In November 2003, School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) activists organized an anti-oppression discussion during their annual pacifist vigil outside Fort Benning Army Base (which houses the School of the Americas, a military training school prominently connected to human-rights abuses in Latin America).

The organizers of the discussion had a difficult time getting the white, middle class participants (by far the dominant demographic at the explicitly nonviolent vigil) to focus on oppressive dynamics (such as racism, classism, sexism and transphobia) within the organization and among activists associated with the SOAW's anti-militarist efforts. Instead, people at the discussion, particularly older, white, self-proclaimed pacifists, kept returning to forms of oppression practiced by some external force- the police keeping an eye on the vigil, or the military subjugating people in Latin America.

It was quite apparent that self-criticism (and improvement) was an undesirable option; the preferable alternative was to focus on the faults of a violent other, emphasizing their own victimization by (and hence, moral superiority to) the forces of state power. Eventually, a number of veteran activists of color who attended the discussion were able to move attention to the many forms of racism within the anti-SOA mileu that prevented it from attracting more support from nonprivileged populations.

Perhaps their major criticism, in pointing out the racism they witnessed, was against the organizations' practice of pacifism. They spoke against the white pacifists' privileged, comfortable take on activism, and lambasted the casual, entertaining, celebratory attitude of the protest, with its pretensions of being revolutionary, even of being a protest.

One black woman was particularly incensed at an experience she had had while taking a bus down to the Fort Benning vigil with other anti-SOA activists. During a conversation with a white activist, she stated that she did not support the practice of nonviolence. That activist then told her that she was "on the wrong bus" and did not belong at the protest. When i related this story and the other criticisms made by people of color during the discussion to a listserv of SOAW-affiliated former prisoners (after serving a fully voluntary six month maximum prison sentence, they had gave themselves the honorific title 'prisoner of conscience'), one white peace activist wrote back to me that she was surprised that a black woman would be ideologically opposed to nonviolence in spite of Martin Luther King Jr. and the legacy of the civil rights movement.

Beneath their frequent and manipulative usage of people of color as figureheads and tame spokespersons, pacifists follow a tactical and ideological framework formulated almost exclusively by white theorists. [...] Pacifists would also do well to examine the color of violence. When we mention riots, whom do we envision? White activists committing property destruction as a form of civil disobedience may stretch, but do not usually lose, the protecting covering of "nonviolence". People of color engaged in politically motivated property destruction, unless strictly within the rubric of a white activist-organized protest, are banished to the realm of violence, denied consideration as activists, not portrayed as conscientious.

The racism of the judicial system, a major and violent component of our society, though one rarely prioritized for opposition by pacifists, has had a major impact on the American psyche. Violence and criminality are nearly interchangeable concepts , and a chief purpose of both is to establish blame. Just as criminals deserve repression and punishment, people who use violence deserve the inevitable karmic violent consequences; this is integral to the pacifist position.

They may deny that anyone deserves to have violence used against them, but a stock argument common among pacifists is that revolutionaries should not use violence because the state will then use this to "justify" violent repression. Well, to whom is this violent repression justified, and why aren't those who claim to be against violence trying to justify it? Why do nonviolent activists seek to change society's morality in how it views oppression or war, but accept the morality of repression as natural or untouchable?

This idea of the inevitable repressing consequences of militancy frequently goes beyond hypocrisy to outright victim-blaming and approval of repressive violence. People of color who are oppressed with police and structural violence every day are counseled against responding with violence because that would justify the state violence already mobilized against them. Victim-blaming was a key part of pacifist discourse, strategy even, in the 1960's and 70's when many white activists helped justify state actions and neutralize what could have become anti-government outrage at violent state repression of black and other liberation movements, such as the police assassinations of Panther organizers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Rather than supporting and aiding the Panthers, white pacifists found it more fashionable to state that they had "provoked violence" and "brought this on themselves".

[...]The contradiction [even] in ostensibly revolutionary pacifism is that revolution is never safe, but to the vast majority of its practitioners and advocates, pacifism is about staying safe, not getting hurt, not alienating anyone, not giving anyone a bitter pill to swallow. In making the connection between pacifism and self-preservation of privileged activists, Ward Churchill quotes a pacifist organizer during the Vietnam era who denounced the revolutionary tactics of the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground because those tactics were "a really dangerous thing for all of us... they run the very real risk of bringing the same sort of violent repression [as seen in the police assassination of Fred Hampton] down on all of us." Or, to quote David Gilbert, who is serving an effective life sentence for his actions as a member of the Weather Underground who went on to support the Black Liberation Army, "Whites had something to protect. It was comfortable to be at the peak of a morally prestigious movement for change while Black people were taking the main casualties for the struggle".

The pacifist desire for safety continues today. In 2003, a non-violent activist reassured a Seattle newspaper about the character of planned protest. "I'm not saying that we would not support civil disobedience," Woldt said. "That has been part of the peace movement that church people have engaged in, but we are not into property damage or anything that creates negative consequences for us."

  And on a listserv for a radical environmental campaign in 2004, a law student and activist, after inviting an open discussion of tactics, advocated an end to the mention of nonpacifist tactics and demanded a strict adherence to nonviolence on the grounds that nonpacifist groups "get annihilated." Another activist (and, incidentally, one of the other law students on the list) agreed, adding, "I think that having a discussion about violent tactics on this list is playing with fire, and it is putting everyone at risk." She was also concerned that "two of us will be facing the star chamber of the ethics committee of the Bar Association sometime in the near future."

Of course, proponents of militancy must understand that there is a great need for caution when we discuss tactics, especially via e-mail, and that we face the hurdle of building support for actions that are more likely to get us harassed or imprisoned, even if all we do is discuss them. However, in this example, the two law students were not saying that the group should discuss only legal tactics or hypothetical tactics, they were saying that the group should discuss only nonviolent tactics.  Since it had been billed as a discussion to help the group create ideological common ground, this was a manipulative way of using threats of government repression to prevent the group from even considering anything other than an explicitly nonviolent philosophy.