I think the crucial difference between your San Antonio Spurs example and what Damian is suggesting is the audience.
Fucked Up is popular with people who are willing to sing along with lines like “I fucking hate the police” and so forth. In fact, I imagine it would be hard to find someone at their shows (in AZ or outside) who didn’t agree, at least to some degree, with that sentiment.
At a Phoenix Suns game, I believe you’ve find a much less homogeneous audience. As such, a boycott that engaged that audience would have the possibility of reaching both people who are and aren’t in support of the bill.
I think the best approach would be to look the civil rights movement that made some historic advances in the south a few decades ago. (I live in Georgia). The Montgomery Bus Boycott, to name a boycott we should all be familiar with, engaged a widely non-homogeneous audience (i.e. anyone who used public transportation and the govn’t that needed revenue for that portion of their infrastucture). It was, by all accounts, an effective tactic in that civil rights movement.
On the other hand, you have the example of Freedom Summer in which young, concerned, privileged people flooded the southern states with their presence and engaged discourse. Of course, they participated in the localized, tactical boycotts, but they also spent plenty of time and money in the state – buying gasoline, food, hotel rooms, and so forth – so that the issue could be brought the forefront of people’s lives. They sang a lot of songs, too.
It seems that today’s bands and “young, concerned, privileged” people could do much more by emulating the success of that Freedom Summer than simply trying to figure out which salsa to avoid buying at the grocery store or which gig not to play.
I think the crucial difference between your San Antonio Spurs example and what Damian is suggesting is the audience.
Fucked Up is popular with people who are willing to sing along with lines like “I fucking hate the police” and so forth. In fact, I imagine it would be hard to find someone at their shows (in AZ or outside) who didn’t agree, at least to some degree, with that sentiment.
At a Phoenix Suns game, I believe you’ve find a much less homogeneous audience. As such, a boycott that engaged that audience would have the possibility of reaching both people who are and aren’t in support of the bill.
I think the best approach would be to look the civil rights movement that made some historic advances in the south a few decades ago. (I live in Georgia). The Montgomery Bus Boycott, to name a boycott we should all be familiar with, engaged a widely non-homogeneous audience (i.e. anyone who used public transportation and the govn’t that needed revenue for that portion of their infrastucture). It was, by all accounts, an effective tactic in that civil rights movement.
On the other hand, you have the example of Freedom Summer in which young, concerned, privileged people flooded the southern states with their presence and engaged discourse. Of course, they participated in the localized, tactical boycotts, but they also spent plenty of time and money in the state – buying gasoline, food, hotel rooms, and so forth – so that the issue could be brought the forefront of people’s lives. They sang a lot of songs, too.
It seems that today’s bands and “young, concerned, privileged” people could do much more by emulating the success of that Freedom Summer than simply trying to figure out which salsa to avoid buying at the grocery store or which gig not to play.