Violence
What you hear
Physical force. Hitting, shooting, breaking. Something done to a body.
The common meaning. This is the cover the redefinition travels under.
What they mean by it
In this literature violence is a category that moves: it grows to cover words, and shrinks to excuse acts.
Words can be violence.
assaultive speech, about words that are used as weapons to ambush, terrorize, wound, humiliate, and degrade
Mari J. Matsuda, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, Westview Press, 1993, Introduction, p. 1
Speech wounds the way segregation wounds.
Segregation and other forms of racist speech injure victims because of their dehumanizing and excluding message.
Mari J. Matsuda, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, Westview Press, 1993, Ch. 3, Lawrence, "Racist Speech as the Functional Equivalent of Fighting Words"
More speech cannot answer the injury, so only prohibition remains.
words of response to such verbal attacks may never be forthcoming because speech is usually an inadequate response
Mari J. Matsuda, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, Westview Press, 1993, Ch. 3, Lawrence, on the preemptive nature of racial insults
Breaking property is not violence, because property is the violence.
property destruction is not a violent activity unless it destroys lives or causes pain in the process. By this definition, private property – especially corporate private property – is itself infinitely more violent than any action taken against it
Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, Pluto Press, 2008, Chapter 4, "Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs", p. 81, on the ACME communique
At the root of the tradition, liberation itself requires violence.
decolonization is always a violent event
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, French 1961; Richard Philcox translation, 2004, "On Violence", p. 1, opening sentence
The plain lines are the archive’s. The words under each are theirs, read in the edition named.
Documented
In plain English
Violence extended to words. If speech can assault, the institution can police it as assault, and whoever runs the institution decides which words wound. The category runs the other way too: force against property stops counting as violence, because they hold private property to be violence already.
The archive’s reading. The definition above is the citable one.
Assessed
Why it works
Everyone agrees violence is bad; that agreement is the oldest rule there is. Grow the category and the agreement comes along. You agree that violence must stop. They then define your speech as violence and their broken window as self-defense, and you have consented to the censorship and excused the riot without changing your mind about anything.
Assessed
The claims ledger
The citable statements behind this term, each tied to the movement source filed in the Vault.
The founding critical race theory text on speech defines its subject as assaultive speech: words used as weapons to ambush, terrorize, wound, humiliate, and degrade.
- Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First AmendmentWestview Press, Boulder
{"offset":5321}
Words That Wound announces its subject as assaultive speech: words used as weapons to ambush, terrorize, wound, humiliate, and degrade.
- Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First AmendmentWestview Press, Boulder
{"offset":5321}
In Words That Wound, Charles Lawrence holds that racist speech injures its victims through its dehumanizing and excluding message, drawing its power from the cumulative effect of similar messages.
- Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First AmendmentWestview Press, Boulder
{"offset":188752}
Words That Wound argues that racial insults are preemptive: because speech is an inadequate response to them, the remedy of more speech is held to be unavailable.
- Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First AmendmentWestview Press, Boulder
{"offset":188752}
The ACME collective communique holds that property destruction is not violence and that private property is itself more violent than any action against it.
- Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to TheoryPluto Press, London
{"offset":147842}
Fanon opens The Wretched of the Earth by holding that decolonization is always a violent event.
- The Wretched of the EarthGrove Press, New York
{"offset":115349}
Plain English for “Violence”: Violence extended to words. If speech can assault, the institution can police it as assaul...
- Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First AmendmentWestview Press, Boulder
{"offset":5321}
The ACME collective communique states that the aim of breaking windows is to destroy the legitimacy surrounding private property rights.
- Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to TheoryPluto Press, London
{"offset":150195}
Fanon describes decolonization as the unconditional, absolute and total substitution of one "species" of mankind by another.
- The Wretched of the EarthGrove Press, New York
{"offset":117582}
The evidence file
Corroboration beyond the ledger. Each passage was read in the edition named, not in a search result.
Exhibit A · What the smashing is aimed at
When we smash a window, we aim to destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy that surrounds private property rights
Source: Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, Pluto Press, 2008, Chapter 4, "Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs", p. 81, on the ACME communique
Their own communique names the target: not the glass, but the standing of private property. That is the pivot connecting this word to capitalism. The Record files the same communique beside Malm, who refuses the euphemism and grants that property destruction is violence.
Exhibit B · The substitution the violence performs
decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one “species” of mankind by another. The substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless.
Source: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, French 1961; Richard Philcox translation, 2004, "On Violence", p. 1
Note the reach of the examples: a sports club, a cocktail party, a bank board. The claim is not confined to armies, which is what makes the doctrine portable into ordinary institutional life. Philcox translation; the passage reads differently in Farrington, which is why the edition appears here.