After the Civil Rights movement "ended" with the death of Dr. King, we had yet to declare as a collective that we refuse! Now, in this crucial moment because the history of resistance in the US is being erased, if not banned. If that history is disappeared, democracy will disappear.
The subject of Jackson's work in We Refuse looks at the role violence played in African Americans emancipating themselves from the shackles of enslavement. It looks at the role violence played during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement. In particular, Jackson's discussion on violence vs nonviolence conjures the work of Fanon, among others.
Jackson points our that the "nonviolence" movement involved the violence of dedicated Grand Wizards and a following of white-hooded jackboots. The nonviolence movement had its James "Jim" Clark of Alabama, George Wallace, Roy and Carolyn Bryant, Robert Edward Chambliss, Frank Cherry, lynching parties, and dynamite bombers.
While the Civil Rights movement, for example, offered the ideology of nonviolence, it also gun owners who were dedicated freedom fighters. Dr. King was a gun owner as was Malcolm. Jackson writes that Robert Williams started a rifle club.
We Refuse calls the tradition of fighting tyranny to the center, once again, and demands that any discussion on resisting oligarchy must include all the ways in which blacks have fought against oppression and achieved freedom from enslavement, independence from colonialism, civil rights from unjust laws. Jackson's work conjures Boukman and L'Ouverture and Nate Turner as well as Harriet Tubman, warning with her gun, that no one was turning back on her watch!
Jackson looks at the work of the Black Panthers, on the other hand, who, as she argues, scared more Americans not by openly carrying rifles, but by feeding and educating black children. Educated blacks are not the kind needed as police and soldiers in a movement to benefit the oligarchs and white supremacy.
"White supremacy does not believe in nonviolence because it does not believe in black humanity," writes Jackson. Nonviolence, she argues, should be the responsibility of the oppressor, not the oppressed, instead of being used as a tool to subjugate, to exploit, to maintain political, social, cultural, economic, and racial hierarchy, and this violence isn't equivalent to an unfortunate shooting by a gang member in a black community. There's more harm to black humanity when a cleansed Dr. King is taught to black children with the eye to keeping them from being curious and learning the truth. But then, that's white supremacy!
"Whiteness is not compelled by suffering," Jackson writes, "but [it's] consumed with inflicting it." That's why, Jackson argues, there is no point in arguing with a system that won't take the time to hear the stories of the historically oppressed. In America there is a MEGA movement determined to privilege the grieving of those who want to do away with hard-fought laws meant to recognize the reality of a diverse US, but a US that practices inequity and exclusion.
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