Violent Queers: Bash Back Story Swap

-Peter Gelderlos, Why Nonviolence Protects the State- Nonviolence is Racist (via tahlalaliaaa)

Note gelderloos is white and an activist who went to jail and learned a lot from within the system. Learned a lot from poc in prison and is pretty young too. I think he makes a lot of credits to poc and Black people make a large part of the biblio of this book from what I remember

(via strugglingtobeheard)

Whenever I think about Nonviolence and Pacifism, I don’t think of white people, I think of Bayard Rustin and how he felt that non-violence was a way of life, not a strategy. I think about how that way of life helped advanced the Southern Civil Rights movement, and how when he debated Malcolm X publicly when it came to this way of life vs. Malcolm’s equally as radical call for direction action.

Ultimately, I think about how both strategies, tactics, and ways of being ended up being co-opted by the dominant power structure and had their narratives sanitized to uphold their power and dominance over people of color. Both tactics were forms of resistance, and resistance was ultimately the bane of the white supremacist power structure. While we can point to white liberals in the suburbs who are comfortable as pacists, I remember that Muhammad Ali was incarcerated because he refused to participate in war, citing pacifism.

I think about Black men, women, youth, elders—Black people—who resisted and had their ass beat at Woolworth counters, dogs sicked on them in while marching, and hoses turned on them, and ultimately gained some semblance of equity through non-violent and pacifist forms of resistance. And I feel to denounce pacifism as a legitimate tactic of resistance, solely based on the ineptitude and non-action of people who would not have supported my people anyway, is to pay dishonor and disservice to their struggles, and the gains made from them.

While I don’t identify as a pacifist, I won’t denounce their way of life, their tactics and strategies—nor, will I confuse pacifism with passivity, or passiveness. To do so is to perpetuate fallacies about some of histories most effective agents of change.

(Source: fuckyeahradicalquotes)