Activists in the fossil fuel divestment movement on college campuses want people to choose sides. It’s a pretty simple choice.

Rachelle Peterson writes at the National Association of Scholars.

Whose Side Are You On?

“#Whoseside” is the hashtag of one of the protest movements currently roiling American college campuses. The embedded question, “Whose side?” is a deliberate echo of the old union organizing song, “Which Side Are You On?” popularized in recent decades by Pete Seeger’s banjo renditions:

Which side are you on, boys?
Which side are you on?
They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair

The original was by Florence Patton Reece, the wife of one of the men who organized a bloody strike among coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1932. She repurposed the music of the Baptist hymn, “Lay the Lily Low.”

History abounds in ironies. The old union song intended to rally Depression-era coal miners to the cause of higher wages has itself been repurposed for a movement that seeks to shutter the coal mines for good. “#Whoseside” is the hashtag of the fossil fuel divestment movement, which takes as its ultimate goal the end of coalmining and the extraction of all other carbon-based fuels from the ground.

In choosing that signifier, the divestment movement said a lot about itself. It said pretty clearly, for example, that the time for debate is over. The time has come simply to pick whose side you join. In politics, this is called polarization. It is a way of radically simplifying choices by eliminating everything beyond group loyalty. The effort to see some merit in views espoused by people on the other side is brought to a dead halt. The possibility that there may be more than two sides to an issue—three, four, many sides—is buried. Attention to nuance is dismissed as weakness. The search for compromise is likewise interred in favor of a demand for outright victory.

Polarizing all too often works.