Demanding change requires time, commitment, and millions of people, filling different roles, in partnership.
The millennial generation is one of the most radical, revolutionary factions in our country today. Since we were children, we’ve been told over and over, “You can do anything you put your mind to.” So let’s do it. Let’s demand progressive, programmatic reform. Let’s push the Democratic Party to create new ideas even if they seem radical or overly idealistic. Let’s create a new version of America.
It’s far from an impossible task. After all, most of the ideas that the “powers that be” will try to convince you are “radical,” or impossible, are no less valid than many of the questionable capitalist ideas the government has pushed and promoted over the past three decades (ahem: tax cuts for the wealthy, government-sanctioned student loan debt, questionable immigration policies, etc.). So there is absolutely no reason, in one of the richest, most diverse, and best educated countries in the world, why we can’t have: universal health care, affordable college education, a justice system that actually works, young people under thirty-five IN CHARGE, TV panels that feature only people of color.
Radical is what some people use to describe something that we think is unattainable because it hasn’t been achieved before. The question isn’t what has happened in the past, but rather what is possible for the future? Framed that way, everything named up above is possible. But just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s going to feel great getting there. There’s going to be heartache, struggle, and loss.
Thankfully, there are plenty of examples from history that we can call upon to bolster our courage and commitment. We can also look to the past for evidence that although revolutionary change usually requires incremental steps, it doesn’t have to move at a glacial pace. (Of course, “glacial pace” doesn’t mean much anymore in our era of climate change; our glaciers are setting new records for their rate of disappearance. A critical and hugely urgent issue that requires radical revolutionary action NOW.)
For instance, consider that before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there was a Civil Rights Act of 1957, and another in 1960: the first act established the United States Commission on Civil Rights and the United States Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, the second created federal inspection of local voter registration polls. Neither did much that affected Black people’s daily lived experiences, and they were neither radical nor sweeping by any means. It was not until four years later, after riots, lives lost, boycotts, sit-ins, and inspirational rhetoric that moved millions that we got the historic legislation of 1964 that codified the rights of Black people and minorities and outlawed discrimination.
There are several key traits of radical revolutionaries, whether you are talking about activists, academics, or practitioners. The first is that you have to be willing to buck the status quo and take a risk. The second, mentioned above, is that you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And the third is that you must be willing to take on your allies as well as your adversaries. To illustrate these characteristics, I want to tell you about several people, different types of radical revolutionaries in their own times and contexts. Because that’s another thing: context matters. The reality is that what’s radical in Nebraska might not be so radical in Washington. What was radical in 1819 or 1919 or 1969 is not the same as today. For those reasons, I also want to talk about people who are pushing against the status quo in smaller or quieter but important ways, some of them working from inside the apparatus for change, complementing the work of those radical activists hammering away from the outside. Because everyone has a role to play. We need everyone in this fight.
One man who was both an academic and an activist, and who changed the way we think about the contributions of Black people in this country, was Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Woodson was the son of former slaves, born in 1875. He began his life working in the coal mines of West Virginia. He was the second Black man to earn a PhD from Harvard (after W. E. B. Du Bois). And he is the reason that we recognize Black History Month.
Black History Month
Lemme pause for a minute and say the fact that Black History Month falls in February is a major affront to some people. “It’s the Man trying to get us down, relegating Black History Month to the shortest month of the year.” I’ve heard people say this more than once. No, y’all. It’s the fact that Dr. Woodson, who launched the idea of Negro History Week in the 1920s, decided that what was then a weeklong celebration of Black contributions to American history should take place during the week that contained the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln, February twelfth, and Frederick Douglass, February fourteenth. So it didn’t have anything to do with February being a short (or cold or miserable) month.
As an academic, Dr. Carter G. Woodson championed African American studies as a discipline worthy of research. Not only that, he paved the way for other disciplines like women’s studies and LGBTQ studies by making the case that groups of disenfranchised people should have their contributions to history taken seriously. Dr. Woodson pioneered the idea that Black history should be preserved and celebrated even when his contemporaries said that Black history was just a piece of broader American history, that it didn’t need any special attention or recognition. Dr. Woodson disagreed. He believed “Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.” And he believed that the distinct contributions of Black Americans were worthy of study and remembrance. He began the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, and the academic Journal of Negro History in 1916. He became affiliated with the NAACP (founded in 1909) but grew frustrated by what he saw as a lack of commitment to revolutionary change to improve the lives of Black people. As Woodson put it, “I am a radical. I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.” He didn’t wait around for people to get on board with his ideas. He went out and began speaking and teaching and agitating by himself.
By 1929, Negro History Week was being celebrated across the country. In 1970, an intergenerational group of students and faculty launched a monthlong recognition of Black History Month at Kent State University. Six years later, though Woodson had long since passed away by this point, President Ford announced as part of the US bicentennial that February would officially be designated as Black History Month. Dr. Woodson went from the son of slaves to a Harvard PhD who forever ensured the recognition of Black Americans’ contributions to history.
Our era has old and new challenges and needs its own change makers. Young people have always been drivers of change—that’s because we’re not jaded; we haven’t seen and done it all before. We come to the situation and see it for what it is. We aren’t afraid to fail. Back in the day, someone had to say, “I don’t think it’s right that we have to sit at the back of the bus.” Today we (still) have to say, “I don’t think it’s right that we have unequal educational opportunities in this country.” The lesson is that it’s important to say “this is isn’t right” as a first step.
Though we bring a fresh perspective and new ideas, some of the same struggles that Dr. Woodson encountered continue to persist today. We need our own radical revolutionaries today to question and fight against our country’s racist policies and assumptions, people like Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi is a millennial Black man at the vanguard of the academic study of racist policies in America. But he didn’t start out as an academic or an activist. Kendi wanted to grow up to play in the NBA. He never imagined he’d become a member of a different, more exclusive NBA—those who have won the National Book Award, one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes. (The number of Black people who have won the National Book Award: twelve, starting with Ralph Ellison, who won for Invisible Man.) Kendi’s award-winning book, Stamped from the Beginning, explodes the idea “that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, [which] lead to racist policies.” Kendi says, “If the fundamental problem is ignorance and hate, then you
r solutions are going to be focused on education, and love and persuasion.”
But, of course, Stamped from the Beginning shows that “the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural.” His latest book, How to Be an Antiracist, showcases the sort of fundamental reimagining that we still need to undertake as a nation when it comes to combating racism. As Kendi puts it, “No one becomes ‘not racist,’ despite a tendency by Americans to identify themselves that way. We can only strive to be ‘antiracist’ on a daily basis, to continually rededicate ourselves to the lifelong task of overcoming our country’s racist heritage.” As part of his mission to help do so, Kendi founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. There Kendi inspires students to take up the fight as change makers, whether they be activists, academics, or practitioners, with the knowledge that to create real and lasting change in combating racism, our focus should be on changing policy instead of people.
As for me, I don’t want to overstate my own contribution in pushing against the status quo, but I do believe I’m making an impact as a practitioner of radical, revolutionary change. The fact that a young, bald, Black woman was a regular commentator on cable news in the first place is kind of revolutionary.
It wasn’t the easiest entrée into television, or politics. When I was out on the campaign trail in 2016 as Senator Sanders’s national press secretary, there were many times when I would travel with the campaign and would arrive places for an event or rally, and I couldn’t even get in. This happened for the first couple months on the campaign trail. I would go to the staff entrance. They would say “This is for staff,” I would say I am staff, they would say “This is for campaign staff,” I would say I am campaign staff. They would tell me I had to go around to the front, I would refuse, I would have to call someone and have them validate who I was, and I would often be late. This happened all the time. Not every single place, but consistently. So much so that on one Friday before a Saturday event, I called our advance team, the people who go ahead on the trail and make sure that everything, like logistics and lighting and security and lodging, is set up, and said, this is when I’m arriving, I’m driving this kind of car, can you please tell security working the event that I’m coming, can you also add that I’m bald and I’m Black. And they laughed, and I said, you tell them that I’m coming, you tell them what kind of car I’m driving, I can’t take being late tomorrow. So please tell them.
I showed up Saturday. I pulled up in my Chevy Cruze, went to the first checkpoint, and security detail gave me so much trouble. Finally, I said, “Did the advance team not tell you I was coming? Did they tell you I was bald and Black?” Second checkpoint, I rolled down my window. The guy said, “They told me you were coming.” Third checkpoint was just a parking spot with my name with a little sign. I pulled up, and these two men came running up to my car, telling me I gotta get out of here, the space isn’t for me—move, now! I sat in my car and I just started crying. Because I just wanted to go to work. I called our security folks, I called our campaign staff, and they came down and met me and talked to the assholes and then took me into a holding area. I put myself together, knowing the senator and his wife were about fifteen minutes behind me. And I still had to go to work.
The senator and his wife showed up. I started explaining what it was we were going to do, what press we were going to talk to, and the senator’s wife, Jane, interrupted me and said, “Symone, what’s wrong?” I broke down and ugly cried, and I told them what had happened. Before Jane could say anything else, the senator said, “Well, why can’t you get in?” And Jane said, “Well, racism, Bernie.” Yes, Jane, I thought, and perhaps a little ageism and sexism too. And then the senator said something profound. He said, “If you can’t get in, who else is being kept out of the building that we don’t know about?” Part of being a radical revolutionary in this moment is thinking about who else is being kept out of the proverbial building. Is our work putting anyone at a disadvantage? Who else are we not thinking about? Who are the people not at the table? Who are the people on the menu?
As I mentioned before, some radical revolutionaries take on the role of activists, some become practitioners, some others work from inside of academia, fueling the creation of new ideas and their implementation on a granular level. We need people enacting risk taking on an ideological scale. Think about the last presidential race: people now talk openly and regularly about these ideas that were so radical five years ago—gay marriage, universal health care, even guaranteed minimum income. That’s because people took risks to associate themselves with these ideas and to push hard for them. Part of being a radical revolutionary is figuring out how to shift the moment, how to introduce an idea in a way that will gain traction. Before we had gay marriage, we had civil unions. The system doesn’t want to open itself up to change; it doesn’t want to allow radical revolution to take root and gain momentum. We have to find entry points. We have to find a way to begin to blaze the trail, if no path already exists.
It doesn’t have to take forever for a movement to come together—look at the Women’s March, for instance. The main rally in Washington that took place on January 21, 2017, came together in mere months. By now you’ve probably heard that the idea started with a few Facebook posts that immediately popped up in the wake of Trump’s election on November 8, 2016. That’s seventy-four days, y’all. To gather millions of women to march all over the country. To knit a sea of pink pussy hats. Of course, the struggle around issues of equal pay, equal opportunity, and equal standing for women has a long, long, legacy. But the organization of the march came together quickly, galvanized by protest of one of the most openly and egregiously antifemale presidents in recent history. What could have been a proud moment of women’s solidarity didn’t really end up that way, though. The intersectionality of the march, among women of different races, faiths, gender identities, and ages, was not what it could have been—both on the day of, and in the aftermath. It was a starting point, though, and a wake-up call for many about how much we can achieve if we come together, how much attention we can demand.
We all can take action. If you’re on the board of a company, stand up and say the unpopular thing that you know is right. You might say, “You know what? I’d suggest that we do something different this year. Instead of putting the money toward X as we always do, I have a better idea: to contribute toward a more worthy cause that will have more of an impact.” Or, “Let’s cancel the PTA luncheon this year and use the money to fund a project at an underfunded school in our district.” In the realm of politics, people like to say that members of Congress should just walk out whenever something egregious happens. C’mon. We do not elect members of Congress to walk out; it’s their duty to sit in there and figure it the eff out. If getting the president impeached is your thing, a radical concept would be: organizing folks to come onto the Hill for the next three to four months; helping support a letter-writing campaign; writing and publishing op-eds. All of us need to do whatever we need to do, in our roles and in our contexts, to make change happen. Protests have their time and place. So do fund-raisers, phone-a-thons, filibusters, and “teachable moments.”
I had a remarkable opportunity to connect with young potential change makers when I taught undergraduates at Harvard as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School. How I ended up there is kind of a funny story: I applied for the fellowship in spring 2017. I wasn’t accepted. So, case closed, I figured, and I moved on. Out of the blue in October 2018, I got an email from Amy Howell, the new executive director of the IOP. It was a Thursday when I heard from her, and she asked me if I could come to an event for the bipartisan women’s group on campus. She told me the students had been lobbying for me to come. The event was on a Tuesday. I was like, Are you kidding me? I knew this was Harvard and all, but I was a little bit busy.
I was at an event later that night, a gala for the group Knock Out Abuse, wh
ich works with victims of domestic abuse, I bumped into Monique Pressley. She was like, “Symone, are you crazy? You have to go.” So I agreed to do the event at Harvard. It was a small group of twenty young women who showed up, and I gave my talk and then we had a great dialogue. I heard from Amy again a few days after the event. She said, “I’m so sorry we didn’t have a chance to talk in person, but I was sitting in the back of the room quietly inspired—and do you want to come be an IOP fellow this winter?” I laughed and wrote back and told her about my rejection. “Never mind that,” she said, and a few months later I was back at Harvard, in residency, teaching a ten-week class. The university worked out a flexible schedule for me so that I could be there for a few days a week and then back in DC to keep doing my other work on CNN and elsewhere.
Looking back now, I realize that when I contemplated turning down my initial invite to Harvard, I almost missed a life-changing opportunity. The fellowship pushed me to think of myself as a teacher and a writer, which I’d never really done before. It sounds clichéd, but it’s true: in the end I learned just as much from the students as they learned from me. I also interacted with a couple of other residential and visiting fellows to whom I probably never would have spoken otherwise, like Ed Gillespie, longtime GOP operative and a former Republican National Committee chairman who narrowly lost the race for governor of Virginia in 2017—and my new best friend. During our first week of orientation at the IOP, Ed and I were seated near each other at dinner. After a few glasses of wine and small talk, and in true Symone D. Sanders fashion, I decided to ask the burning questions I had about his gubernatorial bid. Ed definitely had answers and that was the beginning of our friendship. The IOP was a great reminder that conversations change things—people, circumstances, and even our political discourse.
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