The Violence of (White) Nonviolence

In what follows, I offer a brief critical and exploratory reflection on the entanglement of non-violence with whiteness against the backdrop of what is almost two years of genocide enacted against the Palestinian people by the Zionist settler colonial state of Israel with the enabling complicity of the United States, other white settler states historically originating from the United Kingdom, and various European states.

While those who manifest whiteness, consciously or otherwise, claim to advocate for nonviolence and against violence, I argue that their advocacy can function as a form of violence that contributes to the ongoing oppression of non-white people. Consistent with that reading, I further argue that violence – or rather counterviolence – may be necessary to end this oppression. Although nonviolence might help end oppression, that is usually by virtue of its situation within a wider context of counterviolence. I will show that commonly invoked examples of effective nonviolence were successful due to contemporaneous counterviolence, notwithstanding that the counterviolence might not have been intentionally linked to the nonviolent action.

I start by setting out what I mean by ‘whiteness’, and why I refer to whiteness rather than some other phenomenon such as ‘neoliberalism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘Eurocentrism’, ‘Westernism’, ‘colonialism’, ‘imperialism’, ‘hegemony’ etc. What work does whiteness do that these other terms do not – perhaps cannot? Underlying this question is another line of questioning having to do with the extent to which the concept of ‘whiteness’ is strategically useful, or whether it risks perpetuating rather than dismantling racism? Put another way, to what extent might ‘whiteness’ alienate potential white allies and undermine the attempt at building strategic alliances and international solidarities to achieve shared goals?

Following sociologist Steve Garner (2007), by ‘whiteness’ I refer to a racialised identity – being ‘white’ – that needs to be understood as existing in dynamic relational tension to and with other racialized identities (for example, being black, being Muslim etc). Crucially, whiteness or white identity is not merely one identity among others, but rather that identity which is dominant. Going further, Garner points to whiteness as functioning in at least two ways: first, as an invisible background and standard against which non-whiteness is understood and ‘measured’; and second, as a persistent, albeit contested, globally-systemic political structure, viz. white supremacy. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, white supremacy was established and is maintained, expanded, and refined through thought, speech, and action that is violent, directly through the exercise of physical force – on occasion exterminatory as in the racial-colonial prosecution of genocide – and indirectly though deceit (Fuller, Jr., 1984). It is in relation to the latter – that is, indirect violence or deceit – that I want to consider the entanglement of whiteness with non-violence. Put simply, and anticipating what follows, I am interested in exploring the whiteness of non-violence as a means by which whiteness enacts violence against its victims by a ‘disarming counsel’ – that is, an encouragement to adopt exclusively non-violent means in the pursuit of justice with such as the principled injunction that ‘violence is never the answer’. Nowhere is this perhaps more blatantly evident than in the disavowal of those who call for the legitimacy – and perhaps necessity – of Palestinian armed struggle against the Zionist settler colonial state of Israel, and the legitimacy – and again, perhaps necessity – of challenging militarism within the enabling Western ‘core’ of the modern/colonial world system.

Before proceeding, however, I need to clarify that in exploring the entanglement of whiteness with non-violence, I’m not suggesting that non-white people have not developed and assumed principled nonviolent orientations of their own on various grounds – metaphysical/theological, ethical and otherwise – although it is crucial to question the extent to which these orientations are separable from whiteness, at least subsequent to the latter’s becoming dominant. In addition, I’m not arguing that non-white people should never adopt nonviolent means strategically in pursuit of liberatory projects, nor that violence is something desirable in and of itself. (In this connection, I find myself in good company with Franz Fanon, Malcolm X and, most importantly, adherents of the Islamic tradition going back to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.) Rather, and at the risk of labouring a point, my focus in this piece is on exploring how nonviolence is used as a means to maintain, expand, and refine whiteness. In short, and adapting von Clausewitz, nonviolence as the continuation of violence by other means.

Furthermore, in engaging with the whiteness of nonviolence, I am not suggesting that all white people are committed to maintaining, expanding, and refining the ‘project’ of whiteness as understood on the lines sketched above, although I insist that under contemporary conditions of global white supremacy this is the default arrangement. Consistent with the late Charles W. Mills, author of The Racial Contract (1997), who argues that white people are the intended beneficiaries of the ‘contract’ of white supremacy, I maintain that white people can choose – and some have chosen – to refuse, reject, ‘tear up’ this contract, turn ‘race traitor’, and work alongside black, brown, red, and yellow people in attempting to dismantle this unjust global structural and systemic reality. I suggest that the possibility of race treachery provides a response to those concerned that calling out whiteness might alienate white people and thereby undermine the potential for strategic alliances and solidarity. That said, in what follows, I want to explore how whiteness is at work in at least some of the ways in which arguments for nonviolence and a disavowal of violence are made. My means of approach is through critical engagement with a few examples drawn from history. (In this connection, one glaring omission, relevant on account of certain ostensible parallels with Palestine, is South Africa and the resistance of the ANC which assumed various forms including armed struggle against the apartheid regime. Unfortunately, limitations of space preclude engaging with that example here.)

In an article for OpenDemocracy discussing, among other matters, the effectiveness of nonviolence in relation to the Second World War, freelance lecturer in conflict studies, activist, and ‘nonviolent trainer’ Jorgen Johansen – a white person –concedes that “there is no reason to believe that nonviolent defence any more than armed defence could stand against a well-prepared military force without serious preparation.” However, he goes on to maintain that “the German army was well prepared to meet armed resistance, but less able to cope with strikes, civil disobedience, boycotts and other forms of nonviolent action.” Importantly, Johansen points to the actions of “6000 ‘Aryan’ German women [who] took part in a nonviolent protest in February and March 1943, outside the prison in Rosenstrasse in Berlin, to get their Jewish husbands and friends released. Thanks to these brave women 1700 prisoners were indeed released. These examples illustrate that some groups have more impact than others. It was difficult for the Nazis to attack German women.” Indeed. According to Johansen,

While the Allies were busy bombing civilians in Hamburg and Dresden, the nonviolent resistance movement saved thousands of people from concentration-camps. Although military strategists were aware of the existence of gas chambers, they destroyed neither the camps nor the infrastructure for transporting prisoners.

Granted, yet would such nonviolent resistance have been possible without the violent action of the Allies? Here, I refer to the important intervention of Black Panther – and Muslim – Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz analysing the dialectical relationship between violence, nonviolence, and counterviolence in the context of Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King’s struggles in India against the British and in America against white supremacy, respectively. According to Shoatz, one cannot make sense of the effectiveness of either of these nonviolent interventions (liberation from British rule in the case of Gandhi, and the civil rights struggle against white supremacy in the case of King Jr.) without understanding the wider systemic context in which violent and counter-violent (as contrasted with nonviolent) forces interacted. Briefly, according to Shoatz, “World War II … served as the counterviolence to the British Empire’s violence – which was otherwise holding Gandhi’s nonviolent movement in check.” (Shoatz 2013, p.233) Crucially, as he goes on to argue, “Gandhi’s nonviolent non-cooperation campaign did not free India from British rule at the end of World War II (in 1947). Instead, it was the counterviolence of the Nazi, Italian, Japanese and their surrogate Axis powers that neutralized the violence of the British Empire and allowed Gandhi’s nonviolent movement in India to obtain independence through a synthesis between the kinetic forces that dominated these events.” (ibid, p.234)

In the case of “Martin L. King Jr. and the gains made by the civil rights movement in the United States, we can easily recognize similar counter-violent forces working to neutralize the violence being levelled against that movement. In this case, the counterviolence came from two major arenas: the police and military forces of the United States government, and the rising anticolonial struggles in the (so-called) Third World – the latter being closely associated with Russian and Chinese Cold War opposition to the United States.” (ibid, p.234) In short, counterviolence is a necessary facilitator of nonviolence, a position similarly endorsed by white anarchist Peter Gelderloos who draws attention in The Failure of Nonviolence (2013) to the ambiguity and incoherence of ‘violence’ as an objective analytical concept and category given its entanglement with power, mounting a critique of the reduction of oppositional direct action to exclusively nonviolent forms. (That said, I think one can and should distinguish between violence – that is, force targeting persons – and destruction – that is, force directed at property. On this reading, direct action, vandalism, sabotage, civil disobedience, unrest, riot, boycott, protest, strike, disruption, uncivility, etc. should all be understood as nonviolent. However, in arguing along these lines, it is crucial to appreciate that the line between the two can – and often does – blur. For example, targeted destruction of property – especially where the latter assumes the form of critical infrastructure necessary for the maintenance and flourishing of life – can result in violence to person, the devastation wrought on Palestinian life through the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza being an obvious case in point. The distinction between violence and destruction also collapses where persons are transformed into property – as happened to enslaved African people during the Transatlantic slave trade, for example.) Crucially, in relation to the argument I am making in this piece, Gelderloos also points to “the utility of nonviolence for colonialism and for suppressing and co-opting liberation movements, as well as the paternalism and racism of white progressives in using nonviolence to control the movements of people of colour.” (p.283) In this connection, mention needs to be made of We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (2024), in which black historian Kellie Carter Johnson explores the dismissal of ‘Black violence’ as an illegitimate form of resistance as a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Building on her 2019 work exploring violence in relation to black abolitionism, Carter Johnson argues that black resistance to white supremacy tends to be reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s ‘by any means necessary’. However, on her reading, force – from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt – has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions.

There’s nothing in our book, the Qur’an, but you call it ‘Ko-ran’, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone, but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion. In fact, that’s that old-time religion. That’s the one that Ma and Pa used to talk
about. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and a head for a head, and a life for a life, that’s a good religion. No one resents that kind of religion being taught but a wolf who intends to make you his meal.

Malcolm X / Al-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz, ‘Message to the Grassroots’, 1963

I will conclude by continuing with the theme of revolution and turning to Malcolm X’s ‘Message to the Grassroots’. Notwithstanding the importance of attending to the historical context within which the speech was delivered, I suggest it retains its analytical force and relevance in relation to the contemporary world – a world that continues to be plagued by the entangled violence of white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism.

Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you’ve got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. Once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight … I cite these various revolutions, brothers and sisters, to show you that you don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution … The white man knows what a revolution is … Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, “I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.” No, you need a revolution. (Malcolm X 1965 [1963], pp.8-9)

Insofar as the decolonisation project remains unfinished, the legacy afterlives of colonialism and new forms of colonialism building on such legacy manifesting in the contemporary postcolonial era, I find myself returning to a statement I made over half a decade ago:

If the modern/colonial world system is indeed a violent global systemic hierarchy, then perhaps some form of ‘counter-violence’ is necessary to bring ‘The World’ to an end and replace it with another, different and hopefully better world.

(Ali 2017, pp.300-301).

I stand by this, but I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not arguing that counterviolence is – or should be – the preferred means by which to effect radical, revolutionary change. What I am arguing is that it cannot – must not – be discounted as a means among various other means enabling such transformation; in this connection, I find myself, once again, in the company of Malcolm X, the latter of whom has “a very utilitarian vision of the utility of violence” (Sawyer 2020, p.114).

In short, by any means necessary.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank some friends and colleagues – black, brown, and white, male and female, Muslim and non-Muslim – for providing feedback on drafts of this essay which has improved the final version in various ways. While anonymous, I trust you recognise the traces of your provocations in the final version of this piece.

Dr Syed Mustafa Ali is Lecturer and Convenor of the Critical Information Studies (CrIS) research group in the School of Computing and Communications at The Open University. His transdisciplinary research focuses on developing a hermeneutic framework grounded in Heideggerian phenomenology, critical race theory, and postcolonial/decolonial thought, and using this framework to explore how race, religion, politics, and ethics are ‘entangled’ with various technological (more specifically, ICT) phenomena. In this connection, he has published work in the areas of Decolonial Computing and Algorithmic Racism, interrogating Trans-/Posthumanism, the discourse of ‘Big Data’ and internet governance.

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