Four Hundred Souls
Page 36
I think many of us were naïve then. We thought things would only get better, not worse. Many thought of the election of Barack Obama, not as the end of racism, but certainly as a turning point. And it was. But for many, President Obama’s election was a turning point in a different direction. It spurred a backlash among white supremacists invested in maintaining the status quo.
It can be no coincidence that the carnage of the Voting Rights Act so central to the Shelby decision occurred during the presidency of our first-ever Black president. It is no coincidence that in the decade since Obama’s election, voter suppression has gained more momentum, velocity, and animosity than it had in the previous three elections combined. Since Shelby County v. Holder, voter suppression has taken on more pervasive and pernicious forms than ever before.
Voter purges are on the rise. Between 2006 and 2008, states removed 4 million voters from their rolls, as they are permitted to do under the Constitution in order to maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls. Between 2014 and 2016, that number jumped to 16 million people. Voter ID laws, like the one that stopped Eddie Holloway, Jr., from voting in the 2016 election, have seeped into state constitutions across the country. Felon disenfranchisement laws and voter access laws run rampant.
It was, technically, a change in the law that spurred these vile additions to voter suppression. But it had much more to do with what had happened five years before Shelby County v. Holder, with the election of President Obama. His election signaled that the direction of power in this country was shifting; the growth in voter suppression we’ve seen over the last decade is a response to that election and to that signal.
Laws alone have never changed this country. The Voting Rights Act would never have happened without the Freedom Rides, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the brave souls who sat at that lunch counter at Woolworth’s in 1960. The Voting Rights Act, as historic and critical as it was, was not enough to give Otis Moss, Sr., his vote.
At the March on Washington in 1963, John Lewis was just twenty-three years old. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he said:
To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we have long said that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now! We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again. And then you holler, “Be patient.” How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now….We must say: “Wake up America! Wake up!” For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.
When it comes to our democracy, and who we determine to have the right to vote—our most sacred of rights—patience is no virtue. We must never be patient when someone else’s rights are in the balance. We cannot wait on laws, or elected officials, or anyone else. The only virtue when it comes to the right to vote is impatience.
2014–2019
BLACK LIVES MATTER
Alicia Garza
Change does not occur without backlash—at least, any change worth having—and that backlash is an indicator that the change is so powerful that the opposing forces resist that change with everything they have.
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, a small suburb outside St. Louis. His body lay in the street for four hours as angry crowds gathered, demanding to know why an eighteen-year-old boy had been shot and killed by police just steps away from his mother’s home. After Brown was shot, he reportedly was still alive, and yet he was denied medical attention. Later that afternoon the crowd erupted and began to march to the Ferguson police station a few blocks away.
What unfolded that fateful day is painful and complex. It is a story that the people who joined in that uprising that day and in the days, weeks, months, and years afterward are most fit to tell. Storytelling is often connected to power and influence, and even today the voices of activists in Ferguson, from their own perspectives and viewpoints, are too hard to come by and often eclipsed by those who want to center themselves within a story that is not their own.
Such has been the case with Black Lives Matter, which I started with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi a little more than a year prior to Brown’s death, after the acquittal in 2013 of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, in Sanford, Florida. Such has been the case with all social movements as we seek to best understand their origins, their impacts, their failures, and their methods and strategies.
There are lessons that can be drawn from this tapestry of stories that point to a simple truth—Black lives still do not matter in American society. Whether it be the murder of Trayvon Martin by a vigilante, the murder of Michael Brown by a local police officer, the murder of Renesha McBride by a private citizen, the murder of Kayla Moore by police officers, the murder of Mia Henderson, or the mysterious death of Sandra Bland, who was found dead in a jail cell she should not have been in after a routine traffic stop—Black lives, be they poor or middle class, transgender or cisgender, disabled, adult or child, are seen as disposable.
The movement addressing this simple yet painful truth has deep historical roots. It has emerged from previous iterations not only to fight back against the state-sanctioned violence occurring against Black people each and every day. The movement has declared that all Black lives are worth fighting for.
This Black Renaissance understands that it is not only cisgender, heterosexual middle-class Black people who deserve to live full and dignified lives, but also Black people who are subject to discrimination, oppression, and marginalization of many types all at once. It was this Black Renaissance that propelled activists to refuse to allow traditional Black church leaders to speak on their behalf, to tell them to go home in the dead of night and be content with allowing the system to run its course as Michael Brown lay dying in the street. It is this Black Renaissance that declares that the lives of Black transgender women must not end in homicide before they are thirty-five years old. It is this Black Renaissance that refuses to make the coffee and the copies while the men do the real work. It is this Black Renaissance that questions the stated role of policing in this country, and that calls attention to the Black disabled people who are killed at eight times the rate of people who are not disabled. This Black Renaissance has dutifully carried on the tradition of resistance that our ancestors gifted us, and it has continued to push for the changes that they did not complete.
There were more protests in one year, 2014, than at any time during the last period of civil rights activism. Black Lives Matter—the hashtag, the organization, and the movement—exploded around the world. Making Black lives matter meant fighting back against the oppression of Black people, which also meant investing in loving Blackness in all its forms.
The explosion of this Black Renaissance came with a swift, strong backlash. Soon after Black Lives Matter began making a cultural and systemic impact, refrains of “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” began to counter it. These Americans denied the existence of racism and branded whoever dared to expose it as people who were “playing the race card,” ostensibly for sympathy or to deny culpability in their own oppression. These Americans framed Black Lives Matter activists as domestic terrorists who posed a threat to the lives of law enforcement.
The 2016 presidential election was the platform upon which this backlash against the Black Renaissance took place. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, expected the allegiance of Black voters and yet became the subject of numerous protests by Black organizers. The Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, allayed the fears of white voters, promising to restore law and order to the country, to support law enforcement, and, after the first Black president, to “Make America Great Again.”
A few months after Trump was sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States—a president who has been accused of groping or otherwise sexually a
ssaulting no fewer than thirty-five women—Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexually assaulting, harassing, or raping over eighty women. Exposure of these allegations prompted a hashtag known as #MeToo, which was the original creation of Tarana Burke more than a decade ago to support survivors of sexual assault to find resilience and hope. Since then, the #MeToo movement has exposed a widespread epidemic of sexual violence, particularly by powerful men like Weinstein, actor Kevin Spacey, and music mogul R. Kelly.
The #MeToo movement has proven to be a radical upheaval of societal norms that degrade, abuse, and devalue women-identified people. It has also amplified the voices of those who are survivors of that harm, and it encourages them to celebrate their resilience in the face of such violence. Harvey Weinstein’s career is now over, and he faces multiple lawsuits and court cases, intended to hold him to account for his abusive behavior over decades. Kevin Spacey’s career has also effectively ended, and the popular television show that he once starred in has been canceled. R. Kelly was finally charged with abusing underage girls.
And still the backlash has been swift. Not only have those who have come forward with their stories, daring to be resilient after having survived such horrible traumas, been interrogated, ridiculed, and picked apart; even those who dare to provide platforms for such voices have received death threats as a result of their service. Beyond the retaliation against individuals, a powerful countermovement now misrepresents this movement as harmful to men.
Three years into Trump’s first term, at the four-hundred-year mark of African American history, white nationalism exploded nationally and globally. Although white nationalism is not a new phenomenon, it had formerly been politically fraught to declare sympathies with white nationalism in public. In 2019 alone, more than 250 people in the United States were killed in mass shootings. The overwhelming majority of the shooters were white nationalists.
Today white nationalists openly serve in the White House and in Congress. Trump’s first year in office saw the designation of a new category of terrorist—the Black identity extremist, defined as a Black person who takes pride in their culture and wants to cause harm to law enforcement officials. Though the designation has recently been dropped after being exposed as fiction, the fact still remains that the backlash against the powerful Black Lives Matter movement that rose in 2013 and exploded in 2014 was deemed a threat by the FBI.
Activists valuing and defending the lives of Black people were considered a threat, but not a president who openly bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” calls immigrants of color to America “foreign invaders,” called Haiti a “shithole country,” and said that majority-Black Baltimore was a “rat infested city.” Trump personified the backlash against all those Americans saying Black lives mattered.
A looming question faces antiracist social movements in the United States: Will the backlash become a force powerful enough to prevail? Or will our organizing become stronger and sharper in the face of such backlash, assured that its presence alone has already declared our victory?
Only time—and strategic organizing—will tell the next four hundred years of African America.
AMERICAN ABECEDARIAN
Joshua Bennett
A is for atom bomb. B is for Blacks belting blues before burial, the blood they let to give the flag its glimmer. C is for cocoon & its cognates. Cocaine, coca-cola, the cacophonous wail of drones filling air with wartime. D is for demagogue. E is for elephants & their semblances, every political animal laboring under some less than human name. F is for foxhole. Firefight. Fears we cathect onto men holding best intentions close to the chest as one might guilt or guns & of course G is for guns, g-men, guillotines draped in flame we dream any hellscape holds if it’s up to snuff. H is for Horsepower. I is for I. I is for individual drive trumps all concern when it comes to this business of living joyously at the edge of wit, watching half a world drown with your hands tied. J is for jeans. K is for Krispy Kreme. L is for loss. L is for loveliness. L is for lean in the cups of boys in white shirts billowing free in Mississippi towns so small, they are visible only when passing through them, like death. M is for metafiction. N is for next: next wife, next car, next life I would spend the bones in this flesh one by one to touch. O is for opulence. Opportunity. Occasional anguish but nothing compared to what I will reach when I peak & P is for Preakness. Poverty & bodies that flee it. Oh body, like a storm of horses. Oh questions we dare not ask for fear of breaking rank or losing funding. Q is for quarantine. R is for repair, Revolution, other conflicts that lack limit in any definitional sense. S is for stars we adore & reflect. T is for tragedy. U is for upper-middle working class when the survey asks. V is for the viola my mother plays in the 1970s as her hometown collapses without fanfare. W is for Windows 98 in the public school computer lab & every fourth-grader playing Oregon Trail there. X is for xanthan gum, every everyday ingredient you couldn’t identify by sight if you tried. Y is for Yellowstone. Y is for the yachts in the docks in our eyes. Z is for zealotry: national pride like an infinite zipline, hyperdrive, the fastest way down.
CONCLUSION
Our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams
KEISHA N. BLAIN
There’s a saying that has circulated in Black communities for decades: “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
Its origins are unknown. Yet its power is unmistakable. It speaks to all that Black people have overcome that did not seem possible generations before.
I’ve often wondered what my ancestors dreamed about. I wish my great-great-grandparents who were enslaved somewhere in the Caribbean had left letters detailing all their hopes and dreams for themselves and me. I’ll never know for sure their wishes, their desires. But I can say with certainty that they wanted a life of freedom.
When I hear passing stories of my great-grandmother Felicity, a sassy and strong-willed Black woman from Grenada, I imagine that she had a lot of dreams and desires. Did she want to travel abroad? Did she want to obtain an education? Did she want to learn a particular skill?
What were her wildest dreams?
I’ll never actually know—no matter how much others might tell me about her.
So I am left to imagine and question. What did a Black woman living in Grenada in the early twentieth century desire? What did Felicity desire? What did Mary Jane Langdon, the great-grandmother of Malcolm X who lived in Grenada during this period, desire?
Although slavery had been formally abolished in Grenada in 1833, the experiences of Black people on the island were similar to those of Black people who were enslaved in the United States. Black people in the Caribbean could not claim a life of what historian Kim Butler has described as “full freedom.” Grenada, much like other Caribbean islands, had been colonized by the British during the eighteenth century (after previously being colonized by the French a century earlier). A Black woman living under colonialism in the Caribbean—much like a Black woman living under slavery in the United States during this period—could certainly dream. No one could have stopped them from imagining a better future, even if they tried.
But they could stand in the way of those dreams becoming a reality. And they certainly did. By design, slavery and colonialism stripped from Black people the right to live their lives as they wanted: on their own terms. They restricted Black people from having access to and control of their own resources. They stripped Black people of their “full freedom” and attempted to chip away at their personhood. They tried to crush their dreams.
The millions of Black people who shaped American history—whether descendants of enslaved people or of colonized people—all had dreams. Some dreamed of “home”—the place they could truly call their own. Some dreamed of the opportunity to explore and travel. Others dreamed of the opportunity to obtain a quality education. Regardless of the diversity of their individual hopes, they all dreamed of freedom. “Full freedom.”
Are we our ancestors’ wildest dream
s? Are Black people in the United States now living the lives our ancestors of the past imagined for us?
I am not so sure.
Today, a little over four hundred years since the arrival of “20 or so odd Negroes” in Jamestown, Virginia, Black people across the nation continue to face many of the same problems our ancestors fought to correct. Despite the many political gains and triumphs over the years, racism and white supremacy persist in all aspects of American life and culture. As disparities in maternal mortality rates and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 diagnoses and deaths reveal, Black Americans experience poorer healthcare access and lower quality of care than any other racial group. In the educational sector, Black students lag behind their white peers—not for lack of talent and ability but because decades-long structural inequalities have impeded their success. From police violence and mass incarceration to voter suppression and unequal access to housing, the social and economic disparities that shape contemporary Black life are all legacies of slavery and colonialism.
These two distinct yet deeply connected systems of power, oppression, and exploitation sealed the fate of the group of Africans who arrived in Jamestown in 1619. They influenced centuries of laws and policies that determined how Black people could live out their lives. They tried to stifle Black people’s dreams, and when they were unsuccessful, their architects and beneficiaries simply set up barriers and restrictions to make it nearly impossible for them to attain them.