We Must Refuse To Cooperate With Injustice
New York City, 1985. The high sign that rules this summer is increasing fragmentation. I am filled with a sense of urgency and dread: dread at the apparently random waves of assaults against people and institutions closest to me; urgency to unearth the connections between these assaults. Those connections lurk beneath the newspaper reports of teargassed funeral processions in Tembisa and the charred remains of Baldwin Hills, California, a flourishing Black neighborhood leveled by arson.
I sit before the typewriter for days and nothing comes. It feels as if underlining these assaults, lining them up one after the other and looking at them squarely might give them an unbearable power. Yet I know exactly the opposite is true—no matter how difficult it may be to look at the realities of our lives, it is there that we will find the strength to change them. And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance.
—Audre Lorde, Apartheid USA, A Burst of Light & Other Essays
In 1985, Audre Lorde sat down to write about the growing fascism of her time—the violence against Black people by white supremacists on Turtle Island, the apartheid levied by white South Africans against indigenous Black South Africans and the purposeful undermining of these stories in the national media. The threads of this violent history are still so prescient in 2025. This presidential administration is amplifying the wickedness that has existed since America’s original sins were consecrated in our constitution and the permeable-for-whites-and-elite-class rule of law was set into motion.
As Audre prophetically instructs, we must look at the realities in our lives, the forces that shape our ability to reproduce ourselves, and we must name these truths so they don't accrue power in the dark. And so I must line up these injustices one by one.
It’s news stories, one after another, of ICE kidnapping people without due process, like 18-year-old, baby-faced Carlos Daniel Terán, from his parents’ home. It’s preemptive compliance across American universities. Institutions willingly cooperating in the kidnapping of immigrant students of color; over 800 student visas revoked overnight by the state. ICE snatching doctoral students of color, like Rümeysa Öztürk, on her way home from an iftar, a post-fast Ramadan meal with her friends, in broad daylight by masked agents, or Ranjani Srinivasan, a 27-year-old PhD student from India, whose student visa was voided overnight. She has since fled from the US to Canada. All of these young people were criminalized under the ever-elastic definition of who or what constitutes “legal. “ The detainment of university students highlights how deeply embedded Zionist supremacy is in the fabric of American politics and Western hegemony.
In the process of writing this, ICE posted and since deleted a graphic including the word “IDEAS” defined as “past, current or expected beliefs,” i.e., “thoughtcrimes,” as a justifiable basis for criminalization. These actions build on the chilling legacy of government interference and violent suppression of civil rights groups through the 1950s and 70s. The dog whistle politics of this fascist government have provided even more scapegoats for the machine to grind down to bone and dust.
Exactly when I feel the crunch on my ribs of all of this damning news, another pile of dirt is shoveled atop.
Federal workers are being laid off across government agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), resulting in an uptick in avoidable plane crashes and collisions. Trump blamed the worst commercial airline crash since 2021, a collision with no survivors, on the hiring of a diverse workforce. His vow to crush “anti-white” racism during his campaign has turned out to be true. This white-centered semantic shift of the definition of racism and the purpose of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) disproportionately and purposely targets Black and other marginalized federal workers. The violent revocation of rights for a portion of working-class society will also erode the civil rights of the people who voted in favor of these austerity measures. These actions will have a tangible impact on every single one of us, if it hasn’t already—in our daily lives, at the grocery store, in our schools, at the pharmacy, even within our interpersonal relationships.
(Side note: do you remember during the last Trump presidency when democrats and liberals refused even to whisper “racist” to describe Trump 1.0 policies? Boy, do I feel fantastically gaslit. The media’s inability to plainly name how the depravity of the first Trump administration paved the way for this flagrant proliferation of white supremacist agendas and billionaire rampages is mind-boggling.)
It’s staff layoffs at the Veterans Affairs (VA), imperiling thousands of veterans who rely on vast care networks to survive. It’s the cutting of funding to NIH-backed research, effectively halting critical development for HIV care, LGBTQ and trans-specific related healthcare, Covid-19 research and climate-related health impacts. It’s paving the way for states to deny civil protections and access to healthcare based on gender identity. It’s adding more obstacles to obtaining jobs, accessing healthcare and pursuing justice for people with disabilities. It’s cutting $900 million of funding from the Department of Education, specifically from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which investigates cases of racial, sexual, religious and gender-based discrimination in schools. It’s libraries forced to scrub queer, gender and race histories from their stacks and archives. It’s DOGE closing social security offices nationwide with threats to close every federal office, a move which directly impacts financial assistance for retired folks, disabled people and child orphans living in poverty.
It’s rolling back environmental protections that slowed the unhinged speed of commodification of Earth’s gifts by billionaires unaffected by polluting our waterways, cutting down forests, clearing wetlands and prairies. All of these life zones sustain and support all of us, even the folks who hate our existence. It’s gobbling up our public services to feed AI data centers and sprawling bitcoin mining farms with more, and more, and more electricity and water—the impact has already led to deteriorating health outcomes, increased electricity bills and environmental pollution in across small towns in America.
These planned and reckless deficiencies leave a gap for Musk’s parasitic power grab, effectively laying the groundwork for his companies to become inextricably woven into the fabric of the US government.
By all of these measures, it appears that not much has changed since Audre enumerated the colonialist crimes of her time. In the 40 years since penning her essay, our government has only deepened its enmeshment in the sticky hands of the corporate oligarchy and the destructive culture of whiteness that criminalizes and discards any trace of difference within people and our bodily autonomies.
Beloved reader, I know it sounds really fucking bleak. It feels as much. Sometimes, it’s hard to fathom the level of violence we are all experiencing. Sometimes, it even feels hard to breathe. I must gently remind myself in these many moments that not only are we living proof that our ancestors knew how to survive, but they also passed down the antidote to hatred in our DNA. Alongside this destruction, we are also living in the futures our kin ached to experience. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be witnessing such sweeping terror from white supremacist elites to criminalize, cage and disappear us. Beloved, even the idea that we could freely exist is a dangerous one.
Our histories offer us a lifeline of both how we survived and how we refused. They provide instructive ways on how we collectively fought to crush injustice and flourish through solidarity.
If you experienced an education like mine, lessons about the Civil Rights Movement by white teachers would immediately dull the tenor of the classroom. I could see the gaze of my mostly white classmates chill with boredom. And, as we're witnessing in current times, there continues to be a stronghold of society that rejects instructive political education on the struggle for justice and liberation. This is purposeful. This is by design. As a result, the stories mainstreamed by the media remain flattened, two-dimensional versions of the networks solidarity required to shift power.
In the neutered version, Martin Luther King Jr. is glorified as only having a dream and never a violent one. That education didn’t include the vast and measured acts of sustained solidarity and disruption required to create seismic shifts in race policy. King helped organize renter strikes in Chicago, and during the nearly year-long Montgomery Bus Boycotts, he supported mutual aid networks of carpools that offered rides to Black residents until the bus company capitulated from heavy financial losses.
Inspired by the momentum of the Black movement for justice, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in 1968 by a group of Indigenous men who had been incarcerated. Members of AIM organized against systemic inequity faced by Indigenous people that stemmed from this nation’s birth—the genocide, violent dispossession and displacement of native peoples from their lands and way of life by white settler colonialism. They fought to end racist policies and the federal government’s land theft and to improve the health outcomes of their communities. AIM created networks of deep mutual care through opening schools and organized months-long occupations of federal buildings, towns, and national monuments. They protested through demonstrations like The Longest Walk, a spiritual walk across the country to raise awareness around the loss of tribal sovereignty, access to land and water resources and vital social services. Though AIM was eventually disbanded because of the FBI’s subterfuge through COINTELPRO, smaller AIM chapters continue to fight for the rights of Indigenous people across Turtle Island.
In the same decades as both the Black and Indigenous struggles for justice, gay and trans folks were growing increasingly frustrated with the mounting discrimination towards them. In 1969, following the Stonewall riots, several gay organizations came together to create the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a coalition of radical queers organized to expand the civil rights and protections for LGBT people. Though Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were members of the GLF, they were fed up with the lack of Trans and POC representation in these groups. In 1970, they organized a network of mutual aid and community support for trans and gay youth through the formation of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and STAR House, a grassroots organization and home committed to supporting and sheltering trans and gay youth who were experiencing homelessness, incarceration, or cast out of their family of origin.
Concurrently, through the late 1960s, Mexican Americans organized to end institutional racism, widespread discrimination and sought to expand voter rights, educational access, land rights and civil rights through the formation of the Chicano Movement or El Movimiento. Young people formed local chapters like the Brown Berets and the United Mexican American Students. Collectively, the movement offered free clinics, organized community social networks, protests and large-scale demonstrations, formed student organizations and unionized farm workers. However, some Chicana women were outspoken against the sexist narratives within the movement and formed the Chicana Feminist Movement. They organized to educate, support and increase class consciousness that included race, class and gender, intersections that were largely ignored by both the broader Chicano movement and the white women-centered movement of second-wave feminism.
Everywhere you turned, the people were rising in defiance! And if we relied on popular narratives and retellings of that history, it would seem each of these events stood alone. However, there was solidarity and commonalities throughout all of these movements for civil rights and self-determination. Everyone was pissed the hell off and had a stake in the fight for justice. All of it was happening all at once, steadily growing like the buildup of a tidal wave.
Remembering, studying and celebrating the ways we refused and we are refusing injustice offers a lifeline for this moment. It’s vital for our survival to recall that history is not some far-away mirage—it’s happening right here and right now. We are the history of future generations. We are also the futures of ancestors past. And just as history offers evidence of our refusal, our current time offers us sustenance as well.
Kelly Hayes wrote in a recent essay, “In our organizations, our workplaces, our churches, and our own homes, we must grapple with what it means to refuse to cooperate with injustice. To enact Trump’s fascist vision, the administration will need public cooperation."
The threadings of how we are refusing to cooperate with injustice are all around us today, too. You, dear reader, are likely participating in these disruptions, repairs and sustained acts of solidarity and mutual aid. Across this country and globally, millions of protestors are reaching across divides demanding an end to government corruption, investment in our civil rights and liberties, and an end to US imperialism, human supremacy and Israeli apartheid. Federal employees are choosing noncompliance, slowing down the destructive forces of DOGE, people are putting pressure on elected officials to protect the civil rights of trans and gender-expansive people in their states and disrupting the kidnapping of folks by ICE. In my Chicago community, our mutual aid networks are supporting neighbors who aren’t able to meet rent this month, or need assistance through recovering from medical procedures, or emergency childcare. My comrades organized a postering event at their kid’s school for Trans Day of Visibility. We are rallying together around the people and communities that are most at risk of being crushed by empire’s greed.
"Witnessing and disapproving will not save us. We must be willing to act and refuse to act on the basis of what we know is right. We must build a rebellious culture of care in defiance of a death-making culture of greed. We must reject the disposal of our fellow human beings. Rather than allowing this fascist oligarchy to invisibilize its violence by cloaking its harms in criminalization, we must be willing to become criminals. To be orderly and cooperative in a fascist state is not a virtue. We must be prepared to live and act defiantly, deriving no legitimacy from the illegitimate brutes who would govern us. " Kelly Hayes, A Brutal Beginning via Movement Memos
Refusing injustice isn’t just something that happens out in the physical world. You can choose, right here and right now, to refuse in the place where it all starts—in your spirit, body and mind. Refusal yearns to caress the spaces where your body feels hardened by all of this suffering, where your body feels shame at changing your beliefs once you’ve received new information or when you’ve made a misstep.
What if instead of doom scrolling from scene after scene of violence juxtaposed with OOTD selfies, we put down our phones and expressed our grief beyond the borders of polite conversation—to allow, even for the briefest moment, another person to see the edges of where we hurt and let them unfurl their pain, too? What if we refused by choosing vulnerability over isolation and compassion over callousness?
Refusal is noticing how nature refuses, too. I’m awed by the ways dandelions and clover push through cracks and jagged splits along the concrete. Or of learning the brilliance of bees and our close relationships with them for millennia. Though habit destruction has severely impacted the livelihoods of Native North American bees, they still survive and generously offer us their gifts over and over again.
Refusal is to remember that we are connected to dandelions and bees and all of life everywhere on Earth and to everything in the cosmos.
We, the people of conscience, who recognize the inherent dignity in all beings—have never stopped fighting. If the disease of power through domination and subjugation is disconnection, then our charge is to deepen our connections by accepting the reciprocity of this miraculous gift of life.
We must refuse with every fiber of our being.
"We are in a moment that calls for hands that refuse stillness, for feet that do not idle, for voices that do not wane." Frederick Joseph, Find A Way To Fight Back via In Retrospect
Now is the time to reach into our imaginations and devise creative ways we can continue to refuse injustice together because our refusal is never isolated. We move as a hive. Behind each of our refusals is a lineage of our ancestors thrumming their fists, and stomping their feet, and raising their voices to resist and refuse with us.
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