Resistance is not new to Black people. White people who profited from their abuse and dehumanization of every aspect of our people — from the horrors of the Middle Passage, to the beating, branding and lynching of Black humans, to the use of our hair and skin to make furniture and shoes (tinyurl.com/57w3zeby) that still exist to this day — believed that applying enough torture and inhumanity toward these stolen people would crush our spirits and provide them with a docile flock of Black slaves forever.

To their horror, and terror, that turned out to be a dangerous miscalculation. We have resisted for 400 years.

Since the first African was stolen from our land by white enslavers and put into bloody chains to be used as livestock, we have resisted. Many of the stereotypes about Black people stem from this resistance. Let’s talk about the ridiculous stereotype that Black people are lazy. In fact, the truth is that we just weren’t willingly participating in our own enslavement.

Enslaved Blacks deliberately gummed up the works whenever they could as a form of resistance. They moved as slowly as they could, broke tools and equipment, and interfered in countless ways to fight back (nps.gov/articles/000/resisting-slavery.htm). When you are stolen to make a profit for a white person, the best resistance is to slow that profit down. White enslavers didn’t care about the Black people they enslaved but they did care about their profits, just the same as they do now.

The utter hubris of stealing literal humans to force them to do your work for you, and then breeding them to make them stronger so you can get more work out of them, and then developing a stereotype that says we are stupid and lazy — when in fact we are so smart that we will resist in every way we can, is the hallmark of white fragility. The stupidity is in thinking we are simpleminded enough to comply without resistance. We control what we can control, no matter what it costs us.

White people have feared Black people while exploiting us for resources, be they minerals from our home countries, backbreaking plantation labor, housework, music, entertainment, and touchdowns — all to line white pockets while simultaneously holding us in contempt. White people forced enslaved Black women to suckle their own white infants at their breasts while simultaneously refusing to allow a Black woman to eat off the same plates as the whites. They insisted enslaved Blacks were too dimwitted to take care of themselves, while actively preventing them from learning to read and write, lest they become educated enough to rise up using pen and paper instead of merely breaking a hoe.

White people are just now realizing what we Black Americans have been telling you all along about the reality of the nature of this tainted country. Paradoxically, white Americans have been desperately scrubbing history of the glaring and unflattering evidence that the only ones destroying this country’s potential is white Americans and their greed, bigotry, and love of how racism makes them feel, no matter what it actually costs them.

All the while, those same white Americans are building up a vast and glittering golden calf, sheathed in straw, to burn in an ecstasy of vengeance … all to distract from the fact that the face of the idol is a mirror. The backlash you are seeing now is directly proportional to the level of fear white people have for non-white people. When you fold molten iron and apply force over time, it becomes the strongest steel — there is no way to unfold those layers.

And still, the 92% (gazettenet.com/Columnist-Jones-58784754) resists, as we always have. We resist every day, and have been resisting even while you who are white and claim allyship rested, believing the scab over the festering pustule of white racism in America was nearly healed. Every day Black women encounter the infection of racism and bias, and every day we must decide if we are going to stay quiet in that meeting and let the bias wash over us, or speak up and be judged for the strength and truth of our voice.

Yet we resist.

And now, when the scab has been ripped off and the truth about the fathomless hatred and corruption bubbling sulfurously just underneath the thin skin of this entire country spews out its infected and gangrenous rot, Black people quietly continue to read our books, fold and hammer our iron into steel, bake our pies, and break our hoes.

We organize among ourselves, quietly stop giving our money to those who actively seek to crush us, walk instead of ride, and rest when we are expected to be working for the advancement of white mediocrity. The 92% told you, and now we are quietly making our own plans as we have for 400 years. As my sixth Great-grandmother Lucia did, we resist in all the ways, every day. We will not comply.

Yet many white people, who are unaccustomed to having to actively make themselves uncomfortable in the pursuit of justice, anxiously comply in advance to blatantly immoral and unjust directives, preemptively whitewashing their values so they will be able to continue to blend in with other whites. White people seek ways to smooth the pathways of bigots so conflict can be avoided. They focus on the letter of the law while ignoring the fact that the paper the law is written on is made from human skin and therefore cannot be obeyed.

We whose skin bears witness to the evil and horror that white people have spread across the globe over generations have never been able to simply step away from who we are at the first sign of threat. Our daily existence provokes those who feel threatened by our beauty, our intellect, our capacity, our strength, and our ability to excel — not because of who we are as Black humans, but because of who they are as white humans. And still we resist.

Learn from the 92% of Black women who are empowered by 400 years of practice resisting the unjust and the inhumane.

Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton. She writes a monthly column.