We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance by Kellie Carter Jackson

My favorite book of 2024

I read voraciously because I love to learn. I love writing and I believe to write well, you need beautiful words stored up in your body like literary muscle memory. I write about Black books here because there is a special place in my soul and heart for what we do with language, when it finds us, or when we meet it with our entire being.

I loved We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance first because of its stunning cover, an image painted by the artist Taha Clayton, but I became immersed in it because of its clarity, confidence and thorough dismissal of Black international refusal throughout history.

I know, I know: Books and their covers. But listen: A glance at this beautiful Black woman with her shotgun suggests a defiance that pulses through every page and section of this treasure, my favorite read of 2024. Maybe that’s not even saying a lot given that I read slow in this jam-packed, shenanigan filled turn around the sun (Goodreads put the total at 34, which is light weight for me). But I view books a little like children and it’s always hard for me to name one a fave — but here we are.

Given this country’s discomfort with white supremacy and threats to it in the form of Black refusal, even a defiance rooted in love — as this book is — I understand why no major media lists I’ve seen, anyway, would select this book as part of their roundups. It’s incendiary and confrontational and a lot of people are not ready for this truth.

But, for now, we’re still free enough to indulge the beauty, nuance and complexity within the pages of a more complete history of how Black people have gotten over, persevered through and survived. So let’s get into it.

The sum of what I could have told you about Black historical revolution and resistance before reading We Refuse is this:

• Haiti is still being punished for being the first Black nation in the world to fight and win its liberation.

• Nat Turner was a prophet and visionary, but folks prefer to talk about nonviolent revolutions, which are probably not technically revolutions but they are at least permissible to discuss.

• General Harriet Tubman was both an overt and covert resistor, and the same could be said for Black Panthers.

• I admired and still do, Angela Davis and Assata Shakur and Afeni Shakur and Cleo Silvers and the women of the Black Panther Party who did not get their due for how they transformed Black communities with their care and attention, mainly because of American discomfort with the reality that Black women have always resulted to any means necessary to protect our families. (Margaret Garner, who inspired Beloved, comes immediately to mind, but there are several others noted in We Refuse.)

What I learned reading We Refuse is this: White violence is a default in this country, stemming back to the American Revolution. Black violence is so scary and threatening because white violence is a way of embracing American citizenship. This is why patriotism is so fraught for Black folks, because to love this country is to be willing to both kill and to die for it, and whenever Black people have tried to offer ourselves, white people have been afraid that we would follow this rule that they have made.

I learned a lot more, but I want to back up and tell you that when I posted a note on Substack saying I was obsessed with this book, I was not exaggerating. In the weeks following the election, I was scanning my TBR list and shelves for something that would lift me up and I kept coming back to this book, but I was afraid reading it would unlock a kind of rage that I didn’t quite have the emotional capacity for at that moment.

Then, there was a family emergency and I had to fly to Oklahoma twice in the span of three weeks. It was all really sad. I don’t cope well with being overwhelmed and sad, maybe nobody does, but the one thing that always works is a good book. I had a little multi-colored highlighter and We Refuse, and I took it on the plane, and once I started highlighting and underlining things and dog-earing pages, I couldn’t stop.

I brought it home with me while we waiting for news about our loved one’s funeral services and when we had to go back. I took it to lunch with me after Thanksgiving when we were trying to recover from the intensity and grief of it all and highlighted some more. And then when I was done, as soon as I finished the acknowledgements, I was so sad that it was over, which is what happens when I read a beautiful book: I rejoice that I had the good sense to finish it, but I mourn because the experience is done.

We Refuse is divided in five substantial chapters that define refusal as revolution, protection, force, flight and joy. Because I am most interested in joy as resistance, I was elated to read this in the introduction:

Finally, joy is possibly the most important and strongest remedy that makes a push for Black personhood. While anti-Black violence has profoundly impacted the African American historical experience, it is not the totality of Blackness. While whiteness cannot be separated from violence, Blackness can be separated from oppression. The most powerful tool the Black Panther Party (BPP) employed was not guns but joy. Black pride invoked hope and happiness, which could be shields from the demoralizing and degenerative effects of racism. In jest and in truth, James Brown once said, ‘The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.’ There is no civil rights movement without singing. What was the long freedom struggle without music?…As Imani Perry wrote for The Atlantic, ‘Racism is terrible. Blackness is not.’ Joy is typically understood within a spiritual context and works in tandem with suffering.

When I tell you I was not ready for these bars, I mean it. The above, and sentences like, “The past shapes our creative potential to think a new, better world into being.” Or, “What is so powerful about protection is that protected people protect people.”

If you have not read We Refuse or did not plan to, I invite you to change that if any of the above resonates with you. I’ll be thinking about it and returning to the ideas it opened up in me for some time, and I hope more people find it as edifying as I did. There is deep power and liberation in knowing all the ways our ancestors, particularly the Black women who kept us alive before these times, as dark and complicated as any before, protected us with more than their love, but with their agency.