Red Skin, White Masks by Glen Sean Coulthard

A call to commune with other collectivities in struggle. Until we’re all free: A refrain turned echo. Rage is the disavowed truth of what resistance tends toward: Outrage aimed at freedom, collective action rooted in love, the active defiance of injustice. The temporality of resistance is the present. We are encouraged to suppress responses that are not deemed palatable or respectable to settler society.īut the correct emotional response to violence targeting our families is rage. The underlying message in such statements is that we, as Indigenous and Black peoples, are not allowed to express a full range of human emotions.

I am repeatedly told that I cannot be angry if I want transformative change-that the expression of anger and rage as emotions are wrong, misguided, and counter-productive to the movement. Will this rage be negated? Anishinaabe writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson states: In a war of defiance, resistance marks a union of forces that seeks to out-maneuver the policing of its legitimate parameters, that moves to negate its suppression. It is a grim acceptance of governance ruled by rights and recognition, sunk under the state’s delineation of what matters, what is counted as “morally legitimate” politics, authentic protest, acceptable forms of resistance.īut resistance contests these limits of respectability. The latest instantiation of respectability politics is performed as acquiescence to a status quo that cannot hold. Cars aflame in Ferguson and Crown Heights, RCMP vehicles and tires ablaze in Elsipogtog. Burning police cars: a hallmark of indignation, sedition or infiltration, provocateur-led sabotage. Fires of protection in defense of Indigenous territories. It’s too early.or too late.” - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masksįire is raging across Turtle Island.

“Don’t expect to see any explosion today. Rage is the disavowed truth of what resistance tends toward.

Red Skin, White Masks by Glen Sean Coulthard