We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

There is no form of protest white supremacy will approve. Whether Black people take a knee or burn down the QuikTrip, the backlash will always be the same. Appeasing white power structures will not work. And when nonviolence is not successful, it is likely because nonviolence is being used as a tool to suppress change. Only by force can freedom be gained.

Gun rights mattered, but protection attended to the whole body, the whole person. True liberation makes guns obsolete because when everyone is cared for there is no need to conquer, and certainly there is no need to hoard.

Ordinary people without political, economic, or social power have always found empowerment in defending their lives and the lives of others. Collective protection is powerful. It not only saved lives, but compelled people to reckon with the reasons for needing it. ... The answers should haunt us. Protection was a constant response to white supremacy. White power had become synonymous with violence.

Much of the hard work in protection is about proving that a double standard exists in terms of who is awarded rights, citizenship, and humanity, and preventing the double standard from causing harm. Until Black and oppressed peoples are able to be and belong, protective collective action will be required.

For Black Americans, the [American] Revolution replaced a distant white supremacist tyrant supportive of Black enslavement with local and electable white supremacist tyrants empowered to preserve the existing social, political, and economic order, which was grounded in slavery and anti-Blackness. The Revolution was not merely imperfect; it was not true.

The violence of white supremacy is also bound up in forgetting. That Black revolutionary victories have been marginalized and forgotten is not accidental. The French did not just want to eliminate Black leadership; they sought to erase Black history because history often serves as a road map to a possible future. In marginalizing the past, white people were attempting to make Black people beholden to an identity stuck in subordination.

Peaceful resistance during apartheid is nonsense, even to a child. Tutu recalled a moment when he was speaking in a meeting about peaceful change. After the meeting, a twelve-year-old boy approached him. 'Bishop Tutu, I heard what you said. Do you believe it?' Tutu said he began to hem and haw and evade the question. The boy, sensing his inability to answer him straight on, issued a challenge: 'Can you people, with your eloquent talk about peaceful change, show us what you have achieved with your talk? And we will show you what we have gained with a few stones.' The boy was referring to the Soweto Uprising of 1976, in which over twenty thousand South African schoolchildren protested the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in Black and Bantu schools. Hundreds of children were shot at or wounded, and sixteen were killed, by the police. The violence went on for three days and drew international attention. Thousands of children were harmed, but even though they were outmatched by police forces, they physically fought back and won the world’s support. Tutu admitted that he did not have any evidence to show him. Yet the boy could point to the fact that Afrikaans was no longer the compulsory language of instruction. He could point to new school buildings that the South African government had put up as a result of all their activism. He could point to the fact that the South African government was putting more money into Black education than they had before, largely in response to what the young people had done. Tutu conceded, 'And so in some ways, he was right.' Even a child understood the efficacy of force and the limitations of nonviolence.

No white people in the Western world could imagine their own revolutions without the suppression of Black people.

Nearly every African American could teach a master class in refusing the terms in our degradation.