WASHINGTON DC – You really do have to participate in your own oppression, as Frantz Fanon asserted. For years, I helped a group of folks with life sentences in myriad ways, none of which were illegal. I was banned from even visiting, in part, because I was teaching a course in mediation and problem-solving in which I frequently referenced Fanon’s thesis. Sadly for me but great for them, they used my lessons and, through non-violent refusal to cooperate, managed to force the warden into negotiations, and I was out the door.
Dennis Wise, then as now a man with gravitas, and I had a discussion about the above topic. His brother was one who thought violence was a usable strategy and spent 15 years off and on in solitary confinement for his efforts to resist institutional malfeasance and violence. Dennis, having seen the uselessness of violence in the place where he found himself, offered the thesis that in his situation, the inmates could only bring insignificant violence, while those in power over them could rain down almost unlimited violence upon them.
Applying that logic to the current thugocracy we are living under, which has demonstrated that they are willing to use violence unto death when met with even the non-aggression of being filmed in their thuggery, the only course of action is that which my inmate friends started to use. Sit down and stay there until the guy in charge agrees to talk.
In a time of flash mobs, I posit this tactic. At a given time, all the willing show up at a given spot with chairs, food, water, and their phones. Sit down and completely ignore ICE. Silence. No engagement at all. Then, after a prearranged time, everyone simply gets up and leaves. Do this every day for as long as it takes. There are no non-violent tactics that can react to a large group of silent folks, playing on their phones and utterly quietly blocking a street or a building for hours, day after day.
If discipline fails, which it most often does, the country and the world will see a Bull Connor moment in which bully boys assault completely non-aggressive people.
Not cooperating in your own oppression can still get you hurt because power does not have many quills in its quiver. They have threats, intimidation, and assault. Eventually, refusal will be met with what they have. People are being brutalized and killed, white people! They are not against sane immigration policies, but they are against arresting 5-year-olds and separating children from their parents. They oppose beatings and tear gas. They reject having masked ICE agents usurp their local police and make traffic stops, pulling people out of their cars.
Maybe the creatures in the media that hire only sycophants to Trump have eyes that see a phone as a gun and a man trying to help a woman shoved onto the ice and snow as attacking them, but most of us don’t.
No violence, no shouting. Just sit there. If someone tosses water at you, just sit there. If others try to create violence, just sit there, silent, still, until the alarm on your phone goes off and you and everyone else get up, fold their chairs, pack up their backpacks quietly, and go home to come again another day.
M.A. Callahan
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
- M.A. Callahan#molongui-disabled-link
