Roxane Gay

I think violence is abhorrent.

I think it should be a tool of last resort.

But...

You know, saying that we don't have to be civil is not saying we are going to be violent.

It is saying that we are not going to go quietly and we are not going to do nothing in the face of really just pernicious overreach.

No, not at all.

I think that it's going to take multiple strategies.

And many people have said that we could not have Martin Luther King without Malcolm X and we could not have Malcolm X without Martin Luther King.

We need multiple approaches.

And throughout the civil rights movement, there have been significant proponents of nonviolence.

And they have a point.

And for many people, nonviolence does feel like the right way, because it isn't passivity.

It is an active choice to be nonviolent in the face of violence.

It really isn't.

Quite frankly, I admire it.

I don't necessarily have that capacity.

But I admire the people who do.

And I also know that there have been many people during the Civil Rights Movement who decided that, you know what, we are going to fight fire with fire.

And Black gun owners in the South, in particular, were big advocates of not just going quietly when lynch mobs tried to come to their homes and

kidnap them and do grievous harm to them, they decided, no, you know what, we're going to use our guns because we have them too.