In 1835, Harriet Jacobs wedged her 22-year-old physique right into a crawl house above her grandmother’s home in Edenton, North Carolina, for seven years. Enslaved and hunted by a white man decided to manage her physique, she selected confinement quite than submission.
In her 1861 guide Incidents within the Lifetime of a Slave Lady, Jacobs described the garret as so cramped she couldn’t stand, may barely sit, and was solely capable of peer out at her youngsters by means of a tiny peephole. Her pores and skin was chewed by bugs, her muscular tissues stiff with immobility, and her spirit refusing to bend.
She known as it her “loophole of retreat.” Nevertheless it was additionally an act of rebel: seven lengthy years of resistance carved out of three ft of air. Higher to undergo in hiding than to give up to her oppressor.
Greater than a century and a half later, Texas Rep. Nicole Collier wrapped herself in a blanket, tied down her bonnet, pulled a sleep masks low, and stretched out at her desk for 2 nights on the Home ground. She refused to signal the Republicans’ “permission slip” that will place her below fixed police escort.
Like Jacobs, Collier selected confinement on her personal phrases quite than undergo a system meant to humiliate her. Completely different century, totally different instruments, identical logic: Black ladies boxed in at any time when they refuse to yield.
And when Collier emerged, she made the connection specific: “Throughout slavery, Black folks fled. They ran away. In the course of the Nazi instances, Jewish folks fled. They fled their oppressor.”
The applause that adopted wasn’t for theatrics and made clear that she wasn’t exaggerating. Rep. Collier was finding her protest in a deep custom of survival and defiance, reminding everybody within the chamber that oppressed folks have all the time resisted.
It’s no shock that as quickly as she drew these highly effective historic parallels on the Home ground, criticism got here quick with some people on the fitting arguing that Rep. Collier crossed a line by evaluating her protest to the horrors of slavery and the Holocaust, declaring that, bless her, she’s by no means been enslaved and clearly isn’t dealing with genocide.
Yeshiva World Information rushed out a headline: Texas Democrat Sparks Outrage After Evaluating Herself to Runaway Slaves and Holocaust Victims. Republicans and a few Jewish leaders known as the comparability “traditionally inappropriate and offensive,” arguing it trivialized two of historical past’s biggest atrocities.
However Collier by no means mentioned she was enslaved or dealing with extermination. She mentioned what’s all the time been true: oppressed folks resist. Interval. If something, dismissing her phrases as “inappropriate” proves her level: folks would quite police the language of resistance than confront the techniques that require it.
Mediaite piled on with: Texas Dem Nicole Collier Compares Herself to Runaway Slaves and Jews In the course of the Holocaust, and amplified the critique that she was overstating her case. However this framing flattens her phrases right into a caricature. Collier wasn’t inflating her struggling. She was inserting her protest throughout the lengthy continuum of human defiance. From the Underground Railroad to Jewish households fleeing Nazi Germany, the purpose isn’t sameness, it’s survival. Her speech wasn’t historic cosplay; it was historic literacy.
Past the preliminary protection by Yeshiva World and Mediaite, the echoes of Collier’s analogy and the backlash it sparked have reverberated throughout different shops.
The Day by day Caller reported the critique bluntly in a chunk titled One other Texas Dem Equates Fleeing Votes to Escaping Slavery And Holocaust, underscoring how Collier likened fleeing the redistricting vote to the acts of survival undertaken by enslaved folks and Holocaust victims. The framing from this outlet and different conservative-leaning platforms made clear that the criticism prolonged from each partisan and cultural critics who noticed the comparability as overreach.
Saying she confronted slavery shouldn’t be what she did. Collier didn’t declare she was enslaved or persecuted below a totalitarian regime. She invoked the broader sample: When humanity is stripped away, resistance isn’t just doable, it’s inevitable. Her level wasn’t private equivalence, however historic continuity.
Resistance echoes throughout contexts. Her phrases weren’t about evaluating severity. They had been about affirming a legacy of refusal. The Underground Railroad, Holocaust escapes, and actions like Collier’s share a throughline: survival towards imposed energy. To dismiss that parallel is to disclaim historic patterns in favor of discomfort.
Past historic debates, her protest had real-world resonance. Because the Washington Publish studies, Collier stayed in a single day on the Home ground and known as it “civil disobedience,” echoing Congressman John Lewis’s name to make “good bother.” And even Texas Republicans declined to forged the protest as imprisonment, framing Collier’s refusal to signal the slip as a matter of Home guidelines quite than detainment.
In essence, the backlash wasn’t about details; it was about discomfort with highly effective precedent. The critics weren’t rejecting historical past; they feared it.
These conservative and right-leaning Jewish shops know precisely what they’re doing. They use rhetorical tips to police the language of Black resistance, flattening it into caricature so it may be dismissed. On this case, they intentionally take Collier’s phrases, rip them out of context, after which repackage them into clickbait outrage by saying she was claiming private equivalence with slavery or genocide. That’s not journalism, that’s manipulation. It’s a bait-and-switch sport: flatten the complexity of her level, then whip up outrage by accusing her of trivializing struggling whereas erasing the deep historic context she invoked.
What makes it much more insidious is the way it echoes a well-known sample. At any time when Black folks invoke historical past to name out the continuity of white supremacy, the fitting and its echo chambers rush to close it down. They’d quite twist her phrases right into a spectacle than grapple with the uncomfortable fact she was pointing to: that America has all the time demanded resistance from the oppressed. By caricaturing her analogy, they’re not simply silencing her; they’re reinforcing the very techniques of denial and domination she was naming.
Collier’s phrases additionally hit a uncooked nerve with some Jewish people, too. Why?
As a result of when Black people invoke the Holocaust alongside slavery, what typically will get stirred up is a contest over historic struggling. Who “owns” atrocity? Whose ache is incomparable? For some Jewish leaders and commentators, the Holocaust has been sacralized in American reminiscence because the singular, untouchable atrocity, and when Black folks place it in the identical continuum as slavery or Jim Crow, it could possibly really feel like a trespass. However what’s not often mentioned out loud is that this defensiveness additionally masks Jewish complicity within the perpetuation of white supremacy at house and overseas.
As a result of the arduous fact is that Jewish folks, like different immigrant teams, had been capable of assimilate into whiteness in America by means of entry to housing, faculties, jobs, and energy buildings whereas Black people remained locked out. That proximity to whiteness generally comes with defending it, even on the expense of Black solidarity. So, when a Black lady lawmaker attracts a line between the Holocaust and slavery, it threatens that assimilation cut price by exposing the shared structure of oppression, the white supremacy that undergirds each.
So, the outrage isn’t nearly “historic inappropriateness.” It’s about guarding whiteness. It’s about refusing to see that the identical techniques that murdered Jews in Europe are those that lynched Black youngsters in America and are slaughtering brown youngsters in Gaza. And it’s simpler to scold a Black lady for saying it than to face the methods white supremacy nonetheless recruits and rewards silence.
It’s a cynical transfer: use historic atrocities as sacred, untouchable objects to police the language of the current, whereas ignoring the truth that those self same atrocities are the inspiration of the techniques nonetheless grinding on in the present day. They wish to defend the mythology of struggling, not the folks nonetheless struggling. It’s rhetorical violence masquerading as ethical outrage.
And what these critics don’t wish to admit is that comparisons like Collier’s are uncomfortable exactly as a result of they’re efficient. They remind us that authoritarian creep doesn’t arrive sporting a swastika or wielding a whip. It exhibits up in smaller humiliations like a “permission slip,” a police escort, a legislative rule designed to field in dissent and demand resistance earlier than they metastasize. Collier’s defiance didn’t trivialize historical past; it honored it.
Outrage over Collier’s analogy isn’t nearly defending historical past. It’s about defending whiteness, guarding assimilation, and avoiding the popularity that white supremacy is a shared structure of oppression that hyperlinks slavery, lynching, the Holocaust, and in the present day’s legislative assaults. We should refuse the siloing of atrocities and drive People to confront the continuities.
Harriet Jacobs crawled into an attic crawlspace barely sufficiently big to breathe as a result of slavery demanded her resistance. She wrote her story so nobody may ever say they didn’t know what America required of the enslaved to outlive. And greater than a century later, Rep. Nicole Collier curled up on the Home ground and did the identical factor: she named what it means to withstand techniques designed to interrupt marginalized folks. She didn’t declare equivalence with Holocaust victims or runaway slaves, she claimed lineage.
Each selected confinement on their very own phrases, and each uncovered techniques designed to interrupt them. In a second when Black ladies are continuously informed to be quiet, defer, or dilute their phrases, we should protect and amplify their refusal.
That’s the half the critics can’t abdomen. They need Black ladies silent, not talking throughout historical past, not daring to sew our struggles collectively. However Jacobs knew, and Collier is aware of: each act of refusal, whether or not it’s hiding in a garret or strolling out of a chamber, belongs to the identical story of survival. And if the highly effective are offended, it’s solely as a result of resistance has all the time unsettled the individuals who profit from oppression.
What Jacobs endured in a garret and what Collier endured on the Home ground are separated by centuries however united by one fact: resistance is rarely well mannered, it’s meant to be disruptive and make the highly effective uncomfortable. So be it.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and creator of “Spare The Children: Why Whupping Kids Received’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Kids In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
SEE ALSO:
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