Revolutions and Resistance with Kellie Carter Jackson

Kellie Carter Jackson, author of We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, is here to take us on a trip through American history where we learn about revolutions, change, and joy not from a few white men, but from generations of Black women.

Kellie Carter Jackson https://www.kelliecarterjackson.com/

Read We Refuse https://www.kelliecarterjackson.com/we-refuse

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Transcript

Sarah: Like any other radical group, they cannot agree on a single thing besides the thing they all are here for. It's perfect.

Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about revolution and resistance with Kellie Carter Jackson. Kellie is the author of a new book called, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. And in this episode, we talk about her book, we talk about resistance, we talk about what revolution is, what we're taught it looks like, what it really can and really does look like. And we really do a bit of a survey course of American history, which does make sense, because Kellie is the associate professor and chair of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. 

So we're doing some back to school. And we're talking about the American Revolution, which I'm putting in air quotes for the moment. We're talking about post World War I America, way up until the protests in 2020. And this is an episode that Kellie and I were talking about making for a little while, and timing was one of the questions, as you might imagine, for a kind of election adjacent time, picking what to share with people, what to talk about and what conversations feel important to have and to share is a tricky and fascinating thing at this moment. But what I love about this conversation, what I hoped it would be, and what I now know that it is that this is a conversation about resistance and change and the work that we do every day, not all at once. So I was really happy to be able to have this conversation with Kellie at this time, and to be able to share with you.

You may also know Kellie Carter Jackson from her previous book, Force and Freedom. It was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and you may know her from her podcast work, including co-hosting This Day in Esoteric Political History and You Get a Podcast. And you can probably guess who that's about.

We do have a content warning for this episode, which is that we mention repeatedly as a topic, racial violence, and get into a description of that at about the 40-minute mark. 

If you like this episode, if you want to hear more, we have bonus episodes on Patreon and Apple+ subscriptions. We have a new one with Candace Opper on Somerton Man and the stories that humans make when we just have a pocketful of information. And I love talking to Candace. I hope you love Candace, too. That conversation is there for you if you want to hear it. And that's it. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you for learning with us. Thank you to Kellie. Let's go talk.

Welcome to You're Wrong About the show where we talk about American history as you are not allowed to learn it in school for some reason, and with me today is Kellie Carter Jackson. Kellie, hello! 

Kellie: Hi! Hello there! 

Sarah: Thank you so much for being here, and I am in a very back to school mood, and I hope that feels appropriate for you as a descriptor of what we're doing today, because in the most fun way possible, we're here to learn. 

Kellie: We started classes, it's actually our first week of classes. And getting back into the groove of things, getting students to get adjusted to what they're learning, especially if they're freshmen. And for the first time, I think a lot of my students are talking about things that they haven't really been taught and haven't really been exposed to, especially if they're coming straight out of high school. And it feels good to have this conversation. There's a lot to discuss that is definitely not taught in our textbooks. 

Sarah: Yeah. And it is, it's 97 degrees in Portland today, but it's fall in our hearts. 

Kellie: And it's fall here. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's a little bit more fall in Massachusetts, I hope. I was talking to a friend just before getting on about how in Portland now, this never happened as far as I know before 2017 and now it happens every summer there'll be like big forest fires in the northwest or in Canada people in the rest of the country have experienced this now too and then smoke will drift in a big way and then you'll have like really bad air quality and headaches and fatigue and among various other health issues for people and also the sun and the moon will be blood red for days. I was saying that to somebody and they were like, wait, what? The sun is blood red? And I was like, yeah, the sun and the moon are blood red. Obviously. What are we doing?

Kellie: That's wild. 

Sarah: This American experiment is not going as planned. And that is part of the conversation here. I think part of what the subtext of that statement is, the American experiment is not going as planned, thank God, because the people who planned it were Thomas Jefferson, etc. 

Kellie: Yeah, I know. I know. In some ways it's terrifying when it is going as planned a little bit. And then trying to right that wrong is what makes history, I think, so complicated. 

Sarah: Yeah and so you have a book out and I do find that authors are really bad at self-promotion. So I want you to take us through today's episode, exactly the way you want, except I'm going to make you at the start, talk about your book a little bit because everything we're talking about today connects back to that.

Kellie: Yeah I wrote a book called, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, and it took me about four years. to write. I started it really at the start of the summer of 2020 right as George Floyd was killed in the summer became a summer of racial reckoning. And I wrote an op-ed just about my anger, my frustration at the double standard I was seeing in terms of how Black people could make use of force and resistance, how white people made use of force and resistance and the different ways in which they encountered sort of backlash in the media. 

And when I wrote the op-ed, I didn't realize that it hit a nerve. And so a bunch of publishers were like, hey, is this a book? And I was like yeah, um, yeah, sure! And four years later it became, We Refuse. But it was a moment where I think I could talk about the things that really frustrated me about racial progress. And it allowed me to think about or push beyond dichotomies. 

If I've learned anything from my students, it's that they really expressed to me how much dichotomies just don't work. It's either this or it's that. And that's just not true, especially when it comes to history. And so in thinking about social political movements, I think oftentimes we get pigeonholed into thinking you're either going to be violent or you can be nonviolent, you're going to do it right or you're going to do it wrong. And I wanted to have a much more expansive way of thinking about Black resistance and saying just because it's violent doesn't mean it's wrong. And just because it's nonviolent doesn't make it right. 

And so how do we tease out these ideas and talk about the limitations of both, but then also push beyond that and say we have a lot of tools at our disposal for achieving Black liberation and social justice and equity. And so the book really looks at that. It's five chapters and it's all about looking at five tools that I've come up with, which are revolution, protection, force, flight, and joy. 

And I argue that these are not exhaustive, like these aren't the only ways, but there are five I think really prominent tools that I think I have either experienced in my own life or seen play out throughout history in terms of how Black people have fought back against white supremacy. I talk about all of those in great detail. And I even talk about my own personal life. I didn't set out to make a memoir. It's not a memoir, not at all. But each chapter starts out with a personal family story or anecdote to show how I've made sense of race and racism in America. 

And I think a lot of these family anecdotes touch a nerve because it's so much of what a lot of Black Americans have experienced in their own lives, talking about the violence of white supremacy and how they themselves have found themselves having to fight back. And yeah, this book for me is a labor of love. I wrote it as a love letter to the Black community and our allies, and I hope it will be read widely. Yeah, but there's a lot we can get into with it, too. 

Sarah: Yeah and when we were talking about what we wanted to talk about on this episode, and also what conversation we wanted to be having in the moments before we have an election, I feel like everybody, maybe not everybody, but everybody that I talked to seemingly is unbelievably stressed, not in a way that we want to talk about, but stressed in the way of about to have your first baby stressed or something like that. You're like, it could go well, but even if it does, it'll be awful. 

Kellie: Or I could die! Or I could die! I know! I have three kids and I think about that all the time. I was the closest to death when I had each of my kids. It's exhilarating and terrifying and super stressful. Every election feels like there's a lot on the line. Certainly, there are stakes in every election, but this one in particular, I thought 2020 was a lot, I thought 2016 was a lot. Like we just keep going up and up and up.

Sarah: The situation continues to be unprecedented. And I think this idea of wow, it's the Enlightenment. It's the late 1700s. We're doing it. We're starting a country based on Enlightenment philosophy and the ideas of the rights of man, white male landowners, of course. And this idea that I think is such a big part of how America continues to attempt to see itself, or at least how white America does, of a revolution is something that you have once and then you're done with it and you just have done it and you've invented your country and you did it right on the first try. I mean we also talked about this in our Jane Collective episode, and I think so much of what we're going to talk about is what history shows and shows that it is a nice little story but seemingly not more than that I would say. 

Kellie: Yeah. Yeah. I tell my students that revolutions are actually starting points. They're not where we end the story. It's not the American revolution. All right. Next chapter. Like we do that a lot in history, mostly because we're trying to constantly move chronologically and keep the story going. But when I think about revolutions, I see revolutions as a starting point because okay, you achieved this big moment. You overthrow a European power, or you abolish the institution of slavery. Now what? The revolution is actually what comes after. 

And I think it's much harder to sustain the success of the triumphs of a revolution than it is actually to have a revolution, because all throughout history, it's the age of revolutions. The United States has a revolution. France has a revolution. Haiti has a revolution. Parts of South America have revolutions. Liberty and equality are in the air. But there are very few of those countries that actually do the work of revolution. 

So in my book, I talk a lot about how the American Revolution was actually not revolutionary, it doesn't change anything for people on the ground. When I think of revolutions, I think of replacing a broken system with the just one, with an equitable one, there is a drastic sort of change in how systems are overturned, repaired, and built anew. And in the United States, you don't get that, nothing changes for Native Americans. Nothing changes for enslaved Black people or free Black people. Nothing changes for women. Nothing changes for poor white farmers. You really have a distant European power that is replaced with the local white elite. And that is how things play out almost for another hundred years, really until you get to the Civil War. 

It's not until you get this huge moment where I feel like America is conceived of in 1776, but born in 1865, you might say 1861 or 65, where you get, the abolition of slavery, you get the citizenship to all people naturalized in the United States are born in the United States, you get equal protection under the law, you get suffrage for Black men, you get the first primary education in public schools come from Reconstruction. The first public health departments come from Reconstruction. All of that was revolutionary. 

You could be a Black person, a poor white person and have access to things that you never had access to before. You could have enfranchisement, you could have protection. There was none of that in 1776, or in 1805, or in 1825, you go forward, there's none of that. There are campaigns for that there are efforts to push for that, but until you really get to see that take place, and then until you get to see people live their lives in that change, the revolution's ongoing. You know what I mean? The push to get these achievements and sustain them. I see the work as ongoing. 

So yeah, my book talks a lot about what does a revolution look like. What does it entail? What should we expect? How do we sustain it? When we look at what Haiti does the unthinkable, the impossible. It's an enslaved island nation, smaller than the state of Vermont, more mountainous than the state of Vermont, many of them enslaved people, African born, and they overthrow France, and they abolish the institution of slavery and they install themselves as national figureheads of their Black Island nation. That's just unheard of. They take the French flag, they rip out the white to say, we will be a Black nation. They make the Haitian flag and boom, Haiti comes into existence. That's a revolution. But when we look at Haiti now, and that's a complicated history, but the work of revolution had just gotten started. The work of sustaining that is still ongoing. 

Sarah: Yeah, and I wonder about if you look at what the stated goals of the American Revolution, which is funny to call it given the conversation we're having, what was actually happening there? What were the priorities there? And who was it for? And how far is our view of it from what was actually going on?

Kellie: That's a good question. A lot of scholars are in intense debates about this. Part of the debate about the 1619 project was about how should we understand the origins of our nation? And were the founding fathers thinking about freedom as only for themselves, as equality is only for themselves. And when I say themselves, white elite men, many of whom were slaveholders. It's crazy to think that Thomas Jefferson is writing the Declaration of Independence while being catered to by enslaved people, while owning over four or five hundred enslaved people. Same with George Washington, he owns over three hundred enslaved people. None of that makes sense. None of it tracks. 

Now, what I will say is that the hypocrisy or the conundrum of this freedom project when we think about the American Revolution is that the principles and ideas are still good ones. That if you were to not look at the hypocrisy and take it at face value and see all men as created equal, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, those are good things. It's a brilliant template. I don't think they understood or realized how much it would apply to everyone or should apply to everyone. 

I think that they were not necessarily forward thinking when they drafted all that they did, which is crazy because people think of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as this very modern document, and that's not exactly what it achieves, that it takes decades before slavery is abolished. It takes another, what, 50, 60 years before women get full enfranchisement. And in a lot of ways, progress, the pace of progress, it's incredibly slow. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I think that the way that we teach history, it's almost like when you're reading a recipe that's like, caramelize the onions. This should take 15 minutes. And then you try and do it and you're like, oh my God, it's taking more than 15 minutes. What am I doing wrong? But it's because there's some sort of unspoken conspiracy for no one to ever admit how long it takes to caramelize onions, because I guess the fear is that then nobody would bother doing it. It takes too long. Like 45 minutes or an hour or something. 

Kellie: We would never do this if we knew what it was really required. 

Sarah: Yeah. I was saying this to a friend the other day about how when you're young and you want to be an artist, like every adult you talk to practically is no, you shouldn't do that. And you're like, I know you're saying that, but I think you're trying to trick me so that I don't have this great life. And art is a really important part of life. But I think the sort of struggle to be a working artist in America, especially in a culture that is systematically disenfranchising and devaluing what people are doing in most fields at any given time. You realize at a certain point that those warnings were real, and they really were trying to stop you. But what's great about being young and passionate is that people can tell you incredibly pessimistic things about what you're trying to do, and you'll still do it. So you should just admit that it takes forever. 

Kellie: Yes. Yes. And that it's still worth pursuing, because you do get those artists that create beautiful, powerful, political pieces, and had it not been for their own sort of grit, you don't get to experience that art, that beauty, A lot of the American Project is just a double edged sword, especially when you think about white supremacy, because you can't create a society based on equality and still maintain white supremacy. It's impossible. 

Sarah: Although we've been really trying to do it. 

Kellie: Yeah, we have. We have. We are trying to. It is impossible. If you have ten and I have two and we're both trying to get to five to make it equal, there's no way we're going to get there if you don't relinquish some of your numbers, right? It really does require subtraction and we're trying to make math work without subtraction.

Sarah: What if I create an entire political party about how you should have two? It is your job to have two. 

Kellie: Listen, I think people don't want a lot of things. People don't want sacrifice. They don't want the discomfort. They don't want an inability to not have leverage. It sounds corny to say, but power is a powerful thing. People don't want to relinquish that. And I think we've created a narrative where we cannot imagine a world in which if I have a job, you have a job. If you have a home, I have a home. If you have success, I have success. We always think that it comes at the expense of someone else. That there's not enough to go around. 

And I think this narrative of scarcity is one that pervades so deeply that it is impossible to think you can give up something without losing and relinquishing is not losing, but that's the lens through which we see it. If I give you this, I've lost. And that's a lot of fear that a lot of white Americans have about their position, I can't relinquish without losing. And that's just not true. Yeah. 

Sarah: And I wonder how much of that has to do with kind of the ways that we teach gender and traditional white American patriarchal society and so much else right and being descended from non-landowners who weren't allowed to vote under the founding documents and so on or whatever. But yeah, that it seems like American culture specifically in a way that relates to our founding ideology also within capitalism, right? Because even the founding fathers who weren't directly enslaving people were still profiting off of other people doing it, right? Like John Adams was making molasses money or whatever.

Kellie: Oh, no question. Yeah. There's a really great scholar. His name is Chris Brown, not to be confused with the musical artist.

Sarah: The only Chris Brown from now on. 

Kellie: I know. I know.

Sarah: He was there first. He's like Michael Bolton and Office Space. Probably. 

Kellie: Yeah, I know. I know. He has this great argument which I think is true, where he says that when the colonists came to the new world, that they could not imagine the new world without the institution of slavery, that slavery made everything possible. It made new world expansion possible. It made European power and wealth possible, you couldn't have an empire without slaves. And even though people understood you can have the church in some ways without slavery. 

When you think about that, and when you know that and when you can concede that slavery is violent or slavery is wrong, but if you can't think of your own existence without it, you have a really big problem. And he says that the abolitionists couldn't just say, slavery is wrong, slavery is bad. People knew that. They're like, but I can't imagine our existence without it. So he says, the key to the abolitionist movement was actually not morality and a pang of conscience and making people feel bad about this institution, but creating alternative systems in which people could imagine a life in which slavery was not required. 

So how do you rethink empire? How do you rethink the American system without exploitation? I won't even say slavery because I think slavery covers a lot of ground, but without deep, gross exploitation. And how might we get there? And maybe we need to be more creative about what we think nonviolence is. And how we can employ force, maybe not necessarily violence, but force. What does force look like? Force is not always violent. Violence is always forceful, but force is not always violent. So how do you compel people to get in these positions to work for everyone? 

Sarah: And I wonder too about how we define violence, right? Because it feels like the state is not typically defined. That's changed a lot in the past few years, but I think a lot of things that state power, government power does can be seen as violent, although we don't see it yet. And I don't mean direct physical violence, but the bureaucratic creation of impossible conditions for life to continue in.

Kellie: I talk about that too. I'm like, violence is not just physical assault. Violence is theft. Violence is replacing the truth with conspiracy. Violence is mass incarceration. Violence is food deserts. Violence is thinking that a poor education is okay. That not everybody deserves to have good schools or good teachers. Violence could be Flint, right? Not having access to clean water. That's violent if you live in Flint and other places around the world. So there's a lot of things that I think we haven't really explored. 

The extent at which white supremacy is not just about whiteness is supreme, but about the work of violence and the myriad of ways that violence impacts people's lives in big and small ways. And I think we live our lives trying to adjust to combat, avoid that kind of violence. And then how do you do that without using violence too? Or how do you do that with the equal level of force to overthrow that kind of system? 

Sarah: And something that also makes me think of, there was so much going on that I'm not saying that this was even a major part of the conversation. But I do remember it well, personally, that when we were first having, these huge nationwide protests in about May 2020, that were generally about extremely real grievances about violence and racism in America that I think it's safe to say there wasn't any other forum for that one of the things that it seemed like people were initially expressing, sincerely or not, a lot of concern about was like looting at Target. Look at this Target! This target has been destroyed. Look at what's happening to Target! There's something about that, that to me at least sums up my memories of the moment. Where the protests are about people being murdered. But what about Target? How's Target doing in all this? 

Kellie:  I'm like, Target's going to be just fine. Okay, Target's a billion-dollar corporation. Target has insurance. Target will be okay. But that is a very capitalistic way of thinking about what is a priority in a society. If we value and if our real allegiance is to capitalism and capital, then oh my god, Target! Right? But if we really care about humanity and people, then, oh my gosh, Mike Brown. Oh my gosh, Oscar Grant. Oh my gosh, Trayvon Martin. Oh my, all these other dead bodies should compel us to be even more outraged and even more active about how we stop something like that from happening. 

And I think that's why the anger was so intense because you're thinking about George Floyd and you're thinking about Breonna Taylor and you're thinking about Ahmaud Arbery and these putting those names out there over and over again was a way of reminding people like this is not about Target, these are about Black people that lost their lives unnecessarily.

Sarah: But I think it's also, this gets to something I wonder about, which is the way we see the law and also the way we see culture and kind of brands and names and the kind of official language that we feel like creates the world that has been made for us to live in, if not by God, then by companies and judges and stuff. And I think that maybe we are taught in sort of American culture and history to see the law as handed down from an authority on high. Which is certainly trying to be, or else they wouldn't wear those outfits. But that it's also something that functions expressively and that the law is attempting to be the greatest wisdom that is at least politically permissible to lay hold to at the time, but really always on top of whatever else it is or under whatever else it is an expression of what people are able to conceive of as something they can bring into reality or something that deserves to be acknowledged as real.

Kellie: Yeah, I think those sort of rigid ways of thinking about how change comes or how we think about equity, it's just not expansive enough. In the book I'm always like, no, violence, nonviolence, those aren't the options. Those are not the tools that people have available to them. Let's get creative. Let's get even a little messy in terms of how we think about these ideas. 

Sarah: Okay, so we have this idea that many of us learn, I certainly learned in school, of what American history looks like and how we got to where we are today, how we had a revolution, we had a constitution, we declared our independence, and so it was, we shot a bunch of British soldiers. And then there we were, and we had all of our human rights all of a sudden. It really is framed, I almost think, as a reflection of the fact that to call the United States a Christian nation, I'm not trying to sound like George W. Bush, but it shouldn't be, but in all the ways that it shouldn't be, it is. 

And I think one of those is the influence of the idea of your rights being given to you all at once, and it almost feels like everybody signed the Declaration of Independence, and in a similarly decisive fashion, Jesus died for your sins. And that was it, you didn't have sins anymore, and also everyone had rights forever. And if that's not how that works, then how does it work, and what is the real story?

Kellie: I studied the abolitionists. My first book was on force and freedom. And there's a great quote where they're like, Listen, freedom is not given. It's won. Freedom given to you is actually not freedom at all. It's a bad deal. You have to take freedom for yourself, you have to almost take freedom by force. That no power is going to be like here, some freedom. You have to snatch it. You have to grab it. You have to push for it. You have to demand it. 

Frederick Douglas says power concedes nothing without demand. And the abolitionist movement and I talk about them a lot in the second chapter of my book. They to me really just gave us a blueprint or a roadmap of like, how we might accomplish that. Why I think the abolitionist movement is such a powerful group is because one, they're only 1% of the population. I think people thought everybody in the North was an abolitionist. Not true at all. Not even close. Not even close. 

Sarah: That's what the North likes to say about itself.

Kellie: Yeah. Yeah. I know the North has this moral high ground, this moral superiority. Not true at all. They're about 1 percent of the population. They're one of the most diverse social political groups you could ever think of. It's men, it's women, it's white, it's Black, it's people born into freedom and people born into slavery, and fugitive slaves, and wealthy people and poor people. And it's such a model of a coalition of a lot of people whose really only primary shared interest is the abolition of slavery. Outside of that, they diverge in so many different ways. Do we do this politically? Do we do this economically? Do we do this through the church? There's so many different ways in which they think about how to get there.

Sarah: Like any other radical group, they cannot Agree on a single thing except what they’re here for, it's perfect. 

Kellie: The only thing they agree about is the destination. Nobody knows how to get there. 

Sarah: That's very familiar.

Kellie: I know that feels like almost everything in life. 

Sarah: Definitely a good college campus.

Kellie: Yeah. Yes. Yes, but I tell my students, that's okay. There's a movie. I love to quote where it's, it's better to know where to go and not know how, than how to go and not know where. And I think that's what the abolitionist movement and so many of these groups represent is that we know what we want. We know what freedom, liberation, emancipation, we know what that looks like. We know where we're headed. We just don't know how to get there. I think the corollary aspect is through the lens of white supremacy, they have no idea where they're going. They only know the path of violence and destruction, and they tramp that road over and over again.

Sarah: They think that's a destination.

Kellie: They think they're going somewhere. It's like, where are you going?

Sarah: And it's almost, it feels like an ideology based on fight or flight. Look, I get it. I also make bad decisions rashly, but you can't make it your whole identity. Then what?

Kellie: No. There's no end game because if white supremacy is the goal, whiteness is supreme, that actually harms white people. It doesn't do any good for anyone to operate through that lens because white supremacy requires domination and violence. So when you've killed everyone off, when you've exploited everyone, then what do you have at the end of that? 

Sarah: I don't think anyone's thought that far ahead. 

Kellie: No, Black people have! Other marginalized groups have! Native Americans certainly have. No one wants to be the dodo bird. Nobody wants to be this extinct, endangered animal that was a period of a bygone era. No one wants that. And no one realizes the deep consequences for extinction. But that's the path. Thinking about the abolitionists just encourages me because I'm like, you actually don't need a large group of people to do this work. You just need people in solidarity. You need people in solidarity with a shared goal, with a shared mission, a shared destination, and that work can begin.

Sarah: That connects to another history question I have, which is that I wonder if one of the kind of Ideas that we fall back on that for whatever reason seems to be one of those sort of simplistic approaches that makes history seem easier on our brain, but I think ultimately is to our detriment is this belief that everyone is locked into their time and place inexorably, right? So we look back on any time in the past, or at least, this is the white approach to history because it absolves people in a kind of wholesale way of everybody was racist then. Just whatever. And we're all products of our times in ways that we're aware of and not. 

But it's also, just from what you're talking about, it feels like worth pointing out that I think at any time in history, it's fair to say people always have different beliefs about what's going on and what they believe to be right or wrong. I think it's revealing to point out that yeah, there are statistical averages, but throughout history, there have always also been people who live in a racially integrated setting and understand the humanity of people around them, regardless of whatever their culture has to say about race or country or ethnicity, and that is something that gets covered up, I think, by that view. 

Kellie: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think that sometimes we look at the past and we invalidate it a little bit because we can say they didn't know any better, and that kind of is a way of dismissing what people were trying to do. But when I think about something like slavery, I think that it could have easily persisted another hundred years had not people chosen to go in a different direction, had people not refused. And part of the reason the book is called We Refuse and that I refuse is because we refuse is this collective stance of saying no, it doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to have this sort of predetermined outcome. There's a great quote by Martin Luther King Jr. where he's like, change doesn't roll in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes through continuous struggle. And that's so powerful because it's not just we would've got freedom eventually. Women would've got the right to vote eventually. Surely we would've let Black people vote eventually as though just we keep chugging along on this timeline and change just happens. And no, there are continuous struggles and battles that are ongoing, that are happening, that people are doing in the 18th century, in the 19th century, in the 20th century, that are chipping away at these systems to make change that we will live our lives in generations later. 

There's a story I tell in the introduction of my book, it's about my great-great-great grandmother. And my great grandmother, Ernesta, was nine years old. She stepped on a rusty nail. She got it terribly infected. The infection got so bad she was almost at the point of death. And her mother, my great grandmother, took her to this doctor to get her help. And it's really the only doctor she knew. He lived on the other side of town in this really big white house. And the doctor says, okay, I'll help your daughter, her only child, but on the condition that afterwards she lives with my family and works for my family for the rest of her life. 

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Kellie: And this is 1915. We're talking about 50 years after slavery. 1915 in rural Alabama. These are the conditions that he is proposing to her. And she actually agrees because she doesn't want her daughter to die. And it's her mother who, we don't know this ancestors’ name, who intervenes and refuses the doctor's proposal and basically says ‘no’. She picks up her ailing granddaughter, takes her home, administers every sort of natural concoction that she can find, and heals my great grandmother. 

And I talk about this as a way of saying we can refuse the proverbial fork in the road. Thinking about a woman who was a descendant of slavery, straight out of slavery, my great grandmother would have been born enslaved. Thinking about how she refused the terms put in front of her. She didn't say maybe he'll free her when she's 20. Maybe when she gets older, he'll let her go. She didn't do that. She was like, no, never. We're not doing this. And I'm always encouraged by people like that, by people who won't accept or refuse to accept the times that they live in and the conditions that are put in front of them. 

And I think we have to be able to do the same thing, even in our current moment, to say it's not even about Kamala or Trump, right? There are things we can say, no there are things we can do right. Outside through and with and beyond their power structures that can create a world we want to live in.

Sarah: Yeah, and that seems like another of these dichotomies that you're talking about where the dichotomy becomes a trick. 

Kellie: Yeah, a trap, really. 

Sarah: Yeah. And yeah, and then so you're writing this book as someone whose very existence is because of an ancestor's refusal. 

Kellie: If my ancestor had not intervened, I might not be here and not just for someone who's not really historical, like my ancestor. I think of other people that I talk about in the book, people like Daisy Bates, or people like Rosa Parks, or people that are doing things that have real bigger consequences, like the Montgomery bus boycott or school desegregation. Like these regular, ordinary women at the time that are having to make hard decisions about how they want their children to experience freedom, how they want their children to have opportunities, what they want to prevent their sons and daughters from happening to them is something that I think about a lot. Quite a bit. 

Sarah: Should we get into one of those stories?

Kellie: Yeah, sure. 

Sarah: Perfect. 

Kellie: I will tell a story about Carrie Johnson who is a 17-year-old girl that not a lot of people know about. Very few people know about her story. She's a Black girl living in 1919 in Washington, DC, and it's incredible. 1919 is a really riotous year. It's known as the Red Summer where there are racial riots that are taking place all over the country. Black soldiers are returning from World War I. They're returning empowered, having been exposed to a life that wasn't filled with segregation. And they're coming back confident, feeling every bit American in their uniform. And it sparks indignation and chaos among white people. 

And in Washington, D. C., a riot breaks out. The typical story is that a white woman accused a Black man of sexually assaulting her. And when the riot breaks out at this time, D.C. is not Chocolate City. It's a lot of white people in D.C. and they are terrorizing the Black community. There are mobs that are going from block-to-block shooting in Black people's homes, pulling Black people off street cars, lynching them in the middle of the street. It is violent. 

And Carrie Johnson is living in one of these Black neighborhoods that's surrounded by white neighborhoods. And she goes on to the second floor of her house and looks out the window and sees a mob coming down the street, throwing rocks into Black people's homes, dragging Black people out of their homes, beating them up. And she takes a shotgun, and she starts taking potshots at the mob. And I'm like, what? She's 17! She's 17. Basically, it's her and her father in the house, and I'm sure he told her like, “Yo, defend at all cost”. And she starts to do that. 

And there are police officers on the block that are not doing anything to intervene with the mob. They're actually more so protecting the mob than they are Black residents. And they start to point out to the police officers, hey, there's someone up there shooting at us. There's someone with the gun on the second floor of this home. And so these two detectives go into Carrie's house. They beat down the door. They don't announce themselves. The house is pitch black and they creep up the stairs. They go into the bedroom on the second floor. They open the door and immediately, Carrie starts shooting from underneath the bed. Bullets are flying everywhere. I think Carrie's father was shot in the shoulder. Carrie might be, I think she's shot in the thigh, but Carrie keeps shooting and she kills one of the detectives. 

And in this commotion, they're dragged from underneath the bed. More officers show up and an ambulance shows up. And people can't believe that this 17-year-old girl has killed a cop in her own home. And she's arrested. She's put on trial. And normally I tell people, oh, you want to know what happens, you have to read the book, but I'll tell you what happens. She goes on trial. 

Sarah: I got a freebie. 

Kellie: I know. And she's actually convicted of manslaughter. They appeal and the prosecution says, eh, we're not going to fight this anymore and they drop all the charges and it's like, what? She's 21. She's like free to go.

Sarah: Couldn't do that today. 

Kellie: No way, there's no way a 17-year-old Black girl could be caught up in a mob, could defend herself and be treated as someone who was engaged in self-defense. And the funny thing about it is that the white press was so ashamed that a Black girl could kill a white cop, that they felt emasculated by it, that they wouldn't even run it in the headline. They said, “White Officer Killed by Negro”. They wouldn't say, “Negro man, Negro woman”. It was just “Negro”. 

Sarah: Gender irrelevant. 

Kellie: Yes. Yes. And the Black press picks it up and runs with it. They're raising funds for her trial. They're trying to make sure…

Sarah: White officer killed by terrified teenage girl he was shooting at.

Kellie: Yes. Yes. Yes. No, to me, the story is just astounding. But at the end of the riot, it's the only riot in the red summer in which there are more white casualties than Black casualties. Ten white people were killed, and I think five white people were killed. And how should we think about protection? How should we think about force and violence when there's state sanctioned violence, right? When the state is not there to serve and protect, when it's there to actually embolden the mob. What? What are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to proceed? 

And it's these stories that I like to tell that I think are so powerful because it reminds people like this is what people were up against in 1919. But also this is what was possible in 1919. So it's wild. 

Sarah: Yeah, the law does not exist without the people upholding it. And therefore the people involved in some way, for some reason, we're able to understand why would you re prosecute someone who clearly killed in self-defense?

Kellie: Who's clearly a teenager in their home afraid that a mob is going to take over. 

Sarah: Like classic slasher movie conditions.

Kellie: Yes. Yes. I would have thought, and as I was researching this, I was like, gosh, she's going to get lynched on the spot. The mob is going to overtake her. People were just more stunned than anything else and I think part of that is gender. People were not prepared to see a girl, a young woman fighting back. We have a hard time understanding Blackness when it's encased in a woman's body. 

We are like, I know men, I know Black men, I know women and white women, but I don't understand this enigma of a Black woman. There is something about what it means to be a Black woman and to be the foot soldiers in a lot of these movements. The women that are often unseen, unheard of, unappreciated, undervalued, but at the same time, leading and guiding their households and the movements that they organize in really meaningful ways. And I don't think we give enough attention to Black women and the things that they contribute to our own liberation. So I center them a lot in the book. 

The cover of the book is a Black woman holding a rifle. And I love it, too. The picture is actually a painting and it's called, Soldier of Love, which I think is powerful. How can we think of Black women, not as soldiers engaged in some sort of heinous war, but as soldiers who are trying to protect and trying to enforce a world that could be shepherded by love. That to me feels very forward thinking, even sci-fi. But how might we reframe not someone who's holding a gun is violent, but someone who's holding the gun as a form of protection.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Kellie: And it almost is a radical act of love. I will protect you with everything I have. That I think is what the book is about.

Sarah: So many so many dimensions to this, but it occurs to me just from yeah, the imagery, the cover, the art, that there is a difference between holding a gun with an intent to use it and holding a gun with an intent to go *ch cha* if that's all the calls for.

Kellie: Yes. Yeah. And there are instances. The funny thing about Black people in guns and oftentimes Black women in guns is that very rarely are Black women shooting and killing someone. Carrie is an exceptional sort of incident. But for the most part, when I'm writing about Daisy Bates, who leads the Little Rock Nine, or I'm thinking about Mabel Williams, who leads these civil rights campaigns with her sons in North Carolina, they have guns with them. Even Rosa Parks talks about during the Montgomery bus boycott, having her kitchen table covered with guns. The guns are meant to arrest violence, they're not meant to perpetuate violence. But the narrative has been so skewed to think of if you have a gun, you have ill intent. And no, there is ill intent and that is why I have to be armed. 

And all of that is something that I just think, even in my own family, I talk about how my grandmother, after she passed away, we were cleaning out her apartment and we found that she had like a 22 pistol in her nightstand that was fully loaded. And we were like, Grandma! Cause I didn't grow up around guns. It was not at all a part of my upbringing or culture. I thought that was a Southern thing or for criminals or, I did not have a tradition in my household of gun ownership. And so I wanted to look into what does that look like in the Black community? And what does it look like when the gun owners are Black women? And why do they own guns? And, what are they afraid of? 

And for my grandmother, I think she was a single woman living in Detroit, but she was also a transplant. She was born and raised in Louisiana. She witnessed her father and her brothers go to jail every weekend. And I remember being baffled when she told me that I was like, what do you mean they went to jail every weekend? And she was like, yeah, on Friday nights the white men got drunk, and they lynched Black men in town. And so if you were in jail, you were safe. And so they would go to jail on Friday nights through Saturday night. On Sunday morning, they would go home, get dressed, and go to church. And I was like, what? What? If that's your reality, if that's how you have to navigate the weekend, by going to jail to prevent yourself from being lynched, because it was a good old time and a weekend in the South. That to me is mind boggling. But that was the twisted, warped society that my grandmother lived in. So I don't see her gun ownership as problematic in light of what she was up against, do you know what I mean? 

Sarah: This brings a couple things to mind. One of them, I think, to compare to the way that we can see white supremacist gun ownership and what seem to be some of the intentions behind it, which is the idea that you need to heavily arm yourself even if you are going to Starbucks. In fact, especially if you're going to Starbucks, and there is, I think, frequently an implied sort of need to look for trouble, right? And just the way that the police are trained to behave in America, even when they are being as nice as they are apparently allowed to be. Everything in their demeanor, as far as I can tell, is geared toward escalation. 

Kellie: Yes. And suspicion. And I think the difference, at least in the Black community and from the women I study, is that guns were not something you boasted about. Guns were not something that you toted around with you in a Starbucks or in a park, they were hidden in small compartments and nightstands and pocketbooks. And it was only used as a last resort. And a lot of times there was such silence, a code of silence about who was packing and why, because it wasn't something that you bragged about. It was something that was merely meant for protection. And you had a healthy respect for when you had to use it. And when you had to teach your children to do the same. There are a lot of instances. 

Daisy Bates, the leader of the Little Rock Nine talks about how she was sleeping and someone threw a rock into her window in the middle of the night and she got up with her shotgun basically goes to the front door and there's a white man standing in the driveway in the middle of the night ready to hurl another brick into her window and she just shoots a warning shot into the air, like get out of here. And he runs back to his car and he takes off. But that kind of force, the kind of presence of force, that kind of threat of force was the only thing that protected Black women from having their homes and their very lives destroyed.

Sarah: And how old was Daisy at that time?

Kellie: Oh gosh, she would have been in her 40s.

Sarah: Hmm. And how much of what's going on I guess in the current quote unquote discourse, and this seems pretty consistent throughout a lot of American history, but let's say, in our current moment and our recent moments, it feels like a lot of what's going on is white people or white supremacists, whether they self-identify that way or not, saying you're not scared, I'm scared. Black people aren't scared. We're scared. And then it's like, oh, why are you scared? And they're like, because of what's happening to Target. Or because somebody rang my doorbell and then left, and I see them on my ring cam and I don't know what it was for. And okay, people used to leave their keys in the car. I hate to say that things are getting worse, but in the public trust way… 

Kellie: Yes! I think part of this narrative that's so troublesome, though, is that because we live in this white supremacist world, we privilege white fear. We prioritize white fear. We privilege it in a way that says, yes, everything that you feel is not irrational. It's rational. You should be afraid. And everything that Black people fear is irrational is reduced, dismissed, ignored, erased. It's not actually valid. And that narrative of twisting who should be afraid and who shouldn't be afraid has been a very successful way, I think, of suppressing a lot of Black grievances and promoting white grievances as real grievances, as legitimate. 

And so when Obama's elected and white people run to gun stores in the droves, and they ran out of stock for bullets not just during his presidency, but also in 2020 when people felt panic stricken and they were like, we need toilet paper and bullets! And you're like, what? Those fears get pushed up to the top and centered. And that domination is not a destination is what I think is really important. 

Sarah: Unless you're a Dom, but that's totally different, I'm sure. But we are, I think currently living in America in a culture that is to far too great an extent decided by the white imagination and the white imagination, I fully believe, cannot comprehend the fact that everybody who white supremacy and white America has oppressed and committed genocide against for all these hundreds of years, isn't waiting to get the upper hand so they can kill all white people. I think it's more said out loud now than it used to be. 

But I was really struck when I started studying the 60s and how much people were talking about the fear of a race war and this idea that a race war is imminent. Which seemed to be what white people were talking about as the fear they had constructed after and around civil rights. But right, it's just, but it's like reality isn't dictated by what white people can imagine. 

Kellie: Yeah. And still, even that idea is white supremacist in that it's still centering everything around whiteness. You're still consumed with what-

Sarah: We're the protagonist!

Kellie: Yeah this has to be about me.

Sarah: We’re the Blake Lively of America.

Kellie: Yeah. What do you mean this is about me? What does it mean? What does it mean? 

Sarah: Yeah, because if someone's trying to kill me, it's still about me. 

Kellie: I know! I think Toni Morrison says that racism at the end of the day is a distraction, that it distracts you from doing your work, that most Black people don't want to spend their lives trying to prove to you that they are smart, that they are capable, that they are artistic, that they are talented. Or that they're just ordinary and basic and deserve to be mediocre too. There is this constant having to prove oneself that is so exhausting and so tiresome. The history of Black people is not just the history of solely fighting white people. That's just not who we are. We have other things to do, we have other desires and goals and aspire to other things than white acceptance. 

Sarah: Yeah, shocking, but I guess I believe it. 

Kellie: I had to make the last chapter about joy because I wanted to really get people to understand that at the end of the day, whether Black people or their allies are engaged in this, Black people are also carving out pleasure and joy for themselves, regardless of how white people are navigating. It's like, yes, this sucks. Yes, I'm constantly up against this. But joy is a weapon too. And it's a way of reclaiming my humanity and that this is another way that I will just say, I'm not paying attention to you right now. I'm dancing. I'm not paying attention to you right now. I'm cooking. There are ways in which Black people I think use joy as a form of retreat and respite that we don't talk about as being a tool as well. 

Sarah: I love that. Yeah. And I love that, what you were writing about and that I guess the destination of your book because this is where you end. Is it fair to say that when you were writing this you knew your destination and the destination was joy?

Kellie: Oh, yeah. One of the last stories I tell is about my daughter who's seven now, but at the time she was five. And she has this infectious laugh. People say I have an infectious laugh, but if I hear my daughter laughing, I crack up. I don't know what, I don't have to know what it's about. It's just funny to me. And we just had a moment where she was like singing a Disney song from, I think, Encanto, and she was way off key and literally screaming out the notes. It was just a hilarious moment. And we shared this sort of intimate moment together where we could laugh at the ridiculousness of her singing but the earnestness of her trying to belt out these vocals. And we both cracked up. We both have a really big laugh. 

And I conclude the book by saying what does that have to do with white supremacy? And my answer is nothing. And that's the point. That's the point. The fact that we can carve out spaces for ourselves where we can find joy and laughter and amusement and not be constantly consumed by the things that are going on around us. So whether this fall leads to another Trump presidency or leads to a Kamala Harris presidency, I think we will still need to fight for joy. We will still need to fight. We will still need to try to sustain the victories that are either won or lost, that all of this work will continue. 

Sarah: Kellie, tell us one more time what is your book called, and where can people find it, and where can they find you? 

Kellie: Yes, my book is called, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. You can get it wherever books are sold. If you'd like a good audio book, like I do, I narrate the audio book. If you're not tired of my voice, you can listen to me narrate the audio book. 

Sarah: I'm excited for that.

Kellie: And you can find me anywhere on social media, definitely at Wellesley college where I'm teaching and loving my students and you can catch me on the podcast, This Day in Esoteric Political History, I co-host it with Jodi Avirgan and Nicole Hemmer. We drop three episodes a week. It's a really fun podcast about history and all of its esotericness. 

And then I did a podcast a while ago about Oprah. Me and my co-host Leah Rigueur talked all about the 25 years of the Oprah Winfrey show and talk show history. And it was a lot of fun to do. It was called, You Get a Podcast. It's formerly known as “Oprah-demics”. But I'm out in these streets, I'm doing documentaries, I'm still writing op-eds and hopefully in a city near you with a book tour. 

Sarah: That's fantastic. And just, thank you so much for your work and for sharing it with us and for sharing it with me and giving me my personal history class, which is what I secretly wanted. 

Kellie: You're welcome. And thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure.

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much again to Kellie Carter Jackson for being our guest. Please make sure to check out her book, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance from your library, from your local bookstore, wherever you can. 

Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you to Nicole Ortiz for production assistance. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing this episode. We'll see you next time.