Life & Wisdom Quote by Barbara Deming

Deming refuses the comforting binaries that keep political actors legible: violence versus passivity, toughness versus moral purity. Her first move is a demolition job. “Power” isn’t synonymous with brutality, she argues, and “conscience” doesn’t require a soft voice or a bowed head. That’s a direct rebuke to the way movements get policed from the outside (nonviolence as “do nothing”) and from within (moral appeal as “be nice”). She’s insisting on a third posture: confrontation without cruelty.

The subtext is strategic, not saintly. Deming writes out of mid-century struggles where nonviolent resistance was often caricatured as meekness and where “power” was claimed as the exclusive property of the state, the police baton, the bomb. Her sentence quietly reclaims power for the disarmed. Sit-ins, strikes, blockades, refusal: these are coercive acts in the literal sense - they force a situation to change - but they do so by leveraging visibility, solidarity, and disruption rather than bodily harm. Nonviolence, in Deming’s framing, is not a retreat from power; it’s a different technology of it.

Her kicker - “the most effective action both resorts to power and engages conscience” - is a demand for hybrid politics. Not pure moral pleading, which can be ignored, and not naked force, which can win while corroding legitimacy. She’s describing the sweet spot where pressure makes injustice costly and conscience makes compliance feel necessary. It’s an argument for tactics that are simultaneously disruptive and narratively unanswerable.