loading . . . _“The slave’s life is a lingering death.” –John Swanson Jacobs_
“Don’t provoke them, they want Black people to provoke them,” one person commented. Another person said, “Just go inside, damn.” I’m paraphrasing comments from Black social media users reacting to footage of the occupation of Washington, D.C. The images of police, soldiers, and agents terrorizing the “Chocolate City” are distressing. Yet, the fearful responses of commenters were troubling for several reasons, including the notion that what’s happening in the U.S. can be avoided. No, you cannot hide from fascism, and unfortunately for many of us, our very lives are a threat. It doesn’t matter if you’re minding your business, fighting back, or hiding somewhere quietly—tyranny comes for everyone. Generations of people throughout history around the world can tell you that being compliant and agreeable does not spare you from genocide, imprisonment, and conquest. Black people throughout the Western diaspora should know this better than anyone, given our respective histories of enslavement, colonization, and displacement. Therefore, it’s essential to reexamine certain aspects of these oppressions so that we can better understand our options and why obedience and avoidance will not save us from anything.
One commonality you might recognize when familiarizing yourself with the history of slave rebellions is the frequency with which informants betrayed them. Uprisings that could have changed conditions and freed countless people were sabotaged by one person or groups of people who feared freedom more than they feared their oppressor. Their reasoning was often that they didn’t want to get into trouble; therefore, they accepted their depraved condition instead. We still have that mentality all around us today. Part of the problem is likely how people have been conditioned to disempower themselves through the electoral politics of representative democracy. There are other problems as well, such as how people are led to believe that obligatory obedience to all authority creates a particular sense of safety and security. We learn this in our workplaces, educational institutions, religious settings, and even our resistance movements, among many other places. The issue is that it has regularly proven not to be true.
When we look at what’s happening in Washington, D.C., for example, we should recall what was said leading up to this point. Let’s not forget, some people were saying that visible resistance would be the “reaction” fascist authorities wanted, “so that it can declare martial law.” That supposed incitement coming from the public to justify the occupation _did not_ need to happen for authorities to overrun the nation’s capital. It will also not have to happen for the authorities to overrun any other cities, communities, or areas they want to take control of. It would be better if people who don’t understand how tyranny works admit that they’re scared or interested in being subservient. Trying to rationalize one’s fear as some degraded form of resistance is akin to the same type of liberalism telling people that consumerism, “self-care,” and disengagement are forms of activism. These are clownish excuses to do nothing and pretend it’s something in order to assuage guilt and dodge shame. As things get worse and are much more blatant, holding such positions will increasingly become outright complicity and collaboration with fascism.
> Being outside and rebelling are not required to provoke the backlash of fascism. … Your existence and your life can provoke them.
I’ve got news for you. Being outside and rebelling are not required to provoke the backlash of fascism. Your Black skin provokes them. Your citizenship status can provoke them. Your ethnicity can provoke them. Your gender can provoke them. Your poverty can. Your sexuality can. Your age can. Your existence and your life can provoke them. It’s all about who _we_ are in their world and what they decide is and isn’t acceptable. After all, if being on our best behavior and following the law were a saving grace, then would slavery have been reasonable? It was a legal institution, and rebellion against enslavers was long outlawed. Should “good” submissive enslaved captives have accepted their fate so they didn’t give their masters a reason to react? By being obedient to the point of giving up all self-determination, we’re poised to go back to conditions that many before us fought long and hard to overturn.
The brother of the famous abolitionist Harriet Jacobs, John Swanson Jacobs, detailed some critical insights on slavery in his (recently rediscovered) 1850s slave narrative, “The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots _._ ” __ Pointing out the 600,000 slaveowners, he stated that “legalised robbers rule the country; the laws of the South are paramount over those of the United States.” Unlike other heavily edited and censored slave narratives, John Jacobs is confrontational in acknowledging the legitimacy offered to the institution of slavery.
When it came to forced compliance with the law, he wrote, “There are the laws of the United States, forbidding the nation to do a single act of humanity toward the most helpless and most needy known to man. … This institution thinks there is nothing too holy to be made subservient to it. There is nothing in the catalogue of crime but what can be found in this unnatural hell on earth.” And finally, he knew that reform wasn’t enough because he knew the nature of coercive political power. He wrote, “How they do try to hide their infamy from the world! The mere passing of a law, of itself, does not seem so odious, though it be ever so unjust, if left open to the power that made it to amend it.”
Some people among us are still waiting for midterms and expecting to vote fascism away. Some hope to be saved by forces that don’t share the same priorities as them in terms of conditions, class, and politics. Others are completely detached and may not be aware of the seriousness of what we’re up against. Regardless of which of these scenarios we can identify, those in power expect us to be cowardly and not fight back enough. Former Trump adviser Steven Bannon said as much explicitly in a PBS “Frontline” interview:
> If you take power and exert it, this system’s not so tough. You know why? They’re all gutless cowards. They’ve all hid behind the system for decades and decades and decades. …You’re not going to scare us, and we’re not going to stop, and what we know is you guys are a bunch of pussies. You will crater. PBS is going to crater. … You know why? You’re not tough. You don’t believe actually at your core in what you’re trying to do, and you’ll fold, like the law firms, like the universities, like the media, like all of these institutions. You will fold, because we’re relentless, and we’re not going to stop.
What a precious self-defeating gift it must be for the reactionary right-wing establishment and white supremacists to hear your potential victims say, “Don’t provoke the authorities, just stay inside.” What a great help it is to an authoritarian government to hear people believe that voting was enough or that oppressors just want a “reaction” from us. It’s bad enough that those ruling over us are in power without a chorus of willful servants announcing their compliance. Their acquiescence and deference to authority is a natural consequence of societies organized in the ways that are normalized the world over.
There is a natural autocracy in the colonial origins that shape what we know as “the state,” which makes dictatorial power easier to usurp. Its monopolies on power force populations to cede their collective power under the assumption that centralized rule is necessary for organization. We are currently in a battle against authority, not a struggle to plead for understanding. To clarify, I’ll quote Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, who described “authority being understood as the ability to impose one’s own wishes and not the inescapable and beneficial practice whereby the person who best understands and is most knowledgeable about the doing of something finds it easier to have his opinion heeded.” When you look at the government, many things should become abundantly clear. The forced white supremacist ideals of social hierarchies based on race, class, ability, and nationality have nothing to do with qualifications. The Trump administration exemplifies the incoherence, ignorance, and domination of the way we’ve been told societies must be structured. Across the political spectrum, all of us freedom-seeking people should reconsider anything that enabled our current disaster.
Countless people have ended up in cells and graves, thinking that they could wait for change rather than force its occurrence. Many thought they could hide, be quiet, or comply enough to avoid their destruction when that wasn’t true. There is no great rescuer coming to save us if we behave long enough. What we know should be taken seriously. Our enemies are relentless, and only a relentless opposition willing to fight by any means necessary will stop them. If you want to know where to find the firestarter for that opposition, locate the nearest mirror.
_Editorial Team:_
_Lara Witt, Lead Editor_
_Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor_
_Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor_
### _Related_ https://prismreports.org/2025/08/21/obedience-fascism-washington-dc/
