ResistanceS

Abstract

Once, a Negro in love with his location in an academic philosophy department sat in on a graduate student exam with me and said something very far from smart, as he objected at one particular point, “That ain’t resistance.” Whatever it was that had been touted as resistance was not the resistance that he claimed to like. But this does not mean that it was not resistance, or could not be. The Negro in question seemed at best to confuse “resistance” and “revolution,” despite classic debates revolving around a text such as Harold Cruse’s Rebellion or Revolution (1969), for example. For real, resistance is almost an elementary matter of physics, requiring much less in point of fact than revolution, which ultimately requires it. It represents a force, a counter-force, any force that counters the prevailing streams of force at a given point in time and space; it resists the physical and/or metaphysical powers that be . . . dominant. Once, I sat in on a graduate student exam with a Negro of the disciplinary philosophical persuasion who did not know squat about resistance, what resistance is, or what resistance could be, since he and a host of other folk feel that resistance is not resistance when it manifests itself in multiple forms beyond their anticipation and approval.