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Movements Are Nothing Without Endurance
The Bus Boycott took a year; don’t get tired yet
In the grand scheme of things, Black people have only been free-ish in America for about 56 years. It’s been barely half a century since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which desegregated public areas and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 secured unfettered voting rights for Black Americans. Surprisingly, however, many White people (and some Black, tbh) seem to be confused when it comes to time and the fight for equity. There is this underlying desire to consistently tell Black people to “just wait” for equity as if we haven’t been patient for 500-plus years while everything we build and champion is destroyed by White rage. And worse, while we sit patiently and nonviolently, waiting to be released from the stranglehold of White supremacy, they want us to do so with gratitude and a smile.
Yet, after just three months of quarantine due to a global health pandemic, these same White folks brandished AR-15s and other reckless military apparatus because the hair behind their ears was getting too long. How does that even make sense? The audacity of caucasity honestly never fails.
When Martin Luther King Jr. said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” I often wondered if he was referencing the timeline of racial terror in America. The terror arc that began as a straight line with the slave trade in the mid-1500s, lasting through the late 1800s, ending with a brutal Civil War, but then was supplanted with Jim Crow for close to another 100 years. The sad reality is that the through-line of White American terrorism has a longer arc than its tilt toward justice. Given this relatively easy math of 500-plus years of racial terror, it’s incredible that America has only had a few pockets of warranted, rage-filled moments. Easier said it’s a wonder this country isn’t lit up like a Christmas tree with daily civil unrest.
