A young man in middle school has a problem. He is of short stature, wears glasses, excels in his classes, and has never considered himself to be athletic in any sense. One thing he does have is a sense of self-respect. This, too often, makes one the victim of those lacking a sense of self-respect. In his school, he would like to make friends, he would like to gain the acceptance of those around him, to be seen as an equal. Yet, another young man, larger in stature and lacking that sense of self-respect, cannot help but hate him as an extension of hating himself. He bullies the former young man, making him feel small and insignificant; keeping him from acting and feeling like an equal in their school. The former young man tells the teacher about his issue, but they do not do anything about it. This continues so to the point that one day, our young man decides to retaliate violently against his bully. For this, he gets detention.
Violence, like in the above story, is often reacted to punitively in our society. That is a valid approach, we do not want to have a population on our hands that assaults each other for the fun of it. However, it might just be that we are operating with an incomplete conception of violence. The young man is guilty of violence, but was not his bully? Is not repeatedly degrading an individual to the point that they resist forcefully also a form of violence? There is a form of violence that too often goes unnoticed, too often goes unaddressed, and too often becomes normalized; these days, the name we have for this kind of violence is “systemic oppression.” Resistance to the quiet violence of systemic oppression is perhaps the only instance when violence is justified. There is something more pernicious about the violence of systemic oppression that does justify resistance of whatever form.
Look to Ukraine; there a larger, more powerful country is invading and bearing down on its neighbor to bring it into its sphere of influence and to subject the Ukrainian people to the brand of kleptocracy that has been ruling the Russian people for the past twenty years – this is an causal result of centuries of Russian systemic oppression of the Ukrainian people. Do we condemn the Ukrainian people for their resistance to their oppressors? Of course we do not; we valorize them as heroes. Why then, do we not think of Nat Turner as a hero? Some might, in retrospect, look at him and the members of his rebellion as heroes. The 2016 film The Birth of a Nation certainly portrays Turner as a hero. This is only a very recent way of viewing Nat Turner and his rebellion; before he was either treated with fear and hatred, or simply considered as an impersonal and unromantic footnote in the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere. Slavery, for decades before and decades after Nat Turner’s rebellion, was normalized and permitted to continue by parties in both the North and the South. Nat Turner’s rebellion was a resistance against an oppressor, and in this, his violence was justified.
Some might take the above argument and say that the same applies to the Confederacy during the Civil War. This “Lost Cause” mentality of the Southern States rebelling against the Northern oppressors who wanted to change their way of life is solipsism. The south always knew that it had the option to secede and become violent in order to continue that system of oppression. It is analogous to the game the whole Western world is playing with Russia right now. Russia could always turn this war in Ukraine into worldwide conflagration, and so could the rest of us. We do not want it to get to that point. However, the oppressed hardly has any choice in their oppression, it’s the oppressor who is alway intimately aware of their violent agency. Which is why violence in retaliation is often what comes out of oppressed peoples. They never want it, but when pushed to it, they will fight with all of their strength, with all of their souls.