Dauntless

The tradition of armed resistance persisted even as the civil-rights movement succeeded by rejecting this fearful symmetry: Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis showed that Black people without guns were much more formidable.
Graeme Wood. "A Black Army Rises to Fight the Racist Right"

I call BS. I think that White people in the United States found (generally after the civil rights movement has ended) these figures to be non-threatening, and thus more acceptable. While civil rights icons like Reverend King and Representative Lewis are often credited with forcing White America to make concessions to racial equity and equality, it's likely more accurate to say that they wheedled and cajoled. If power concedes nothing without a demand, the demand did not come from the peaceful protests of Black Americans, but from the willingness of White Americans to push their will on their recalcitrant colleagues.

"Unfortunately, Jay’s answer—create a parallel, quasi-fascist race army with its own flag and homeland—strikes me as a particularly bad case of becoming that which you hate." Mr. Wood relates. And okay, I won't argue with that. Mr. Wood is allowed to rate ideas however way he likes. But that's not a particularly good justification for saying that a less-threatening path would be more effective. If "acknowledging that Black people are uniquely menaced, is to be expected," then it stands to reason that the icons of the civil rights movement were not formidable enough to get the job done. Would one really expect that if Reverend King were alive today, he'd have concluded that he'd attained his goals?

Generally speaking, the point behind the threat of violence is to affect change that the threatened find unwelcome through presenting the potential for even more unwelcome change. In effect, it's offering a choice between paying a little and paying a lot. Mr. Wood reveals a confidence that power can be convinced to pay a little without the threat of paying a lot. Sometimes, people cultivate that confidence because they genuinely believe in the goodness of people's hearts, and sometimes, people cultivate that confidence because while power might not be frightened of what happens if a revolutionary attempts to make good on their threats, they are. When some of my more radical friends speak to the need for revolution to change America, my pushback comes from a place of noting that revolutions really suck. If a revolution is what's needed, then so be it, but if one can find a less bloody way to make the world a better place, I'd like to try that one first.

But that's different than having some magical confidence that it's the more formidable option. Mr. Wood's piece in The Atlantic is calibrated to present its subject as a clown whom no-one should be following. Which is nothing new. His piece on Kyle Rittenhouse paints the young man as a deluded inhabitant of a fantasy world. But he makes an interesting point in that article: "Training yourself to imagine something makes it seem more likely to happen, and primes your instincts to react to it—and, I suspect, initiate that violent reaction and overdo it when circumstances could be resolved more peacefully." Do Black people in America have to train themselves to imagine being uniquely menaced? Are their angry reactions overdoing it?

One aspect of a commitment to peace that is often overlooked is that outside of someone who is simply intent on homicide, acquiescing to injustice is as peaceful a resolution as any. Part of the ethos of peaceful civil disobedience is that people will see the injustice being perpetrated and withdraw their support for the unjust actor, and that said actor desires that social support more than they crave whatever benefits accrue to them from their acts of injustice. I am not a student of history, and so I can't offer any analysis of the overall effectiveness of non-violence. And at the same time this means that I can't contest the people who critique it in the same way that they critique "civility," as something that allows power to avoid concession by refusing to present it with a workable demand.

People turn to violence for any number of reasons, but in the end, I suspect that most people subscribe to what a Libertarian acquaintance of mine terms the "Non-Aggression Principle," which, put simply, is the idea that violence is only justified in the defense of rights. It's one thing to say that any given right can be defended without recourse to violence. It's quite another to demonstrate that any given right is best defended without recourse to violence. For my part, I'm not a revolutionary. I'm a terrible shot, have no intention on spending the range time that it would take to remedy that and am squeamish. I have too much of a distaste for fighting to see it as anything other than a last resort. But more importantly, I'm at a place in my life where I don't have to call upon my last resorts. So I have the luxury of considering violence to be an unpleasant option where others are available. Not everyone believes themselves to be so affluent. If one believes that they are, helping them to come to the same conclusion is more useful than a blind faith in their ineffectiveness.