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RESIST
Disaster crushes the spirit. It sets the stage for political disengagement. When you’re crushed, it’s hard to get involved. To show up. You saw this after Donald Trump was elected in November 2016, on a platform of naked racism and aspirational authoritarianism. Within his first year in office, Trump’s demonizing rhetoric and destabilizing narcissism led to an epidemic of nihilism: 36 percent of US adults described feeling more anxious in 2017 than they did the previous year, and 25 percent of Americans reported having more trouble forging closer connections with loved ones. One psychologist, Jennifer Panning, termed this the “Trump Anxiety Disorder,” which she defined as “increased worry, obsessive thought patterns, muscle tension and obsessive preoccupation with the news.”1
Even as Trump’s presidency was coming to a close in September 2020, some, like the writer Mychal Denzel Smith in the New York Times, openly wondered whether the four years of Trump, as well as witnessing the wildfires in California, an emboldened ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and the loss of hundreds of thousands of precious Americans to COVID-19, had left an irreversible mark: “I had come around to believing that a slow, frustrating but ultimately sustainable victory and all the jubilation that would come along with it was something my friends’ children might someday experience. That sense of possibility has largely dissipated.”2 Smith’s feeling is relatable, but energetic mobilization is essential. Why? When defiance is missing during a crisis, coercive authority benefits most. Then, the powerful ruthlessly sink their teeth into society and amplify the pain they’ve already caused.
Despair needn’t create paralysis. To the contrary, it can motivate you to risk everything, to find courage wherever you can, to trust the democratic resources available to you, and to never back down. Power can be forged among the dispossessed. Solidarity can be found in the darkest of places. Always resist and make resistance into a tradition. It will inspire you. And those who come after.
US history begins this way. Indigenous communities—the Muskogee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Nations in the South, and the Wampanoag, Pequot, and Narragansett in New England—did whatever they could to protect their communities from being eviscerated without the means of germ warfare or high-grade weaponry deployed by European settlers in their genocidal campaigns.
What Indigenous citizens faced is unimaginable. Every time you gather around the Thanksgiving table, remember the bloody origins of American empire. In August 1609, the military man John Smith, who has been lionized in children’s books through the Pocahontas myth, demanded food from Powhatan Confederacy farmers. After they refused, Smith unleashed a war of extermination that lasted one year. Gruesome spectacles of violence are morally reprehensible. But they also have a political function, which is to remind you that powerful people will stop at nothing to realize what they want and impose their will upon you. The rules don’t apply to them; there’s no limit to their madness. In July 1636, the Plymouth Colony, led by John Mason, decided that, although their introduction of smallpox had wiped out a large portion of the Pequot fishing community there, it was time to slaughter Indigenous women and children, and burn everything in sight. To encourage private bounty hunters to earn their paychecks, New Englanders pioneered scalping. In 1645, the Tidewater War saw Virginia settlers starve out Indigenous villages. The Indigenous population, which once stood at one hundred million, had dwindled to ten million after the pandemic of colonization began.
Against this backdrop, Indigenous people resisted. The Powhatans attacked a Virginia colony in 1622. In New England, the Pequot defended the 250 square miles of their territory from 1636 to 1637, and the Wampanoag used guerrilla tactics to lay siege to settler encampments in sporadic battles during what came to be known as King Philip’s War from 1675 to 1676.
But even more significant than armed struggle in defending Indigenous communities were their complex systems of government, an alternative to the insatiable individualism of European settlers who saw Indigenous land as property to be confiscated. Sovereign nations east of the Mississippi ruled through a council of elders that represented various lineages in a community. The Haudenosaunee Constitution emphasized peace and justice. Treaties between different nations were deemed sacred and inviolable.3 The Iroquois had an advanced moral code, which demanded that those who stole food change their behavior—only then would they be readmitted to the community. Women Iroquois elders selected and could remove male elders who violated their fiduciary responsibility to protect the collective’s interest.4
Imagine if these traditions informed our politics. Politicians wouldn’t be laughing all the way to the bank, enriched by powerful lobbying groups. Mutual aid would take the place of ruthless competition. Restorative justice would be practiced over mass incarceration.
During colonial America, enslaved African Americans were aware of Indigenous resistance. Ever since the first twenty people were kidnapped from western Africa and brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, rebellion had permeated the southern plantation. Africans in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Maryland poisoned their masters, feigned ignorance, went on strike, exchanged gossip, and sabotaged the machines they worked on. Scores escaped with nothing but their freedom—by foot, in water, through thickets, in the dead of night, naked, hungry, with fierce determination and faith. Many of these fugitives, known as Maroons, left in groups and found safe haven in the forests of Virginia and the swamps of Georgia. Among the most notable are the Great Dismal Swamp between North Carolina and Virginia, in which thousands lived, and a settlement in Bas du Fleuve, Louisiana.
Because Maroon colonies existed outside recorded history, we know little about them, but what we do know gives us a glimpse into how to create a community during crisis. In 1724, a Maroon named Cesar lived in a forest close to several plantations on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where a free Black couple gave him food and an enslaved one gave him shelter. Solidarity traversed the color line. Cesar bartered berries he had harvested for cornmeal with two white women, who gave him a bed to sleep in their home.
Fugitives joined up, living in the borderlands. Their very existence emboldened others to do the same. In March 1710, in Virginia, a group of enslaved colonial-born African Americans, Indians, and newly arrived African men conspired to escape bondage. But slaveholders crushed this plot before it unfolded, and the accused were hanged and decapitated. Yet slaveholder fury was betrayed by crippling anxiety. This rising tide of defiance was an existential threat. In 1721, the Virginia colonial governor Alexander Spotswood worried about a small group of runaways in the Blue Ridge Mountains, who lived adjacent to a frontier settlement occupied by poor whites. What would happen if interracial coalitions formed? The architects of the racist-settler complex didn’t want to know, for good reason.
Outside the official record of monumental events is where ordinary people gather, talk, laugh, and organize. This is where liberation unfolds and the roots of resistance flourish. You won’t find militant manifestos or polished philosophical treatises here. You’ll see secret meetings in cramped apartments where fast-food workers organize to unionize, despite the threat of retaliation from multinational corporations. This is where inter-sectional feminists in church basements debate how to pressure their local community to build affordable housing, and where anti-racists in school gyms devise tactics for defunding the police. You’ll find surprising connections. The sharing of experiences. And the breaking of bread. Recognition of collective responsibility and interconnected fate. Statues won’t be erected, and street corners won’t be renamed to commemorate these heroes. True. But without them, democracy doesn’t survive. Not after this disaster, or the next.