White supremacists in the current administration are working overtime to restore America to the Jim Crow era. Threatening African Americans with a good time by removing a requirement prohibiting segregated facilities in new federal contracts—though it is still illegal under U.S. law—didn’t move the community overall. We’ve literally “been there and done that.”
Also, there is an increasing disinterest in the white supremacist storyline. Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar said, “Turn the TV off” during his Super Bowl LIX half-time performance at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 9. So, with that static goes the propaganda of marginalization and minoritization, the need to defend one’s humanity and the way one shows up in the world.
“Get over it” has been the typical response concerning discussions about American chattel slavery, white supremacist terrorism, and reparations. But it is obvious the current administration wants African Americans to “never forget.” Gaslighting while pantomiming victimhood, the consensus is indifference to this attention-seeking behavior.
Without a meeting, the African American community woke up and collectively chose to go back to sleep. A switch flipped, a light switch. Choosing rest as resistance over flooding America’s streets in protest, African Americans have overwhelmingly decided after the November election results to drink our water and mind our business. It is a collective “no” and a conscious decision to be unavailable for comment, conversation, and explanation. This is not our lesson to learn.
African American bodies arrested and beaten will no longer serve as illustrations. Instead, European Americans will have to do their own work and figure out where they want to go from here. Because by the looks of things, most Americans chose chaos over community.
The response has been noted, and there will be no pushback. Choosing the mediocre and morally compromised, it was never about who was the best and brightest.
No, this is about power. White power.
This is not about progress or American democracy. This is about racialized oppression and the citizens who still believe in it, who will vote against their own interest for the salvation offered through whiteness.
This time marks a communal awakening to this realization and the decision not to give this country any more time. Clearly, believing this country was any more than what it has shown itself to be for African Americans was a waste of time. Of course, James Baldwin named it during the 1989 documentary “James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket.”
“What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago. I’m not going to live another 60 years,” Baldwin said. “You always told me it takes time. It has taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces,’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want for your ‘progress’?”
African Americans have decided not to give this so-called “experiment” of American democracy another minute for the foreseeable future. It is as Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
And I couldn’t agree with her more. I, too, feel a deep sense of disinterest in American politics and its outputs. While this has long been the case for me, I feel an intense detachment, a kind of increased release from its outcomes. Since it is proven that the country only wants to revert to my people’s oppression, there is nothing more to do or say.
So, was there ever any genuine interest in realizing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of beloved community? Was the country really moved by the gruesome deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020? With the exit poll results, we have our answers now.
I couldn’t have imagined this quiet revolution, this stillness, this inward orientation towards self-preservation. But I’m so glad to be alive when African Americans decided, after more than 400 years in this country, to do what our ancestors couldn’t: rest.
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Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
