalition that elected Sens. Jon Ossoff and Rafael Warnock to the civil rights victories of the 1960s. This past year has been, in Wasow’s view, an encapsulation of the give and take between those political visions, with no clear cycle of progression or reaction.
The anger of 2020 has spilled into 2021, and despite calls for unity and peace across the political spectrum, it appears that tensions will only escalate over the next four years. For a scholar of racism, protests and political conflict like Wasow, it’s unlikely that this most recent turn in the spotlight will be his last.
