How Should Oppressed People Respond to Injustice and Violence?

This question has been twisted by those who wish to silence me. I have never advocated violence. I have advocated self-defense. There is a fundamental difference that the American system refuses to acknowledge.

When a man attacks you, you have the right—the moral and legal right—to defend yourself. This is not violence. This is self-preservation. Yet when the oppressed defend themselves against centuries of state violence, they are called violent. When they resist the police who brutalize them, they are called rioters. This hypocrisy must be named.

The violence in America did not begin with Black resistance. It began with slavery, with colonization, with the daily violence of oppression. Poverty is violence. Denying education is violence. Police brutality is violence. Systemic exclusion from economic opportunity is violence. All of this has been normalized, made invisible, made to seem like the natural order. But when the oppressed finally push back, suddenly America clutches its pearls and speaks of violence.

I have said that Black people should defend themselves by any means necessary. This means that if the system uses violence to maintain oppression, then the oppressed have the right to use whatever means are available to resist that oppression. This is not a call for aggression. It is a recognition of reality.

However, violence should never be the first response. Organization, education, economic development, building independent institutions—these should be pursued. But a people must be willing and able to defend what they have built. A man who will not defend his family, his home, his community is a coward. A people that will not defend themselves will be destroyed.

The question is not whether oppressed people have the right to resist. The question is whether America will finally grant them justice without requiring them to beg. If America will not provide justice through legal means, then the oppressed must create their own justice. Self-defense is not violence. It is survival. It is the only language that oppressors truly understand.