The Violence of the State and the Right to Resist
Why Chaos Isn’t the Enemy—It’s the Reality We’re Fighting to Change
As a nation “America” fetishizes the deaths of black and brown people within its founding myths. The extinction of the noble savage, the unrelenting miseries of slavery are stories retold in our education system not as apologies, but as formative warnings to generation after generation of our Black and Brown children.
The countless murder of Black and Brown men and women over the past several years, the caging of brown children separated from their parents, and the discovery of thousands of young indigenous children buried in unmarked across Canada and the United States are daily reminders of a precarious position; warnings to Black and Indigenous folk to mind their manners – or die.
Stop saying that violence never solves anything. It’s a lie—a convenient one—that keeps us powerless. Violence has solved things throughout history: it built empires, ended monarchies, and overthrew colonizers. To pretend otherwise sets an impossible moral standard for those who endure systemic violence every day. It tells Black, Brown, and Indigenous people that we have no right to fight back, no right to defend our lives. It reeks of hypocrisy, racism, and the kind of condescension that only serves the oppressor.
This double victimization tells those who are literally fighting for their lives they do not have the right to defend their lives. That the "high road" of self-extinction is the right one, allow yourself to die, be beaten, raped, exploited, shoved back in the closet - just do not ever fight back or “riot” or “loot” because that is WRONG. There is no way to reconcile the racism of US colonialism with the notion black and brown lives have value because for that to be true settler colonialism would have to end, and it does not seem like any of us are going to pray our way to that finish line.
Peace serves the oppressor, defends the status quo and protects the settler. Heightening contradictions and exposing irreconcilable differences is where social change happens. The time has long passed for oppressed people in this country to be held to a different standard of responsible behavior internally or externally. Black and Brown communities through political, cultural and economic nationalization can create our own standards of behavior and acceptable political response to this nightmare.
Look past the images of “riots” on your screen. The truth is that violence—real, systemic violence—has been disproportionately inflicted on Black, Brown, and Indigenous people since the founding of this country. The loss of life, destruction of communities, and daily suffering are not anomalies; they are the rule. What you call “violence” in the streets is a response to the 99.9% of violence that comes from the State—police brutality, prisons, economic exploitation, and stolen land. Anyone that fears the sight of the police, whose blood runs cold when they are pulled over, is passed over for a job because of their name or accent. This is the violence of colonialism; we are all going through it all the time.
Xicanos cannot oppose the system that imprisons them if they have no idea of how the power of that system is arranged. We fail to understand the racism we endure is not a simple mindless exercise of impersonal systems or personal whims but a systematic ongoing five-century exploitation that has left countless millions politically and economically dead and disenfranchised. This abuse and neglect are intentional. It overwhelms the senses and breaks the ‘rational’ mind. For Xicanos and Indigenous people, it forces our hearts and psyches to bear the weight of centuries of worthlessness imposed by European hegemony.
In condemning the “violence” many have asked, “Can true social change really come from chaos and anarchy?” Ask the Natives who fought the Spanish, the natives who fought the English, ask the captured Africans who survived the middle passage and whose descendants to this day die in the street with a literal boot on their neck. Indigenous and Black communities in the Americas have survived continuous, centuries long “social change” so normalized is the oppression that these rare moments of physical resistance are considered shocking anomalies because if they were placed within a legitimate continuum of resistance, it would indict a growing movement to end settler colonialism. By necessity riots must be illegitimate since that illegitimacy is one more way of removing the tool of physical resistance from our anti-colonial toolbox.
The question “Can true social change come from chaos and anarchy?” is flawed because it assumes our current situation isn’t already chaos. For millions of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, chaos is a daily reality. When a traffic stop could mean your death, when children are caged and torn from their families, when Indigenous remains are buried in unmarked graves—how is that not anarchy? The system’s violence is deliberate and constant. Settler “order” is Native chaos, and the oppressed live in it every day.
The Xicano/Indigenous community has been forced through economic and physical colonization to rely on and accept the political dominance of the colonial system. To accept the idea that the wrongs forced on us as a people will correct themselves if we trust in the democratic process of the settler and allow the rule of law to correct itself incrementally has proven untrue. What is not taken into account in this version of “benevolent” settle colonialism is the necessity of direct intervention as the actual democratic change agent implemented, in this case, by the colonized in the change process.
Democracy, at least on paper, is a political system of direct citizen participation. Because of this “participation,” we forget our current system is set up to accept and absorb a certain amount of direct action because without the pressure of dissent the discourse of equality within democracy flounders. So all you boohooing about the “riots” fail to realize this one thing.
Mass rebellions are the closest thing we have to true democracy—where the people speak, unfiltered, with collective clarity. This is not chaos. This is participation, as raw and real as it gets. Yet in these moments, we always hear the condescending voice of respectability politics: “This is what voting is for.” How convenient. In a system where participation is rigged by voter suppression, economic inequality, and racial bias, the privileged get to decide what “legitimate” political action looks like.
These rebellions are not the failure of democracy; they are its fulfillment. One person, one voice, one act of defiance.
This hypocrisy infects every level of the United States where the conflation of capitalism and democracy fosters even greater obstacles for the poor and marginalized in terms of participation and assumed equality.
The time has passed for anyone to tell Xicanos and Indigenous people how to practice our politics. The days of being told to settle for the lesser evil, to trust the same white neoliberal saviors, must end. We cannot wait for the system to correct itself, because it was never designed for us. It is time to create our own political alternatives—ones that reflect our hopes, our struggles, and our aspirations. This is not just resistance; it is survival. This is the beginning of something new.
For centuries, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities have resisted a system built on their subjugation. The violence we see today is not new—it is the latest chapter in a history of colonial domination. But we have never been passive. From the rebellions of enslaved Africans to the Indigenous uprisings against conquest, our survival is proof of our will to fight.
Xicana/o/x must reject the lies of “nonviolence” when it is weaponized to silence us. We must reject the hypocrisy that tells us to endure violence quietly while the State rains destruction upon us. We must reclaim our right to resist—on our terms, in our own way.
The chaos you fear is already here. It is time to transform it.