The Importance of Nonviolent Resistance

I promise this is the last article I will write that describes the feelings associated with racism — situational or institutional. I am feeling the hurt and violence of our history in a way that I never have before. I now am moved by images of slaves, naked on the auction block so that the merchandise could be fully inspected, Black victims of sexual violence easily justified by property rights, the callous separation of families, because slaves were worth thousands of dollars, and breeding was simply another income stream; in short, the inhumanity of the slave trade resembles the inhumanity of the Holocaust, which resembles the inhumanity of separating infants from their mothers at the US Border.

When I contemplate the indigenous peoples of the Americas, I feel the pain of the broken treaties, the smallpox-infected blankets, the Trail of Tears, the Native American boarding schools, rife with physical and sexual abuse, the decertification of tribes to make way for resource extraction on Native Lands. I feel the pain of the indigenous peoples everywhere in the New World who were — and still are — victims of Europeans, armed with the racist, “Doctrine of Discovery,” who subjugated, enslaved, or otherwise appropriated their resources.

I feel how, in the aftermath of the Civil War, southern whites replaced slavery with terrorism. African Americans that migrated north and west literally were internally displaced refugees escaping terrorism. Most Americans are unaware of the reality of lynching — thousands of men, women, and children, killed, often for being too successful, too outspoken, or to protect a white criminal. Did you know that Lynching Postcards were circulated to commemorate the violence? Did you know that until the 1960s, the term, “race riot,” referred to white people, often deputized by local law enforcement, who burned, looted, and otherwise destroyed African-American neighborhoods, like the famous Tulsa Riots of 1924? Are you aware that many of the monuments to confederate heroes were erected as threats and symbols of domination of blacks by whites half a century after the end of hostilities between North and South?

I recently listened to an episode of On The Media, entitled, “The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done.” This is a comparison between how Germany looked at its Nazi past and resolved, “Never Again” to the situation in the US, which still has the equivalent of Goebbels St., Gestapo Ave., and Pogrom High School, not just in the south but also across the country.

Postwar Germany did things like changing the names of all of the streets, so that no one lived on a street where people slaughtered Jews, Roma, LGTBQs, and the disabled. And no one who participated in the slaughter is honored with statues or other memorials — as the leaders of the Confederacy are in the US. Germany has dealt with the shame of Nazism in a way that Americans still must do because of our complicity in Native American Genocide and Slavery.

I claim that if we confront the racism that allowed our country to be founded on these twin horrors, we will naturally rekindle the compassion that will usher in generous single-payer healthcare, excellent public schools and nursing homes, a well-maintained system of transportation infrastructure — we may even decide that individual vehicles like cars separate us unnecessarily — in short, we could ask the system to change so that everyone has enough, even as we reward success with extra resources. But, as we all know, power concedes nothing without resistance. (I was going to say “without a fight,” but nonviolence requires that “resistance” replace “fighting.”)

I want to share with you, esteemed reader, my vision of our country as a human body, the economy as a circulatory system, and money as the blood. If we hold to this vision, the idea that some parts of the body don’t deserve nourishment because “they’re lazy,” that the arm or leg muscles deserve “more blood than they can use” because they do most of the work — will seem as crazy to conservatives as it does to the rest of us. Raising the minimum wage, granting Universal Basic Income, Medicare for All, replacing Drug Prohibition with treatment — that will be less and less necessary as the US becomes a place that doesn’t encourage escape using drugs or mindless entertainment — using our technology for human flourishing instead of war materiel and profits for a privileged few, are the natural results of seeing the humanity in each of us and treating each other as equals.

It is time to look to the postwar US period of advantages given to white GIs but denied African-American Veterans — free college, secured mortgages, then back to the 19th Century when the US repeatedly gave land to white immigrants, established land grant colleges, while denying ex-slaves the “Forty Acres and a Mule” that might have leveled the playing field for this population.

Let us return to a time when Martin Luther King mobilized African-Americans to march for their civil rights and remember his Rainbow Coalition of poor people, regardless of race, and see how thoroughly the poor have been marginalized in the half century since his death — and the middle class reduced to insecurity. We certainly must rekindle the idea that King’s commitment to nonviolent resistance is one of the most powerful tools in protest. The state — represented by Bull Connor, police dogs, and fire hoses spraying dignified looking men and women in their Sunday best before arresting them — obviously looked cowardly at best, evil at worst. Peacefully enduring brutality lends a moral credibility to a protest that can withstand the most biased criticism.

So, my friends, my ask is simple: Let’s make the Democratic Party The People’s Party, let’s wash a Blue Wave over the country, and let’s use nonviolent resistance to bring the Corporatocracy to its knees. Big business functions on the strength of our labor, just as the Slaveholding States of America did two centuries ago. We must resolve to earn just compensation for our labor, not only in the workplace, but in the home, the school, and the community. This will not happen overnight, so I ask that you remain dedicated, vigilant, and open to a greater future.

Peace, Salaam, Shalom.

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