There's this question I keep asking myself, as I watch the footage of unrest spooling out from city after city over the last few days.

How will all this end? The images are familiar now, the fires, the police and their face shields, armed with batons and cans of

pepper spray, the protesters, sporting bruises, pouring milk on each other's faces. Sometimes it feels

like we're stuck in a loop, reliving the same scenes over and over. But each time the loop

starts up again, it gets more intense, more chaotic.

Watching the protests was a little surreal in that we've seen so much, or I've seen so much, of this footage,

reincarnated in different ways over time.

Kelly Carter Jackson is a professor of history at Wellesley University.

Ferguson was not that long ago when we were watching something very similar.

If I go back a little bit to my childhood, I think of the Rodney King riots that took

place. If I go back to my mother's

generation, she lived through all of, you know, 68 while she was in college. And so it just feels

like, are we making progress? I wanted to speak with Kelly because this repetition,

for me, brings up this other question. If we're stuck,

repeating ourselves, is this kind of protest working? And for whom? I live in New York, and I was

watching the police commissioner here give a press conference over the weekend. And at the very end, there was this part that stuck with me because he talked about a lot of stuff and he was basically defending the cops.

He said essentially, like, I've done this a long time.

And my perspective is that the most effective protests are the quietest.

I've worked a lot of protests, good and bad.

The ones I remember, the ones that have the lasting impact, and this is my opinion, are the quietest ones.

I couldn't disagree more. I could not disagree. quietest once.

I couldn't disagree more.

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