Lois 's Reviews > We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
by
by
Lois 's review
bookshelves: advanced-reader-copy, audio-book, black-books, books-i-read-in-2024, feminist-books, historical, netgalley, person-of-color-author, poc-pov-char-or-peripheral-char
Jul 08, 2024
bookshelves: advanced-reader-copy, audio-book, black-books, books-i-read-in-2024, feminist-books, historical, netgalley, person-of-color-author, poc-pov-char-or-peripheral-char
This audiobook was made available for me to listen to and review by Kellie Carter Jackson, Tantor Audio, and NetGalley.
The narrator of this audiobook is Kellie Carter Jackson. I am not usually a fan of authors reading their own nonfiction history books, but this was really well done. The audio quality was crisp and clear. I enjoyed being able to hear the emotion in the authors own voice. Most especially because her statements are so powetful.
"This is a book about the ways Black people in America have responded to white supremacy—including through force. The intrinsic belief in Black humanity is essential to understanding Black resistance to racial terror."
This is an important and powerful historical record. I wasn't really sure what to expect, and I started this with extremely high hopes. I'm elated to share that I was not disappointed in the slightest. I was familiar with the basics of this history as both a historian and Black Feminist. Still, I learned so very much. Even the information I was familiar with was presented in a new light and connected to other applicable historical characters and incidents.
I purchased the Kindle copy of this when it was released and so was excited when I saw the audiobook available to review on NetGalley. My quotes in this review and in my updates as I was listening to the audiobook are taken from the digital book, which was published this past June.
This book is right on time as this has important history to remember and keep in mind as our nation heads into a presidential election like no other with extremely high stakes.
"Or we can let whiteness drown in the violence of its own making."
Thank you to Kellie Carter Jackson, Tantor Audio, and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook. All opinions and viewpoints expressed in this review are my own.
The narrator of this audiobook is Kellie Carter Jackson. I am not usually a fan of authors reading their own nonfiction history books, but this was really well done. The audio quality was crisp and clear. I enjoyed being able to hear the emotion in the authors own voice. Most especially because her statements are so powetful.
"This is a book about the ways Black people in America have responded to white supremacy—including through force. The intrinsic belief in Black humanity is essential to understanding Black resistance to racial terror."
This is an important and powerful historical record. I wasn't really sure what to expect, and I started this with extremely high hopes. I'm elated to share that I was not disappointed in the slightest. I was familiar with the basics of this history as both a historian and Black Feminist. Still, I learned so very much. Even the information I was familiar with was presented in a new light and connected to other applicable historical characters and incidents.
I purchased the Kindle copy of this when it was released and so was excited when I saw the audiobook available to review on NetGalley. My quotes in this review and in my updates as I was listening to the audiobook are taken from the digital book, which was published this past June.
This book is right on time as this has important history to remember and keep in mind as our nation heads into a presidential election like no other with extremely high stakes.
"Or we can let whiteness drown in the violence of its own making."
Thank you to Kellie Carter Jackson, Tantor Audio, and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook. All opinions and viewpoints expressed in this review are my own.
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Reading Progress
July 3, 2024
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Started Reading
July 3, 2024
– Shelved as:
advanced-reader-copy
July 3, 2024
– Shelved
July 3, 2024
– Shelved as:
audio-book
July 3, 2024
– Shelved as:
feminist-books
July 3, 2024
– Shelved as:
books-i-read-in-2024
July 3, 2024
– Shelved as:
black-books
July 3, 2024
– Shelved as:
person-of-color-author
July 3, 2024
– Shelved as:
netgalley
July 3, 2024
– Shelved as:
historical
July 3, 2024
– Shelved as:
poc-pov-char-or-peripheral-char
July 4, 2024
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0%
""While whiteness cannot be separated from violence, Blackness can be separated from oppression.""
July 5, 2024
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""Haiti became the first nation to grant universal emancipation. This was a revolution. Black men and women created a new world for the benefit of all oppressed peoples.""
July 5, 2024
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""The violence revealed the French as the ultimate criminals. The French were barbaric, but the Haitians were brave. The revolution was a refusal to be stripped of one’s spirit. The oppressive system was based on using fear of violence to keep Black people under control, but when the enslaved showed no fear of violence, they could not be kept under control and the system fell apart.""
July 5, 2024
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""I recall her telling me that her brothers would spend their weekends in jail there.
“Why did they go to jail? What did they do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she responded. “It was just safer there.”
I was incredulous. “What do you mean, ‘safer’?”
“Well,” she sighed, “the white men in town used to get drunk on the weekends and hang Black folks, so if you was already in jail, you were safe.”" authors grandmother"
“Why did they go to jail? What did they do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she responded. “It was just safer there.”
I was incredulous. “What do you mean, ‘safer’?”
“Well,” she sighed, “the white men in town used to get drunk on the weekends and hang Black folks, so if you was already in jail, you were safe.”" authors grandmother"
July 6, 2024
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""“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement. It is not the mere presence of Black people that is the problem; rather, it is Blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.” The reason is simple. Equality threatens the myth of white supremacy, and excellence destroys it completely.""
July 6, 2024
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""The mob attacks on Black communities in Washington, DC, were relentless....scores of Black people had been seriously hurt, with injuries ranging from broken bones to deep lacerations and internal bleeding....By Monday...An estimated five hundred firearms were sold that day...Black community had...spent a collective $14,000 on guns and ammunition." 1919 Red Summer"
July 6, 2024
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""The surge prompted police to ask weapons dealers to suspend sales. But when the gun dealers complied, Black bootleggers turned their attention from liquor to guns, driving to Baltimore to buy weapons and ammunition and then handing them out to Black Washingtonians."
We gone be OK folks, we just gotta remember it's always been fucked up and we've always defended ourselves."
We gone be OK folks, we just gotta remember it's always been fucked up and we've always defended ourselves."
July 6, 2024
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""The interesting thing about force was that many times, the appearance of a gun was a sufficient deterrent from white violence. Warning shots were as good as a shot aimed at a person. What terrified white racists hell-bent on wreaking havoc was not the sight of a gun but the emboldened attitude of a Black person who was unafraid to use it.""
July 6, 2024
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""...in the face of white supremacy, do not back down and do not take the bribe. Civil rights activists worked hard to preserve their lives, but it was equally difficult to preserve their values.""
July 6, 2024
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""There was no meaningful difference between white responses to armed resistance by blacks and white responses to nonviolent resistance by blacks. Where massive police force or state power was exercised...of crushing black prtest and demands in any shape.” police violence was not a response to either the use of guns or the practice of nonviolence...crushing black demands in any shape.""
July 6, 2024
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""Force is what happens when white people fail to live up to the laws of their own creation.""
July 6, 2024
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""It can be argued that the successes of the American Revolution and the American Civil War depended largely not on whether Black folks fought but where they fled: their flight from plantations crippled slaveholders because it robbed them of their labor force.""
July 6, 2024
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""In the twentieth century, flight became the Great Migration. From 1890 to 1970 an estimated six to eight million Black southerners left their homes to find new ones in the Midwest and Northeast and on the West Coast."
My father his younger sister were born in Detroit. His olddr siblings were all born in Florida I think🤔
I haf no idea how harrowing The Great Migration was until about a decade or so ago."
My father his younger sister were born in Detroit. His olddr siblings were all born in Florida I think🤔
I haf no idea how harrowing The Great Migration was until about a decade or so ago."
July 6, 2024
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""Leaving is an act of resistance because so many Black people are stuck, unable to leave the ghetto or hood or other place that has suffered from racist neglect and community divestment.""
July 6, 2024
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""Cities were already fragile from white flight: white families that were not interested in integration had left cities for the suburbs decades earlier, in the 1940s and ’50s. With no tax base, cities became unlivable.""
July 6, 2024
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""It should be no surprise that when all the factors of unemployment, underemployment, economic divestment, and failing schools come together, crime is the result. People become compelled to operate outside of the law to provide for their families or survive themselves. The government’s solution to Black poverty is policing."
Hence the inevitable anti-policing stance of Black Communities. It's common sense."
Hence the inevitable anti-policing stance of Black Communities. It's common sense."
July 6, 2024
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""Accordingly, mass incarceration is an entire ecosystem of prisons, jails, courts, parole officers, police officers, investors, and policies, based not on mitigating harm but on punishing crime. And the surest way to dispose of a people is to define Blackness and poverty as synonymous with criminality. The very notion of prison is about an inability to move or have mobility in public spaces.""
July 6, 2024
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""There are no African countries whose citizens can enter the United States without a visa. There is no ninety-day tourist exemption that would allow someone from Botswana to go to Boston or Los Angeles for a holiday without diplomatic hurdles. So much of the Black experience is about isolation—the inability to travel or move from place to place, to be restricted to one town, city, or country.""
July 6, 2024
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""Her family caravanned from Detroit to Mississippi in three or four cars over several days. They all took turns driving, and when it was time to eat, they ate the meals they had packed before they left. When nature called or it was time to sleep, they pulled over to the side of the road. There were no public restaurants they could dine in, or restrooms they could use, or hotels they dared stay in.""
July 6, 2024
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""Wholesale abandonment is the other side to revolutionary violence.4 Some scholars argue that slave flight was more devastating than rebellion. For example, in South Carolina, over twenty-five thousand enslaved men and women left their plantations. This number represented about a quarter of the enslaved population at the time.""
July 6, 2024
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""By the end of the American Revolution, some scholars estimate, as many as eighty thousand to one hundred thousand enslaved people throughout the thirteen states escaped to the British lines. Though the British lost the American colonies, they kept their word to enslaved people regarding the promise of freedom.""
July 6, 2024
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""During the early nineteenth century, the American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded with the idea of sending Black Americans back to Africa—to the newly established colony of Liberia, in particular. Robert Finley, who founded the organization with other white Americans in 1816, could not make sense of a free Black existence.""
July 6, 2024
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""These men considered themselves abolitionists, but the ACS was not about liberating Black Americans—it was about preserving white supremacy. To the founders of the ACS, free Black people—especially those living in the South—threatened the entire nation’s way of life.""
July 6, 2024
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""In 1852, Shadd Cary published a pamphlet entitled A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes of Canada West, in Its Moral, Social and Political Aspect: With Suggestions Respecting Mexico, West Indies and Vancouver’s Island for the Information of Colored Emigrants.... The pamphlet examines the benefits of flight, of taking one’s labor, talents, and family to ...a place where Black people can move beyond surviving...""
July 6, 2024
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""Black leaders such as Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, H. Ford Douglas, James Theodore Holly, E. P. Walker, J. M. Whitfield, and William C. Monroe were at the forefront of Black American emigration, particularly to the island of Haiti.""
July 6, 2024
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""In 1859, Haitian President Geffard also appointed James Redpath to be his commissioner of emigration in the United States. Redpath felt that Black emigration to the island could help Haiti obtain diplomatic recognition from the US and allow Black Americans to have a better life.""
July 6, 2024
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""Frederick Douglass’s and William J. Watkins’s decisions to support emigration marked a significant shift in the way Black intellectuals and activists thought about their relationship to America. Even the abolitionist George T. Downing, who was one of the biggest opponents of leaving, had by 1861 shifted his opinion.""
July 6, 2024
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""When the Civil War ended, Black Americans connected their newfound citizenship not just to protection under the law but
186
mobility. Newly freed Black people left to find their loved ones and to farm for themselves. African Americans readily understood that the freedom to travel locally, nationally, or internationally was one of the major components of citizenship and, at a deeper level, humanity.""
186
mobility. Newly freed Black people left to find their loved ones and to farm for themselves. African Americans readily understood that the freedom to travel locally, nationally, or internationally was one of the major components of citizenship and, at a deeper level, humanity.""
July 6, 2024
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""Accordingly, after emancipation, segregation arose to perpetuate white supremacy. And when Black people could not be stopped from moving freely or from achieving the financial success that would allow them to do so, white people resorted to violence.""
July 6, 2024
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""She revealed that lynchings rarely targeted Black men who had sexually assaulted white women, as was the common justification. Instead, they targeted Black men in consensual interracial relationships, successful Black entrepreneurs who competed with white businesses, and Black people involved in political activity." Ida B. Wells studies on lynchings."
July 6, 2024
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""Wells’s editorials and pamphlets enraged white people, who sought to commit unspeakable violence against her. When the threats of violence began in response...she was already gone, she had taken a vacation to Harlem in New York. ...Wells traveled extensively throughout Europe, particularly England, Scotland, and Wales.""
July 6, 2024
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""“I was promoted on the first of the month. I should have been here 20 years ago. I just began to feel like a man. My children are going to the same school with the whites and I don’t have to umble [sic] to no one. I have registered, will vote the next election and there isn’t any ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’—its all yea and no and Sam and Bill.”"
There was violence. I know from my father who was chased home by white boys."
There was violence. I know from my father who was chased home by white boys."
July 6, 2024
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""Born in 1942, Ever Lee grew up on the Cooleemee plantation in Mocksville, North Carolina... Her family had lived and worked on the plantation for over one hundred years... the white Hairstons ... grew the cotton that the Black Hairstons picked. As sharecroppers, the Black Hairstons never owned any land, and owned any land, and for every dollar they earned, the white Hairstons took seventy cents.""
July 6, 2024
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""By 1972, no Black Hairstons were working for any white Hairstons. It took over one hundred years after emancipation for the Hairstons to be freed from their white employers who exploited their labor.
In 1996, Ever Lee returned to North Carolina to attend a family reunion of mostly Black Hairstons and some white Hairstons."
In 1996, Ever Lee returned to North Carolina to attend a family reunion of mostly Black Hairstons and some white Hairstons."
July 6, 2024
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""Judge Peter Hairston. As a white Hairston, the judge owned the land that the Black Hairstons had lived and worked on. Though he saw himself as benevolent, Judge Peter lorded his power over the Black Hairstons. He made a point of attending all of the Hairston family reunions and always seated himself at one of the head tables. He was the man who had paid every Black Hairston thirty cents on the dollar for picking...""
July 6, 2024
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0%
""Flight can be a reprieve, a relief, a new shelter, and a new beginning. But flight cannot ensure belonging. Because of racism, Black people will always be intellectually, culturally, and geographically nomadic.""
July 6, 2024
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""Happiness is fleeting,” he said, “but joy is grounded by grief.” Joy is birthed from hard places.so much of Black life is filled with compounding grief—loss on top of loss. Tragedy tends to have a domino effect, collapsing life on top of life in what feels like a never-ending cascade of Black bodies falling over into darkness. The irony of joy is that it cannot be understood in isolation or without trials.""
July 6, 2024
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""For many Black people, the cause of death dictates how much empathy should be extended to the bereaved. Compassion and condolences are conditional because even our deaths must be respectable."
A whole word!"
A whole word!"
July 6, 2024
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""I have always felt that white people get to be happy while Black people get to have joy. Happiness isn’t tethered to anything in the way that joy is tethered to oppression. It just is.""
July 6, 2024
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""I’m choosing to end this book with Black joy because I see it as one of the most potent tools of revolutionary work toward liberation. Black joy is the ultimate expression of Black humanity.
The joy of laughter, food, dance, dress and adornment, rhetoric, play, and art can be employed to dispel and destroy whiteness as supreme, aspirational, or the norm.""
The joy of laughter, food, dance, dress and adornment, rhetoric, play, and art can be employed to dispel and destroy whiteness as supreme, aspirational, or the norm.""
July 6, 2024
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""Anti-Blackness is the work of white supremacy; it perpetuates beliefs that Black people are subhuman and deficient. Black joy produces the antidote to the degeneration and erosion of Black life.""
July 6, 2024
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""Black joy is a haven. It cannot be purchased or mimicked. It cannot be stolen because it is intangible.
White supremacy finds satisfaction in treasure, material accumulation, and domination. But Black joy is a collection not of things but of experiences that instill pride, love, and solidarity.""
White supremacy finds satisfaction in treasure, material accumulation, and domination. But Black joy is a collection not of things but of experiences that instill pride, love, and solidarity.""
July 6, 2024
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""Black people need reminders that they are not crazy and nothing is wrong with them. Black joy rejects, neglects, and even mocks white feelings of superiority alongside their unearned or ill-gotten gains.""
July 6, 2024
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""Historian Barbara J. Fields argues that “Americans of European descent invented race during the era of the American Revolution as a way of resolving the contradiction between a natural right to freedom and the fact of slavery.” Thus, race was born from hypocrisy. Race is not biological. Racism is not a necessary evil, nor is whiteness the default norm for society.""
July 6, 2024
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""When white supremacy is not enacting outright violence, the expression of it in interpersonal relationships is foolish.
...
Poking fun robs whiteness of its legitimacy. It undermines ideas that routinely and repetitively stunt Black life.""
...
Poking fun robs whiteness of its legitimacy. It undermines ideas that routinely and repetitively stunt Black life.""
July 6, 2024
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""He argued that Black people in America and in the West Indies were humorous: “They are filled with laughter and delicious chuckling. They enjoy themselves; they enjoy jokes; they perpetrate them on each other and on white folk.” Du Bois reasoned that humor was a defense mechanism or a reaction to tragedy.""
July 6, 2024
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""The Reverend Solomon Sir Jones was a Baptist minister and amateur filmmaker. In footage that is nearly one hundred years old, Jones documented African American communities in Oklahoma between 1924 and 1928. His silent film captured Black schoolchildren performing choreographed dance moves outside on a sunny day.""
July 6, 2024
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""Toni Morrison wrote the foreword to The Black Book, a collection of images and essays compiled by Middleton A. Harris. The Black Book covered the history of Black culture from 1619 through the 1940s.
...
In her 1974 op-ed published in the New York Times, she remarked that reading it was “like growing up black one more time.”""
...
In her 1974 op-ed published in the New York Times, she remarked that reading it was “like growing up black one more time.”""
July 6, 2024
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""Dancing is tethered to Black joy. Any wedding, graduation, or celebratory party draws Black people to do the Electric Slide, the Cupid Shuffle, or the Wobble.
...
...dance may not solve most of Black problems, as James Brown declared, but it can, for a moment, make us forget."
🥰❤️"
...
...dance may not solve most of Black problems, as James Brown declared, but it can, for a moment, make us forget."
🥰❤️"
July 6, 2024
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""African Americans built this country. From the plantations to the White House, from the fields to the railroads, Black labor ushered in American modernity with little compensation, recognition, or gratitude.
Slowdowns, sabotage, feigned illness, and petty theft were ways to resist and refuse this oppression, to ensure that no one got the best of Black labor.""
Slowdowns, sabotage, feigned illness, and petty theft were ways to resist and refuse this oppression, to ensure that no one got the best of Black labor.""
July 6, 2024
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""For Black Americans, patriotism is complicated. White superiority has been cultivated for so long that superheroes—all saviors—are de facto white. The introduction of a Black superhero was a paradigm shift. Crossing one’s arms over one’s chest and declaring “Wakanda forever!” provided Black audiences the feeling that white Americans must get at the Olympics, chanting “USA, USA, USA!” Representation is joyful.""
July 6, 2024
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""By the end of the...series, more than 130 million people—nearly half of the population of the United States at the time—had seen at least one episode of Roots. When the finale aired on January 30, 1977, an estimated ninety million viewers tuned in, making it the most-watched program in television history up to that point. In an era before TV could be easily recorded, Americans canceled meetings...""
July 6, 2024
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""Indeed, just a year before Roots debuted, the network broadcast of Gone with the Wind “broke all previous records for audience share.”""
July 6, 2024
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""Though fictional and eventually controversial for allegations of plagiarism and inaccuracies, Roots hit at the heart of Black Americans’ history of forced migration, violence, and exploitation."
Roots is fiction based on family legend. Very little of it is provable and the scenes set in Wrst Africa were stolen verbatim from a white authors fiction book.
Still this was a solid response to gone with the wind B.S."
Roots is fiction based on family legend. Very little of it is provable and the scenes set in Wrst Africa were stolen verbatim from a white authors fiction book.
Still this was a solid response to gone with the wind B.S."
July 6, 2024
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""bell hooks understood that the answer to our grief is love. She also understood that love is devoid of power. In our capitalistic, patriarchal, and hegemonic world, Americans tend to think love is weak and even embarrassing. Because white supremacy is defined by violent power, it can never produce community or compassion."
She was such a profound loss. I felt her death in my soul."
She was such a profound loss. I felt her death in my soul."
July 6, 2024
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""We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power.” But love makes people vulnerable and thereby connects us to others. Love requires community, and hooks gave us the remedy for pain. She addressed our trauma and prioritized our suffering. She gave her readers language to understand love as a noun, an adjective, and a verb. Healing is a radical communal act." In reference to bell hooks"
July 6, 2024
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""Slavery was an institution that deprived white people of their humanity and created a context in which Black people could not be seen as human either. In slavery, there were no humans, white or Black. For people to become human, slavery needed to be abolished.""
July 6, 2024
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""I believe my ancestors needed We Refuse in the world. I think my great-great-great-grandmother and her daughters and granddaughters needed this work."
Thank you! I needed this book too.
I thank the authors Ancestors, too, for their guidance of the author on this timely narrative."
Thank you! I needed this book too.
I thank the authors Ancestors, too, for their guidance of the author on this timely narrative."
July 6, 2024
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""All that is good, brilliant, and uplifting in this book stems from the invaluable input of a community of scholars, friends, and family. The only exception to this is errors. Should anyone find faults, the failure is mine completely."
Like Malcolm X♥️
Well done Sis🥰😭"
Like Malcolm X♥️
Well done Sis🥰😭"
July 8, 2024
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Finished Reading