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Twentyoneaffirmations.pdf

Twenty-One Affirmations for the Twenty-First Century

When we wrap up a semester-long course on race-related issues, we frequently find that our students feel a bit overwhelmed by all that they have learned. Most are so troubled by the extent to which structural racism pervades US society that they feel almost paralyzed. They want to be part of the solution, but they don’t know where to begin. Before closing, we offer instructive encouragement and some final food for thought to help you grow the movement for racial equality.

— 1. We Are Leaderful

The contemporary Movement for Black Lives has been critiqued as leaderless and thus unorganized and unsustainable. These critics are missing the mark on more than one account. First, movements of the people are built on and sustained by collective activity. Movements are not like group projects at your school or job, where “the work can still get done” by one ardent member while others slack off. This movement will be sustainable so long as a critical mass of people come together in any variety of ways to publicly advocate for the value of Black life. Second, we’ve been hearing since at least the 2003 protests against the US invasion of Iraq

that movements were starting to look disorganized because seemingly disparate issues would take the stage together at a single event. That is, at an antiwar march, we might have seen environmental conservationists critique the United States’ dependence on oil alongside socialists castigating Halliburton and other corporations for making money off noncompetitive wartime contracts. What some people fail to understand is that social movements are rarely, if ever, focused on one single issue or goal. What may be different in contemporary social movements is the conscious strategy to publicly articulate the connections among racism, patriarchy, disregard for the planet, capitalism, and the industrial complexes of prison and war. The willingness to incorporate these strands into a narrative for social change is in no small part due to the growing resonance of the politics of intersectionality. These movements are not unorganized because there is more than one message; on the contrary, the multiplicity of messages is what is being organized. The politics of intersectionality does not compel one to discipline speech or behavior so that only one issue gets addressed at a time. One is instead disciplining oneself to be mindful of the “matrix of domination”1 and to keep that mentality when countering police brutality, gentrification, and budget cuts to subsidized school lunch programs.

Stay Woke : A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49.

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Lastly, there is no one way to lead; we must dispel this myth. Not every leader is an orator or a natural in front of the camera. Leaders are people who motivate, who organize, and who do grunt work so that collective activity has momentum. Leaders make contributions and share ideas. Dependence on the presence of charismatic figures subliminally suggests that there are few leaders among us, but this is not true. The misguided belief that leadership is scarce entrenches elite representatives who either are addicted to power and looking for any justification to continue to wield power or would like to walk away from power but are afraid that their efforts and accomplishments will be squandered if no one steps up to shepherd them to the next level. We can teach children how to be leaders, and we can mentor adults to become more influential and cooperative. One of the most important things we can do as leaders to ensure the progression of this social movement is to train the next generation and follow confidently behind.

Children out front, 2006 Chicago May Day March / Day Without an Immigrant. (Photo by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi)

— 2. Racism Is Tyrannical, and Democracy Is Fragile

Democracy is a radical concept because it asserts that we are all entitled and expected to participate in governance. This precious idea, that every person should have a voice in the political sphere, took millennia to cultivate. The United States of America, however, only became a robust democracy in 1965, when the federal government began to actively enforce

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the law of the land through the Voting Rights Act. This policy called for almost every adult citizen, regardless of race, to exercise the right to vote as guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment, which was written into the Constitution ninety-five years earlier. Up until that time, white supremacists at the state and local levels resisted the extension of the franchise to African Americans at every turn. Their idea of democracy was a herrenvolk democracy,2 one in which the population is stratified, with only the white majority treated as “equals,” and everyone else excluded from participating in a government of self-rule. Nevertheless, people of color resisted and taught the next generation to believe in and act on their natural right to be counted alongside everyone else. Democracy is also very fragile. When we form majorities and coalitions, it is often our

inclination to make decisions that are best for those who are on our team, but this cannot come at the expense of oppressing others. As we write, we are troubled by the idea that this country is slipping toward new iterations of herrenvolk democracy. Indeed, the Noble Prize– winning economist Paul Krugman declared that it is not “economic anxiety” that poses the greatest threat to US democracy today; it’s “white nationalism run wild.”3 If the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency is not evidence enough for you, consider the efforts of many state legislatures to further disenfranchise citizens of color now that an important feature of the Voting Rights Act has been eliminated. We must resist this inclination and instead find ways to make decisions that neither infringe on the rights of others nor require us to make compromises that undermine the creation of a more equitable society.

— 3. Progress Is Not Inevitable

Frederick Douglass famously said that “power concedes nothing without a demand.”4 These are the words spoken by someone who intimately knew the culture of white supremacy against which he advocated the freedom and franchise of Black people and women of all races. Relatedly, people often point to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assertion, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”5 When people today echo this part of his speech, it concerns us that they interpret it to mean that progress is inevitable and guided by providence but that the speed at which it progresses depends on the push of human agency. This may very well be what he wanted us all to hear. But when we listen to his speeches, we imagine something else: a man galvanizing the spirit of social justice because he believes that the free will and conduct of women and men is what makes our world a moral one and that our human souls are capable of such good things. King, Douglass, and many other egalitarians were passionate about getting people

activated for social justice because they believed work and commitment over time were necessary ingredients of social change. (Even physicists have shown that power = energy/time.) They did not trust that the momentum of any one era would carry on to the next or that the agenda of one administration would proceed naturally to some next coherent step. (Physicists also remind us of inertia.) Waiting around for white supremacists and their acquiescent partners to change their mind was not acceptable. There was no “right time”—

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they made their own time. This is our time to push for new ways of valuing one another, for investing in one another, and for being more humane with one another. There will never be a time riper than right now.

— 4. We Don’t Need to Be Perfect. We Need to Be Political.

For unfortunate reasons, antihegemonic movements in the United States tend to center their campaign for rights and equality around people who they believe are virtuously above reproach. Granted, this strategy has afforded different movements some successes, but it has consistently left those who are considered “deviant” at the margins of society. This movement is our opportunity to change this unreasonable standard. We are not perfect, and we should not have to be perfect in order to have our basic rights recognized. People of color and poor whites are often expected to conform to middle-class white norms in order to be deemed acceptable or sufficient or simply to belong. Well, here’s a radical statement: We all belong here! We all have rights, and nothing should compromise our entitlement to those rights. If we are Black, we have rights. If we are poor, live in housing projects or trailer parks, we have rights. If we have same-sex sex, we have rights. If we apply for welfare benefits, we have rights. If we are single mothers, we have rights. If we use and/or abuse substances, we have rights. If we had an abortion, we have rights. If we wear hoodies, we have rights. If we sag our pants, we have rights. If we play our music really loud when we drive by in our cars, we have rights. If we are Muslims, we have rights. If we are atheists, we have rights. If we are fat, we have rights. If we wear turbans, we have rights. If we cannot make bail, we have rights to due process. Believe it or not, if we are in this country without proper documentation, we still have some rights that must be recognized. If you say you stand for justice and cannot envision yourself defending the civil and human rights of society’s most marginalized people, then you need to rethink just what it is that you stand for, because it isn’t equality. It’s all of us or none of us. You need not be an angel to either be an agent of change or to be regarded with dignity, respect, and humanity.

— 5. Interrogate Meritocracy

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

—Stephen Jay Gould6

It is high time that we realize that while hard work and talent are important ingredients for opportunities and advancement, there are many individuals with mediocre skills and personal characteristics who hold advantaged positions. Moreover, there are many folks whose hard work and talent will never be recognized, and by no fault of their own. When people explain

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racial inequality in terms of hard work, discipline, talent, and other virtues, they are touting a myth. The racialized myth of meritocracy empowers people to claim that whites work harder, are more responsible, value education more than others, and inherently possess the kind of values that make for good leaders, good home owners, good students, good police, and good Americans. This is a dangerous belief system. We are not saying that we shouldn’t value hard work or that we shouldn’t want to apply

ourselves in order to achieve our goals, be they ambitious or modest. Instead, we ought to realize that there are other factors that inform the life chances of Americans, and many of them have nothing to do with who people are as individuals. The circumstances of your birth, the social networks that are made available to you, the kinds of schools you go to, the financial status of your family—these all inform whether and what kind of opportunities become available to you. Be proud of your hard work and be proud of the talents that make you who you are. But bear in mind that this is not all that matters in the calculus of your success and that many people enjoy the best material and political standing in our society by little, and sometimes no, effort of their own.

— 6. Children Are Our Barometer

There are a lot of ways to measure how well a society is doing. When gauging the egalitarianism of our society, we’d like to encourage you to ask how the children of our country are faring. Remember, children do not get to choose the circumstances of their birth and childhood. They don’t get to choose the financial status of their families or where they live. They do not get to pick their ascribed race or gender, even though many people will treat them on the basis of these characteristics. Children do not get to vote and do not get to make decisions about who should represent their interests. They have little say in the culture that they are born into. They are not allowed to legally work, and many of them, given their age, cannot literally speak for themselves. Advocating for the equitable well-being of children is one of the most effective ways to

make an argument for racial justice; so many of the rationalizations of and justifications for inequality are predicated on the myth of meritocracy, and this logic gets entirely thrown out the window once we start talking about children. How can they possibly be held accountable for the realities they have been immersed in? They have not realized their full potential, though the political choices of adults widen or narrow the path for them to do so. As adults, we should be making decisions that best support the growth and possibilities of our society’s children. Indeed, it is our responsibility to do so even if we do not have children ourselves. If we want to know how our society is doing, take a look at statistics about children. You’ll

learn where we are and, perhaps more importantly, where we’re headed. How many kids are born into poverty, and who are they? Are babies of a certain racial group living to see their first birthday at a higher rate than those of another? How many words are in their vocabulary? Which languages do they speak, and are they authorized to use them in the classroom? Who is attending public schools, and are all public schools meeting the needs of

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the children? Are the kids at the private school getting a leg up? How many young citizens are denied access to developmental resources because their parents are undocumented, deported, locked up, formerly incarcerated, or dead? To what extent are adolescent behaviors legislated into adult crimes? How many children are behind bars? How many young people go hungry over the summertime and during school breaks? Do our children ever meet people of a different racial background? How many people under eighteen years old have lost a family member, friend, or classmate to gun violence? How many are allowed to preregister to vote before their eighteenth birthday? Have they all been empowered to make positive change in this world?

— 7. Reappropriate the Language of Morality

It is reprehensible that racial identity is an indicator of well-being in the United States. It is unacceptable that the law provides substantial room for police and citizen vigilantes to shoot and kill unarmed Black people without major legal repercussions. It is unconscionable that majority Black and Brown public schools are underfunded and overcrowded. It is shameful that politicians are more excited about being “tough on crime” than they are about being “serious about education.” It is downright deplorable that a nation such as the United States has the greatest military on earth but has neither universal pre-K nor universal health care. It is reckless to act with sloth-like reflexes, or no reflexes at all, to ensure that the water being delivered to a town and its schools is not full of lead. It is downright immoral not to care what happens to whole groups of people—children, poor people, Black people, women, LBGTQ+ people, justice-involved individuals, refugees, and so on.

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Twitter: Black women’s values.

The contemporary Movement for Black Lives is a moral movement because it asserts that the lives of those who have been marginalized the most should be valued as much as the most privileged members of society. By virtue of simply being alive, they should matter. Each person’s life is so unique, precious in possibilities, and finite in its existence here on earth, and that is not to be trifled with. We who advocate for policies and practices that protect the freedoms and enhance the

well-being of marginalized people need to use the language of morality with full conviction. It is, after all, the native tongue for those who want to do the most good for the most people. By virtue of free speech, racial conservatives can invoke morality when they defend the reckless behavior of unprofessional police or rationalize the stinginess of public funds that could be used to help those who are in the most need, but we must not allow them to monopolize it.

— Stay Woke : A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:49.

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8. Read Widely These days it is easier than ever to immerse ourselves in an echo chamber. Hearing one’s own voice and the familiar voices of others again and again is incredibly comforting, but it can also give us a false sense of consensus and power. One simple way to resist this encroaching insularity is to make time to read beyond the headlines of a news outlet that you wouldn’t ordinarily look at. What topics does it believe are worth bringing to your attention? How is it framing the major issues of the day? What arguments is it making, and do you concur?

Standing in the cotton field of Mrs. Minnie B. Guice near Mount Meigs in Montgomery County, Alabama, this woman reads the Southern Courier, a newspaper dedicated to reporting the stories of the civil rights movement, 1966. (Photo by Jim Peppler; Alabama Department of Archives and History)

Be intentional about reading the stories and analyses of people who have a different racial identity than you do. What can you learn from them? Does their point of view on a certain issue cause you to call your previous understandings into question? Despite the differences of

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your racial experiences, are there places where your ideas converge? If we are to strive for a more inclusive society where the lives of Black people matter fully,

we must be attuned to the many types of perspectives that shape discourse about Black life. Let’s do more talking and engaging with and less talking at and past one another.

— 9. Beware of Woker-than-Thou-itis!

Striving to be educated around issues of social justice is laudable and moral, but striving to be recognized by others as a woke individual is self-serving and misguided. So, to those of you who are making a competition out of racial consciousness and progressive politicking, please get over yourself! You know who you are. Go on now and be useful to the causes you believe in by taking all your woke knowledge and making it translatable to working with others. Sometimes working with others means “meeting people where they’re at” to see if you can have a meaningful conversation in which you speak your piece and attempt to understand where the other person is coming from. Who knows, you might actually learn something from them. Speaking down to someone or trying to outperform your fellow allies by being the first person to “call someone out on their privilege” or by striving to write the most searing quip on your favorite social media platform to gain “likes” is ultimately an ego- enhancing activity. Any activist or any social creature is susceptible to trying to best even those people whom they value the most. Let us all (Candis and Tehama included) orient ourselves to advocate passionately, compassionately, and in the spirit of the collective. If in our efforts to speak and act effectively we achieve some level of eloquence and are given praise, we can be grateful for those kind words and sentiments, and we should convey our praise and appreciation to others when so moved. First and foremost, however, let us ask ourselves how, when, and where we can do the most good.

— 10. Yield Silently to Those Who Are Seldom Heard

We can transform relationships of power by transforming how we relate to one another. One of the ways we can do this, according to the political theorist Vince Jungkunz, is through “silent yielding”—or an intentional restraint of speech coupled with active listening that “encourages participation from historically oppressed voices, and participation from historically inept listeners.”7 Possessors of privileged status commit a kind of identity suicide when they discipline themselves from speaking first, longest, loudest, and repeatedly in order for those of lesser social status to be heard and considered. By taking a position of “political and epistemological humility,”8 the yielder creates new opportunities to differently understand and relate to the marginalized speaker. This practice is not meant to dispossess the yielder of having a role in a conversation or decision-making process; rather, the purpose is to transform the role and relationships that that yielder has with others in their shared social

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context. By undoing the discursive colonialism of whiteness, maleness, and other hegemonic identities, silent yielders can help create more democratic and egalitarian relationships. At times, it may not be clear who has a more privileged status; in these circumstances, people should do their best to hear from all who are present. For those underrepresented people who want to speak, please speak for yourself; everyone else, please understand that they are speaking for themselves and not as ambassadors for their race, their gender, or their economic class.

— 11. Second-Class Citizenship Must Be Eradicated

Over 700,000 people in the United States are denied substantive representation in the United States Congress and are required to seek congressional approval before their local government adopts budgets and laws simply because of where they live: Washington, DC. Crazy, right? What’s even more absurd is that there are more people living in Washington, DC, than there are in Vermont or Wyoming! For centuries, Americans have largely accepted this disenfranchisement as a quirky state of exception. But let’s think about this irony. Why should anyone be denied full rights as an American citizen as a function of calling the nation’s capital one’s home? We should furthermore be outraged that power is being denied to a jurisdiction whose largest population has been and continues to be Black (about 47 percent; lest gentrification completely change these figures in favor of whites). In 2016, 86 percent of DC voters cast ballots in favor of statehood. The people have spoken, but Republicans and Democrats refuse to treat the matter as a priority. A more complicated matter that is worth being critical over is the status of Puerto Rico, the

US Virgin Islands, Guam (which sometimes finds itself under threat of bombing due, in part, to the forty-fifth president’s tweets), the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa, among other territories. The matter of these citizens’ vote is more difficult to advocate for given the lack of unanimity as to whether these jurisdictions should become states. These regions are vestiges of a colonial empire, and they remain in a state of disenfranchisement because of the complacency around their state of exception. If they want to become states, they should. If they want to be fully represented in Congress, they should.9

We must also remember that many of those who have been convicted of a felony, depending on where they live, may never get their voting rights back. There is nothing inherent in US law, history, or ethos that says it must be this way. Also remember that those who are in prison or jail at the time of the census are counted in the district of the prison or jail in which they are incarcerated and not from their hometown or place of residence before incarceration. Since most prisons are located in majority-white, rural areas, this means that communities of color are being underrepresented in Congress and that white communities are being overrepresented. If this doesn’t sound very different from the Three-Fifths Compromise, which enhanced the representation of white people in the antebellum South, it shouldn’t. The white privilege of redistricting just got a makeover.

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In this 1899 cartoon, “School Begins,” the artist editorializes the expansion of the United States’ territories as a necessary extension of civilization to an otherwise-uncivilized world. The pouty new pupils in lessons of self-government are the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. The more assimilated and mannerly students, Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California, sit nearby. A Chinese boy stands at the doorway near a Native American, who is reading a book upside down. In the far left, a Black boy washes the windows, looking on without educational materials. (Cartoon by Louis Dalrymple; published by Keppler & Schwarzmann; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-28668)

— 12. Reparations Can Mean Many Things

There are a great many anxieties about the idea of reparations. Outright dismissal and rejection of considerations of reparations to Black folks—especially American descendants of enslaved people—are often couched in worries of what reparations would cost if every Black person in the United States today were given a certain amount of money to bring about financial restitution for the intergenerational economic exploitation of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial discrimination in the post–World War II housing market. A number of scholars have argued, however, that reparations can take many forms.10 They can be symbolic or material. Reparations could mean scholarships, tax deductions, or guaranteed access to quality food and health care. They can range from the idea of child trust accounts, or “baby bonds,”11 to a policy akin to the reparations that the US government provided to Japanese American citizens who suffered in internment camps. One viable opportunity to give monetary restitution for wrongdoing by the federal government is to offer recompense (with interest) to a specific group of African Americans who descend from those who lost their savings when the Freedman’s Bank went bust. The records that were kept during this financial venture are

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some of the nation’s richest genealogical records of Black families;12 if we follow the trail, we would be sure to find thousands of people who would have benefited from intergenerational wealth had the bank been managed more legitimately. We can also think about reparations as relational. When Congresswoman Maxine Waters

insisted on “reclaiming [her] time,” we began to think about how Black people can and should reclaim what is denied them. What if we could change relationships between those who commit microaggressions and those whom they harm by practicing microreparations? Perhaps the ethos of silent yielding could be extended to other behavior. While we ultimately advocate for concrete and constructive ways for our society to invest in the communities that are most harmed by inegalitarianism, some people say the act of even seriously considering reparations at all is a valuable democratic act in itself.13

— 13. No Election Is Too Small

Many people get hyped up about presidential elections, and they should. Choosing a president is a big decision. Voting for a US senator or member of the House of Representative is also important. But we need to be just as concerned with our state assembly, our governor, our mayor, our school board, our district attorney, our alderman, our police chief, and our fricking dog catcher. These people make decisions about our lives, and they appoint other people to positions that cannot be held immediately accountable via elections. We need to vet these candidates and choose the one who best represents our interests. We need to be pumped up about the midterm elections and special referenda that appear on the ballot during the years when we don’t pick a president. There is no election too small when it comes to picking the leaders who will either advance or obstruct racial justice. Indeed, it is at the local and state levels where we most directly budget for our priorities. In most elections, there are local referenda or ballot measures that ask voters to decide

whether taxes should be spent on one public resource or another: roads, homeless shelters, public transportation, sidewalks, open spaces, and the like. Investing in public resources that we can all share is an effective way to reduce inequality in our country. Everyone in this country should be able to receive a high-quality education, live in a safe and adequate home, roam around in a clean park, meander through a library, and be seen by a medical professional when one is ill or, better yet, before one becomes ill. We can take steps to reduce structural racism by pooling our resources together for the good of the whole. Get registered, get informed, go vote, and proudly wear that “I Voted” sticker. Remember, one vote can literally make a difference.14 Local power is real power.

— 14. Someone Is Counting on You to Do Nothing at All

Right now, this very minute, there are political candidates (hell, political parties), corporate

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executives, and local officials who are calculating how much resistance they are going to get for dragging their feet when it comes to uprooting racial inequality under their helm of responsibility. Some people even put time and money into demobilizing US citizens, hoping they will be so disheartened and disillusioned or feel so inefficacious that they will just stay home and accept things for how they are.

Artwork by Lucy Holtsnider. (Courtesy of Amplifier.org)

But we can’t drag our feet. Casting a vote during all elections is just the beginning. We need to write letters to (and tweet and Snapchat and send Facebook messages to) our representatives, attend town hall meetings, speak up at the PTA, boycott businesses that go against our values, attend protests, and use our talents and skills to voice our opinion in any way we can. Those who show up are often the people who make decisions. We need to get involved and be counted.

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http://www.Amplifier.org

15. Division of Labor Is a Beautiful Thing Being a full-time activist is an exciting and demanding lifestyle, but it isn’t for everyone. In fact, it isn’t for most people. Instead of measuring your level of commitment against the likes of Ella Baker, César Chávez, Grace Lee Boggs, DeRay McKesson, or Alicia Garza, ask yourself instead, “How can I be a long-term advocate for racial justice given the time and resources that my current lifestyle allows for?” Do you have more time than money? If so, there’s probably a campaign out there that

needs a canvasser on the weekends or a weekly tutor for a child in your neighborhood. Some people can only dedicate time to an organized effort about once or twice a year; being there and giving it your full energy can still make a difference. Do you have more money than time? Great, there are literally thousands of high-quality,

justice-oriented organizations that could use your donation. Becoming a sustaining member of a nonprofit organization can help its fiscal managers plan more effectively for the long haul. If you are deathly afraid of crowds and can’t bring yourself to attend a rally, that’s fine:

you can make signs for the protest. If you are barred from the ballot box, you can jump on social media to help get the word out until we win the reinstatement of the franchise for all people with felony records. Every movement needs artists, philosophers, child and elder caretakers, documentarians, phone callers, envelope stuffers, public speakers, food preparers, trash-picker-uppers, translators, door knockers, carpoolers, fundraisers, recruiters, errand runners, cheerleaders, and kind people who check in to see if anybody needs anything.

— 16. Collective Action Is and Has Been Powerful

There are a lot of things we can do as individuals. But there is nothing like working with other people to achieve a shared goal for racial justice. Participating in a march or canvassing a neighborhood with someone you just met that morning at the organization headquarters can be a moving experience. Knowing through experience that other people care about the issues you care about and that they have their own story that brought them to this shared activity can be very enlightening and quite heartening. Logistically speaking, working with others is not always easy. People need to be

organized, strategies must be developed, resources need to be mustered, and plans must be deployed and carried through. This work is energizing but also very draining; all of these sensations are valuable. When we realize how much effort goes into changing a policy or the discourse around one particular issue, it makes us aware of how much inertia and obstruction must be overcome to achieve a victory for equality. It is in the struggle for change that we can gain new appreciation for what these issues mean to us. On a personal level, working with others to achieve social change can be emotional and

challenging. Like in any relationship in which you put some piece of yourself on the line, you may find that the people you collaborate with are fallible. At some point, they may let you

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down, flake out on you, frustrate you, undermine your trust, or even break your heart. As you build and maintain coalitions, ask yourself whether and under what conditions you are willing to forgive and work on repairing a weakened comradeship. On the flip side, collective action can also reveal that you are fallible too. If you let someone down, undermine someone’s trust, or break someone’s heart, are you willing to admit fault, and would you need to be told or shown something to know that it was possible to get back to a place where you could go forward together? Being a conscientious member of a coalition requires introspection about our own humanity—could social change happen any other way? The work you do on your own is important, but the work you do with others is crucial.

Racial inequality and anti-Black oppression are collective problems, and they will require collective efforts to eradicate.

— 17. Calibrate Your Time Scales

Information has never moved faster than it does right now. Someone posts a video or commentary on a social media platform, and in the matter of an hour, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people can watch or read it. When we use our most modern technology, we can shape consciousness over the span of minutes, even seconds. The speed of this transmission, however, does not necessarily translate into political or policy change. The disconnect between our information flow and the time it takes to build a movement,

nurture a movement, and act as a movement can discourage those who do not learn to calibrate the various times scales of their lives. We can harness the speed of the internet to achieve certain goals, but other actions will take more time. The fact that some things may take more time does not mean that we can’t be successful or that we will not make incremental change. Movements require a balance of urgency and steadiness. Change is often slow and arduous. Accept this fact and calibrate your time scales so that you do not mismeasure either success or failure. We need you for the long haul.

— 18. Be for Something

We should be angry and dissatisfied with the disparities we see and more so with the lack of comprehensive efforts to eliminate them. But we cannot simply be against something—we have to be for something. Complaints need resolution. We need to critique but also to create. We need to be willing to test new ideas and try many tactics. We can be almost certain that we won’t “get it right” every time we put our foot forward, but that doesn’t mean we give up. Working for something better is a challenging process. We create a vision, we orient ourselves toward that vision, and we struggle toward it.

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19. Have Fun! Let’s face it, staying woke can take its toll. The inequalities and injustices of the world can evoke an array of emotions, many of them unpleasant. Working for racial justice is demanding, but it doesn’t have to be depressing. It can actually be a hell of a lot of fun. Some people may even call it life-giving. What can you do to make racial justice fun? Let’s say you’re a busy person who wants to

build in time with friends but also wants to put pressure on your city council to change its anti-sagging-pants ordinance. Ignite your multitasking spirit, throw a potluck with all your compassionate friends, and between chip-fulls of guacamole and your second helping of chili, ask your guests to pen handwritten letters to your elected representatives. Going to a protest? Make a clever sign or create a papier mâché figurine. Are you a musician? How about putting on a concert to raise money and bring attention to a social justice organization that needs your support?

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Protesters at the 2006 Chicago May Day March / Day Without an Immigrant use this papier mâché figurine to claim that matters of gentrification, immigration, and segregation are connected to racism, injustice, inequality, fear, and greed. (Photo by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi)

You will need to renew your energy from time to time—have fun. The development of racism is a process, and so is building up your stamina to resist. Pace yourself and rejuvenate by celebrating the people you meet, the knowledge you acquire, and the accomplishments— big or small—that are made on this very long journey.

— 20. Do unto Others as You Would Have Them Do unto You

What would the United States be like if we all followed the Golden Rule? How different would our politics be if we all treated one another as though we would one day be in the same position as those whom we affect? What if we made this mantra our guiding political principle?

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We assert that a “golden” sensibility is oriented around a view from the bottom. If we imagined what it would be like to be the most dispossessed and vulnerable people, we would want laws and practices that treat the dispossessed and the vulnerable with care and compassion—a safe place for all to lay their head; preventative and catastrophic health care for all; the presumption of innocence before proven guilty; the recognition of rights and personhood for all. Why can’t the bare minimum be humane?

— 21. Dream Big!

If humane treatment is the foundation on which we build our government, what would our society look like if we dared to dream big? Everyone would wake up in an affordable home, and the kids would go to school to get a relevant, effective, and engaging education. It wouldn’t really matter which neighborhood you lived in because the public schools are equally funded, the teachers are well paid, and the free after-school programs are a fun place to be. If a parent is a little late picking up a kid, the child doesn’t worry that she or he will get choked, shot, or deported by law enforcement; the parent was just having one too many laughs with an interracial social network at her or his living-wage job. Tonight’s dinner is another nutritious meal with vegetables from the town farm half a mile away, and that clean glass of water from the tap washes it down nicely. After eating, people promenade around the neighborhood to let their food settle and get caught up on the latest scoop. The older woman down the street has been diagnosed with breast cancer, but thankfully, they caught it early during her yearly mammogram, covered under universal health care. The nineteen-year-old who graduated from high school last year is visiting his family for the weekend; he’s been working at a wind farm as part of a national program that will pay for a single year of college for each year of service. It’s election week, and some folks are casting their ballots tonight, but those with other commitments are voting tomorrow or in the next few days. Two women candidates are going head-to-head again this year; one wants to build more bridges across the border with Mexico, while the other would rather expedite the conversion of our federal prison properties into job-training centers for the environmentally sustainable economy—this will be a tough choice. The night sky grows darker, but since its safe outside, people stay out a little later to watch the stars come out. The sky is clear, and the air is clean. Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! No one ducks, but all look up—fireworks are going off over city hall. It’s Harriet Tubman’s birthday, and the sparkles overhead light up the faces down below. Tears well up in the eyes of the elders. They remember a time when fewer people knew her name and how she risked her life to liberate others. We carry her spirit with us a little more these days because we’re attributing greater value to what we share with others and are less concerned with what we can accumulate and keep for ourselves. As we make our way home to turn in for the night, we pull our hoodies over our heads to ward off the evening chill. We feel safe in our skin, we feel safe in our country, and freedom and justice are for all.

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