We Refuse Quotes

“There is no form of protest white supremacy will approve. Whether Black people take a knee or burn down the QuikTrip, the backlash will always be the same. Appeasing white power structures will not work. And when nonviolence is not successful, it is likely because nonviolence is being used as a tool to suppress change. Only by force can freedom be gained.”
― Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

“Gun rights mattered, but protection attended to the whole body, the whole person. True liberation makes guns obsolete because when everyone is cared for there is no need to conquer, and certainly there is no need to hoard.”
― Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

“Ordinary people without political, economic, or social power have always found empowerment in defending their lives and the lives of others. Collective protection is powerful. It not only saved lives, but compelled people to reckon with the reasons for needing it. ... The answers should haunt us. Protection was a constant response to white supremacy. White power had become synonymous with violence.”
― Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

“Much of the hard work in protection is about proving that a double standard exists in terms of who is awarded rights, citizenship, and humanity, and preventing the double standard from causing harm. Until Black and oppressed peoples are able to be and belong, protective collective action will be required.”
― Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

“For Black Americans, the [American] Revolution replaced a distant white supremacist tyrant supportive of Black enslavement with local and electable white supremacist tyrants empowered to preserve the existing social, political, and economic order, which was grounded in slavery and anti-Blackness. The Revolution was not merely imperfect; it was not true.”
― Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

“The violence of white supremacy is also bound up in forgetting. That Black revolutionary victories have been marginalized and forgotten is not accidental. The French did not just want to eliminate Black leadership; they sought to erase Black history because history often serves as a road map to a possible future. In marginalizing the past, white people were attempting to make Black people beholden to an identity stuck in subordination.”
― Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

“No white people in the Western world could imagine their own revolutions without the suppression of Black people.”
― Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

“Nearly every African American could teach a master class in refusing the terms in our degradation.”
― Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance