January
is
about respecting and protecting the legacy
of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is in this
spirit that I invoke - not a dreamin’ King -
but an impatient leader of the civil rights
movement in 1963: “This is no time…to take
the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”
Unless one has been sleeping, this country
is in the throes of an internal ideological
and cultural war for domination. The
oppressed are supposed to suffer silently
and grin in the face of gradualism.
By the time Dr. King made his
famous “I Have a Dream” speech before the
Washington, D.C. gathering, he had already
summed up white America’s gradualism
strategy towards full citizenship of African
Americans. He called them out with the
powerful metaphor of the bounced check. That
sucka’ is still bouncing in 2023. Seventy
years after the height of Dr. King’s
non-violent movement for civil and human
rights, Black folks are still fighting for
those rights.
Let’s go back to a now historic
January event. January 6, 2021. That’s when
a sizeable swath of the white population was
primed to take their country back. Their
quasi-military planned to stop the peaceful
transition of power. Their failed coup
showed its hand, or maybe another part of
the anatomy. The goal was to keep president
trump in office despite his ineptness for
governance and his demonstrated contempt for
people of color, women, gays, immigrants,
Muslims and the differently abled. He
allegedly received more votes in 2020 than
any sitting president - 73 million votes. We
can’t ignore these compelling numbers
because the folks who cast them aren’t going
away. They showed up for the senatorial race
in Georgia where Raphael Warnock barely held
on to his seat. His opponent had as many
character flaws as trump.
The visual of armed whites scaling
walls, running through the halls of Congress
with nooses, and smashing anything in their
way should’ve been a real wake-up call for
the country. It must be a gut-punch for the
social justice movements. Our movements need
to go cold turkey on our gradualism
addiction and be prepared to take some
unflinching liberatory leaps this year.
We must engage our people in mass
education campaigns with strategic messaging
about self-determination and solidarity. Our
outreach must be creative and penetrating.
Think about alternative methods of
communication we’ll need when corporate
thugs like Elon Musk restrict access to
their tools.
We have become accustomed to
mobilizations as our main barometer for
progress. Getting thousands in the streets
is insufficient if we can’t wrestle power
from those who have the power to determine
our future. We must re-define organizing so
that there’s measurable impact on the
quality of life of the majority of us
struggling under racial capitalism. This
means having a political analysis rooted in
the material conditions in this country and
a realistic assessment of the progressive
forces who are committed to fighting for the
democracy Dr. King died fighting for.
The political differences between
organizations or across sectors are real but
they are not insurmountable. They pale in
comparison to the fascist repression waiting
for us on the horizon if we fail to get it
together. We must get to a higher unity
through principled struggle.
The battle looming ahead is the
preservation of the democracy and whose
hands it will be in. The vision that Dr.
King articulated for this country is not
just one of hope but for the political,
economic and social transformation that will
create a new reality.
Dr. Martin Luther King would tell
us today what he told us sixty years ago on
the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:
“We…remind America of the fierce urgency of
now. Now is the time to make real the
promises of democracy.” Let’s intensify our
organizing in 2023!
