The following is an edited version of a chapter from Kazu Haga’s new book, “Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm,” published with permission from Parallax Press.
In Kingian Nonviolence, a philosophy developed out of the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., there is a distinction made between nonviolence spelled with a hyphen, and nonviolence spelled without a hyphen. “Non-violence” is essentially two words: “without” “violence.” When spelled this way, it only describes the absence of violence. As long as I am “not being violent,” I am practicing non-violence. And that is the biggest misunderstanding of nonviolence that exists.
I live in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Oakland, with an equal mix of black, Latino and Asian residents. One day, I was taking a nap in my apartment when I was woken up by a couple yelling at each other below my second-story window. I decided to get out of bed and look, and I saw a woman on the ground being beaten, crying and screaming for help. I jumped up, put on my shoes and ran downstairs. By the time I arrived, about 15 of my neighbors had also come outside, but they were just watching this woman get beat, doing nothing to help. I managed to break up the fight and get the two to walk away from each other, one fuming with anger and the other in tears.
My neighbors who were just watching this were practicing “non hyphen violence.” They weren’t throwing punches or kicks. They were explicitly being “not violent.” So, you see how, from a Kingian perspective, what a difference that little hyphen makes. You see how big of a misunderstanding it can create if we think that nonviolence is simply about the absence of violence. If we define nonviolence as “not violent,” then we can hide behind the veil of nonviolence while still condoning violence.
It’s easy to be a bystander. We see rising homelessness, and we turn the other way. We see unarmed black folks being killed by police, and we blame the victim. We hear about high suicide rates among LGBTQ youth, and we do little or nothing about it. We read reports on the climate crisis but leave it to the next generation to deal with. We watch our communities and the earth being assaulted every day, and we just gather around and watch.
Nonviolence is not about what not to do. It is about what you are going to do about the violence and injustice we see in our own hearts, our homes, our neighborhoods and society at large. It is about taking a proactive stand against violence and injustice. Nonviolence is about action, not inaction.
Negative peace
This misunderstanding of nonviolence leads to a dangerous misunderstanding of peace. Similar to misunderstandings of nonviolence, calling for a misunderstood peace can be an act of violence. On February 3, 1956, a woman named Autherine Lucy became the first black student to attend classes at the University of Alabama. Within days of her arrival, riots broke out. A mob of more than a thousand people surrounded the car she was traveling in, and rioters climbed on top.
In response, the university expelled Lucy. They claimed that her presence was causing a threat to the safety of the school. The following day, the riots stopped. The local newspaper ran a headline that read, “Things are quiet in Tuscaloosa today. There is peace on the campus of the University of Alabama.”
There is peace. What kind of peace was the paper talking about?
A one month later, King gave a sermon in response to this titled, “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious.” In it, he said the peace the newspapers described was not a real peace. He said that this is “the type of peace that all men of goodwill hate. It is the type of peace that is obnoxious. It is the type of peace that stinks in the nostrils of the Almighty God.” Strong words from the man who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. When King spoke of a “peace boiled down to stagnant complacency,” he was talking about what peace educator Johan Galtung calls “negative peace,” a peace that describes the absence of tension at the expense of justice. King went on to say that, “peace is not merely the absence of tension, but the presence of justice.”
Oftentimes, we think of peace as calm and quiet. We conjure up images of watching the sunset on a tropical beach, meditating in the forest by a creek, incense and scented candles. That can be as problematic as thinking that nonviolence is about not being violent. I guarantee you that the moment after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, things were really quiet. So did we create peace? If someone is screaming in my face, and I stop them by knocking them unconscious, did I just create peace?
It is easier in the short term to sweep issues under the rug and settle for a cheap yet ultimately unsustainable negative peace.
As ridiculous as that sounds, this is how our society tries to create peace, because we have such a gross misunderstanding of it. This is what allows us to justify going to war to create peace. If we just kill all the terrorists, we’ll have peace. It justifies the militarization of the police. If we just lock up all the protesters, then our streets will be quiet and peaceful. It justifies mass incarceration. If we just lock up all the bad people, we’ll have peaceful neighborhoods.
Negative peace is prevalent in many of our relationships, homes, workplaces, faith communities and institutions. This is often the type of negative peace created and maintained by a ubiquitous, unspoken understanding that surfacing conflict is not welcome. My home country of Japan deals with this type of negative peace on a national level. As a culture, we tend to be conflict-averse. We are taught that the honorable thing is to hold it in, keep our heads down and endure. It is considered rude to bring up difficult topics that could create tension because we would be placing a burden on others. It’s impolite. So we endure.
Japan may be one of the safest nations on Earth in terms of violent crime, and from the outside looking in, it looks peaceful. But we also have one of the highest suicide rates in the world. To learn to endure life’s challenges with dignity can absolutely be a positive trait, but when it results in a nation of people trying to simply endure trauma, isolation and living a life without purpose — when people are taught not to speak out about injustice and oppression and to “stay in their place” — that’s repression. It is negative peace.
I once heard someone describe this phenomenon as the “tyranny of civility.” We’re told in corporate workplaces not to speak out about sexual harassment because it would “create conflict.” We’re told in our churches not to question the use of church funds because “it’s improper.” So we go on pretending there’s no problem. Enduring.
We see this everywhere in our society today. Racism? Not a problem anymore; the only people still talking about racism are the racists! Patriarchy? Look at all the women leading major corporations now! Poverty? The economy has never been better! Look at the stock market!
It is easier in the short term to sweep issues under the rug and settle for a cheap yet ultimately unsustainable negative peace. It is an entirely different conversation to proactively work against violence and build toward a positive peace that includes justice for all. It requires us to lift the veil off injustice and work to repair the harm.
Disturbing complacency
When we associate peace with only the absence of tension, we actually move farther away from the positive peace that King called for. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he wrote, “My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”
In 2015, in response to the police killing of Freddie Gray, the city of Baltimore erupted into an uprising. This included some members of the Baltimore community engaging in acts of violence. Buildings were burned. Car windows were smashed. Former Baltimore Ravens star Ray Lewis implored the protesters to “stop the violence.”
When we use nonviolence to confront violence and injustice, we are not disturbing the peace, we are disturbing complacency.
As a nonviolence trainer, I don’t necessarily think that burning buildings is the most effective tactic to creating lasting change. And at the same time, I was disappointed at Lewis’s statement. There is great irony in his call for protesters to “stop the violence.” Because that is exactly what the protesters were trying to do. The uprising in Baltimore wasn’t only about the killing of Freddie Gray. It was a response to 500 years of violence against people of African descent in this country. People were out in the streets because they were the ones sick of the violence perpetrated in their communities for so long.
King once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Riots are ultimately a cry for peace from communities who have never had it. To condemn oppressed people for lashing out against centuries of violence is to ignore the larger context of violence they are lashing out against. It is the inevitable response from a community whose pain had gone unacknowledged for centuries.
Calls for Black Lives Matter protesters to be peaceful following the latest police killing can be a form of repression. It is a call for peace that acts as a euphemism for “stop complaining” and “stay in your place.” Peace is messy. Justice is loud. If we expect that creating peace in a society as violent as the United States will be a neat, calm and quiet process, we will be in for a rude awakening.
Real peace-building requires us to learn to have the conversations we don’t want to have with our families and with society. It may require us to hold interventions, shut down highways or perform other acts of resistance. When we do those things, we are not creating the conflict. We are simply surfacing the conflict that already exists so that it can be addressed.
King was arrested 29 times in his short life. Many of those times, he was charged with “disturbing the peace.” Think about that for a moment. Let that sink in.
This still happens today to many activists. When we use nonviolence to confront violence and injustice, we are not disturbing the peace, we are disturbing complacency. We are disturbing the normalization of violence. We are disturbing negative peace. When massive homeless encampments become normalized, we need to disturb that. When we accept a 50 percent dropout rate from urban high schools, we need to disturb that. When we invest in a prison system that produces an 83 percent recidivism rate, we need to disturb that. When corporate interests are destroying our planet and endangering the livelihoods of future generations, we need to disturb that.
The charge of “disturbing the peace” should be stricken from the criminal codes of this country until we finally learn to live in real, positive peace. We cannot disturb something that doesn’t exist in the first place. When we engage in the hard work of nonviolence and social change, we are not disturbing peace. We are fighting for it.
Thanks, Kazu, for your call to us to give up conflict aversion. Your examples are vivid and clear, and you make Dr. King’s words sing. There are times when I allow conflict aversion to keep me from saying hard truths or asking hard questions, and I often feel it in my stomach afterward: my body knows when I let myself down. In the early ‘seventies it took a year to get ready to come out in public as a gay man because I knew it would roil the waters — “disturb the peace” — and while my coming out resulted in some hostility and doors closing, I’m glad I took that step of integrity. Not only was it empowering for me (nonviolence is about empowerment), but also for allies who were emboldened as a result, and of course it was one more of the many steps taken to build a movement that, this many years later, is still winning victories.
I look forward to your book.
George
Thank you so much George! I also grew up in a very conflict averse culture, and as part of my practice in nonviolence, in addition to organizing and participating in movements, I’ve been trying to get better at having hard conversations not only with society but with my own family and community. Thank you for sharing a bit of your story too! Look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks!
An excellent article calling for tension between two forces, one of complacency and the other of confrontation. Granted that sometimes the forces of confrontation can get violent, because no one is listening to civility. We cannot let tensions build by being complacent and reactionary. We have to confront those who will have, “keeping the peace” as a path to nonviolence, when the opposite happens when oppression rears it’s ugly head. The solution is constant engagement with the system that oppresses. Civil disobedience, voting, organizing, building coalitions, and holding our elected officials accountable are all nonviolent acts that create productive tension that leads positive change.
this touches my heart. For the 35 years that I worked with children of trauma, adults of trauma, domestic violence, and addictions that is what I was most exhausted from, the absence of action. How many times a man would see a woman abused in public and do nothing. all of us have seen and heard the angry frustrated mother yelling at her child in the shopping cart and we all stand and stare hoping that our looks will spare the child and stop her raging. It doesn’t work. Often she will begin to rage at anyone who stops to look…..Watching an animal be abused and not intervening and praying for some other divine intervention. Yes there is a risk in stepping in, and sometimes it isn’t safe to intervene. I hear many good men denouncing male violence against women but doing nothing to bring real peace. Real peace where everyone is heard and everyone has a different idea to be listened to and contemplated. It’s not an easy path to root for peace but it is an honourable one
I am still working on the video to explain horizontal governing in about 5 minutes. It is taking much longer than I had expected, because it has to be so good and clear. Meanwhile, it seems apparent that we all would like to live in a “regenerative culture”, one in which profit is not the bottomline. A world where everyone is involved in making a healthy and wholesome society, where there is no “programming”, nothing imposed on people, no politicians subject to bribes and threats, one in which the citizens self-organize and collaborate. Perhaps a state-less society, since the state seems to take on a life of its own and needs to control and self-perpetuate, and ends up serving money (corporatocracies waging wars to steal resources from defenseless countries), wasting trillions on polluting and murderous militarism, and not serving the people, and creating huge bureaucracies.
Many might think that a strategy is to build this society under the nose of the present regime and wait for it to fall on its own, and to be there with the regenerative culture already in place. Following the quote of Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
However, with the urgency of the climate crisis, this strategy should not be entirely abandoned, we should continue building a regenerative culture, but we need to realize that it is no longer viable as far as saving us from extinction or fascism, as it needs too much time and we don’t have that anymore.
For centuries, governments have been doing the “unacceptable” and sleep walking humanity has lived with this and grown accustomed to this and implicitly accepted the unacceptable. But now, it has gone too far to accept anymore and we must have the courage to confront them once and for all before its too late. These world-wide protests are a big step in that direction, but again, its not enough without being much better organized and coordinated on a world scale. And what needs to be agreed upon by all the protesters, in my opinion, is that corrupt governments (all of them), need to go. How? by simply restructuring from vertical to horizontal, which is citizen run and collaborative, and virtually uncorruptible. They may try to intimidate us with naked tyranny as they have done to some degree with the protests, but it is through solidarity that we have a chance, as some of the protests have shown.
Lets align our thinking with the world-wide protests, which is the immense discontent from having to live under criminal and irresponsible regimes and really make the one big necessary change.
Kazu’s got it right!
I personally will go one step further and state my faith that there is a teleological process at work in the process Kazu is talking about. Yes, let us continuously “disturb the peace,” pulling the veil back from injustice that has been hidden and hearing the voices that have been ignored, and actively responding to them, with them. I live in faith that all this struggle is really going somewhere. That there is a “destination,” although that is probably not the right word or concept. Charles Eisenstein calls it “The more beautiful world we know is possible,” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls it “the Omega Point.”
Thank you for this powerful piece.
Kazuhiro,
I applaud you for “spelling ” things out . Our so-called peace here is complacent but also controlled and manipulated by our police forces who are in turn controlled by higher powers in our country. The riots here or anywhere are a cry for peace and justice. Other methods have obviously failed. As Bernie Sanders says, “it is time for a revolution ” for equality and social justice and only than can we have true peace.