What's an Economic Boycott, Anyway? | Andra Watkins & Sam Osterhout LIVE

Boycotts work. Mostly. One of the first things our children learn about regarding our founding is the Boston Tea Party — basically, a boycott. In retaliation against British-imposed taxes, colonists boycotted British tea — and famously dumped tea shipments into Boston Harbor. This direct action galvanized the American Revolution and became one of our history’s most famous economic protests.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks’ arrest, and led by Martin Luther King Jr. and others, forced the Supreme Court to declare bus segregation laws unconstitutional, marking a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. Of course, that one took nearly a year of struggle to bear fruit.

And that kind of collective struggle is a problem for modern Americans. We’ve all done one thing or another — stopped shopping at Home Depot / Target / Hobby Lobby; ended our subscription to Amazon / Disney / etc. But we haven’t yet been able to muster a collective, focused, organized boycott that would force our overlords to the bargaining table.

Yes. We got Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. That was a win, for sure, and it wasn’t just about letting a comedian tell jokes. It was about pushing back on a government that sought to coerce a corporation into compliance, and hammering that corporation when it bent the knee. And it worked, and it’s a start.

Now imagine that all seven or eight million of us who marched last weekend organized and committed to a disciplined and persistent campaign of boycott. We could accomplish just about anything.

But we can’t just individually decide to stop shopping at, say, Walgreens (or H&M or Ulta or etc etc). Seven million individual actions will get us nowhere.

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