Black people who have made it economically are now facing pressure to align with a definition of “peace” and “violence” that serves white supremacy. We are being told that if we want to keep our status, we will align with the police narrative that protest produces violence.

I believe that when someone attacks you and you engage in self-defense, the responsibility for creating the violence sits with the attacker and that Black Lives Matter means Black people have a right to respond like people who want to live: to fight off the attack.

In a white supremacist narrative, Black self-defense is labeled as “violent,” and police violence against Black people and our allies is “keeping the peace.”

I read this George Orwell novel in high school, 1984. “War is peace” was one of the state’s fascist slogans in it.

Part of Orwell’s point is that these fights over freedom and fascism take place not just in the streets but in our dictionaries, novels, and modes of speaking to each other.

It matters if you cede the definition of “violence” that says Black self-defense is illegal and bad.

It matters if you say that burning a building is like kneeling on the neck of a person until he dies. It matters if you say a Black life is only as important as a Target that can be rebuilt.

I think of Adrienne Rich’s “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” which opens with quote from Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit who was on trial for burning draft papers in Catonsville, MD with napalm:

“I was in danger of verbalizing my
moral impulses out of existence.”

Rich goes on to quote a neighbor:
‘“The burning of a book," he says, "arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book."’

She means to show he doesn’t understand the tragedy and violence of Hitler.

Have care when you construct sentences out of “violence” and “peace” because your choices are not morally neutral. They tell a story about what you believe and what your priorities are. They also become part of a larger social fabric that determines who lives and dies.

The United States has a national holiday celebrating its founding called Independence Day.

We don’t call it “day backed by a violent revolution, genocidal tactics, and chattel slavery.”

The words we use — and the words we don’t — tell a whole story.

Ask yourself about the politics of the words you cling to.

As yourself if you want to cling to those politics.

Ask who lives and who dies under those political conditions.

Your choices are not morally neutral.

It’s not lost on me either that people think burning a Target down — whoever the fuck did it — is the moral equivalent of threatening state legislators at gunpoint because they implemented life saving public health measures.

Please get a fucking grip.

When the way society is structured is violent against a group or groups of people, you can’t trust the authorities’ definitions of “violence” and “peace.”

You have to think carefully enough to recognize where the seeds of violence are being planted and by whom.