In the tradition of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, bell hook’s All About Love, and even James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, comes a groundbreaking blend of personal and political commentary from acclaimed memoirist Casey Gerald, offering an iconoclastic reframe of resistance and rebellion to meet the current moment and remake the world on our terms.
In 2019, 400 years after the first Africans were stolen and brought to American shores for enslavement, Casey Gerald made a bold and controversial proclamation on national television: “We’ve been given strategies to make it in this country, to endure this land… but there’s another very important tradition that each person has the right and opportunity and perhaps, at this very urgent moment, the responsibility to reclaim, and that is the strategy of flight, of escape.” His interviewer, Michel Martin, asked, “Where are we going?”
The Great Refusal is the answer to Martin’s apt question. In a short yet powerful volume, Gerald maps the path forward, calling on the works of Black luminaries, writers, and activists, as well as his own experience stepping back from the limelight and reassessing our current strategies of resistance and endurance. He implores us to tend to our inner resources and restrengthen our own worlds. Much resistance, he argues, is an inherent dialogue with the oppressor, playing on their battlefield, a defense to their offensive. (He is a former football star, after all.)
Now, again, we find ourselves on the shorelines of destruction. The strategies we’ve been taught—assimilation, respectability politics, meritocracy – are stalling out or degrading us further. What would rebellion look like if we stepped out of this cycle and imagined a different world, one on our terms? Marginalized Americans are in a gridlock fight for dignity in a system that is hellbent on never granting it. It’s time we understood our power, our peace, and our needs, and built them on our own instead of begging for scraps. Gerald offer’s a way—one that saved him, just as it once saved his forebears: the great refusal.
