What We Fail To Repair, We Repeat
Written by J.J Briscoe.
Repairing the harm of white supremacy at its foundation is required to put an end to its evolution and grotesque resurfacing in America.
The matter of addressing the social disease of white supremacy at its root is an urgent one. If you do not share that sentiment, allow me to ground you in our current reality, one that can be characterized by a rapid unraveling of our democracy and racial progress, replaced by the worst of America’s historical tendencies.
What we are currently seeing is a repetition of a chapter of American history that has already been written. Post the Civil War in the late 19th century, the US had a brief multiracial democracy during Reconstruction that after a few decades was upended leading an apartheid era that consisted of nearly another century of drastic political, economic, and social inequality between white and black communities. This Jim Crow period was, of course, marked by a constant drumbeat of violence brought on by white terrorists in the form of lynching and mobs.
The Civil Rights Movement as the Abolitionist Movement before them were able to overcome enormous odds and redefine what freedom meant, what America meant, thus deeming the chains of Jim Crow incompatible and undesirable.
Today, we are watching the same disastrous phenomenon occur in real time; progress made towards racial equality deliberately being reversed and erased. Major civil rights gains have been undermined, most tragically, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act which arguably is the most potent victory by the movement before us considering it fundamentally restructured the political power allocated to Black Americans nationwide. The United States has now seen the end of affirmative action, the closure of civil rights offices in virtually every federal agency, the erasure of Black historical figures along with the subjugation they overcame.
And never mind that Black Americans are still brutalized and killed unabated by “law enforcement” agencies at a disproportionate rate. And truly never ever mind that now an ascendant, fully unaccountable and lethal force is patrolling our streets and abducting anyone they would like, legally based on the color of their skin, to be sent to an overcrowded camp to become imprisoned indefinitely and forced to engage in unpaid labor.
And now our federal government is portraying itself in a way that could have only been seen in nightmares, officially disseminating white supremacy that used to be confined to the deepest darkest corners of the internet and our society. As we speak, officials within the executive branch amplify the anthems of our modern KKK, unabashedly parrot Nazi propaganda, and emblazen themselves with iconography that echoes the most racist and hateful of tropes imaginable. The mask has come off in ways it has previously in our history and it brings into question, how do we meaningfully get out of this apparent merry-go-round? How do we finally dismantle the racial hierarchy our country was born out of, ending its overt and covert symptoms that are ever evolving.
In 2020, despite its falters, the Black Lives Matter movement produced a meaningful foothold for those fighting for racial justice. It produced a paradigm shift and made a term ubiquitous for the first time in our modern history. All of the sudden systemic racism captured the zeitgeist and it became understood no matter what side of the political aisle you are on that despite all the progress made, racism is still a pertinent issue in this nation. Social media was suddenly inundated with content explaining how racism appears in the designation of land, funding for schools, accessibility of affordable and healthy food, health outcomes, the water we drink, the air we breathe.
We came to a collective understanding, despite us being necessarily able to name it, we are living through neo-apartheid. A new segregation produced by zip code allowing schools to remain as segregated and a racial wealth gap to stagnate, never fully recovering from the disparity manufactured by chattel slavery. Yet perhaps the largest blunder of the Black Lives Matter movement was to reduce the newfound central issue of systemic racism to calls for criminal justice reform such as ending qualified immunity and defunding the police. While those calls were incredibly important, as we can see now, they quite obviously were not enough. If we are naming an issue as systemic, then why are we not fighting for a systemic solution?
What repairing the harm looks like is called reparations, based on the UN Model, it would entail five critical and comprehensive pillars to remove ongoing barriers to equality and realize a mulitracial democracy where freedom is truly for all. Get Free, a new youth-led movement organization spearheading the endeavor to make reparations a political priority for Gen Z and Millenials, has revamped the five pillars to be as follows: reckoning with the whole truth of our history and how it has shaped our present, rehabilitating our communities from generational trauma inflicted, restoring the rights to all those wronged under white supremacy, and crucially, rewriting the rules so that these wrongs founded in enslavement and genocide never happen again.
Many may read this and posit that America as an empire is doomed, that a country founded as the global nexus of racial capitalism has no capacity for any such future of meaningful and real justice. I would posit that America is merely a place, an idea and one should live with the hope of making the best of its values come true. Resignation and defeatism only concedes power to evil forces that are thrilled to enjoy it unchallenged. As freedom fighters, we have made enormous gains and changes in civil life that should not be discounted.
We can only win if we fight for an affirmative vision that gets to the root of the issue rather than negative calls that only serve as responses to melt the tips of the white supremacy iceberg. We must no longer be content with tinkering around the issue. We must be steadfast in an agenda of repair that delivers structural change and entrench it into law. If we do not, we repeat.
We at Groundswell thank JJ for their contribution to our page! Check out JJ’s socials below.
No AI was used in the creation of this writing.
