Every time people gather in the streets to protest, you can practically hear the familiar chorus begin. "Protesting doesn't change anything." "What's the point?" "Go vote instead." It is one of the most persistent dismissals in modern political life, the assumption that public demonstrations are nothing more than noise, a naive substitute for "real" engagement with the systems people are trying to change.

The critics are not entirely wrong. Protest alone does not change the world. A march that ends at a parking lot and dissolves into a Monday morning changes very little on its own. History is littered with demonstrations that produced no lasting reform, movements that burned bright and burned out, crowds that dispersed and were simply waited out by the institutions they opposed.

And yet, no major movement for justice in the modern era has succeeded without protest. Not one. The question worth asking is not whether protest is sufficient. It never is. The question is why, again and again, it turns out to be necessary.