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 A hot summer of race news—Moral Mondays to preserve voting rights in North Carolina, the efforts of the Dream 9 to expose the vagaries of our immigration policy, and those of the Dream Defenders to undo Florida’s Stand Your Ground law—have led many to speculate on whether we are at the start of a new civil rights movement.
We are definitely at the brink of something. I hope that it is a racial justice movement, one that builds on the legacy of civil rights while bringing crucial new elements to our political and social lives. We have a chance to explore fundamental questions like the nature of racism, what to do with the variety of racial hierarchies across the country, and how to craft a vision big enough to hold together communities who are constantly pitted against one another.
Using the racial justice frame allows us to fight off the seductive, corrupt appeal of colorblindness, which currently makes it difficult to talk about even racial diversity, much less the real prize of racial equity. Such language also allows us to move beyond the current limitations in civil rights law to imagine a host of new policies and practices in public and private spaces, while we also upgrade existing civil rights laws at all levels of government. Finally, the modern movement has to be fully multiracial, as multiracial as the country itself. More
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We now can easily express our political views with a few clicks of our keyboards and touchscreens, by signing on, sharing, donating, reposting and retreating. But thinking that we can click our way to the Promised Land is “pie in the sky.” Indeed, our online activity needs to complement our “boots on the ground.”
Direct action involves direct stakeholders directly engaging powerholders and articulating clear demands for change.
Action on the ground led to two recent victories in New Orleans. BreakOut! pressured the New Orleans Police Department to approve a new policy to prevent the profiling and unfair treatment of members of the LGBTQ community. BreakOut! and allies showed up at public meetings, wrote letters, delivered signatures and protested outside police headquarters. Meanwhile, the New Orleans Center for Racial Justice just got the Orleans Parish Sheriff to enact a new policy that blocks immigration enforcement at the New Orleans Parish Prison, where immigrants were being held for months without charges.
Despite major setbacks earlier this summer, with the Voting Rights Act and the Zimmerman verdict, there’s been a flurry of grassroots organizing and action across the country that have resulted in visibility and success—the Dream Defenders occupying the Florida governor’s office, the many New York organizations that have shown up in the streets and at city council meetings to finally begin dismantling Stop and Frisk laws, the Moral Monday marchers turning out at the North Carolina statehouse, to name a few.
This week’s 50th anniversary of the March on Washington reminds us of the impact—and lasting impression—of bringing large numbers of people out in the streets to the seats of power to demand a different vision for freedom and justice.
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