From the inception of the barbaric and dehumanizing institution of slavery to the extant inspiring historical moment of Black Lives Matter, an organic citizens’ movement for truth, justice, and equality, black resistance has been instrumental to demanding America to achieve her ideals of liberty, justice, and equality for all.
During slavery, enslaved blacks employed multifarious methods of resisting this racially, mentally, physically, and economically exploitative system, including defying productivity expectations, murdering slave owners, and learning to read. Arguably the most powerful method of black resistance used during slavery was running. When an enslaved black person chose to run, he or she engaged in a courageous act pregnant with revolutionary energy and potential.
Dependent on racialized and exploited black bodies for its existence and survival, slavery was greatly threatened by enslaved blacks electing to run. They ran from slave owners, from the plantation economy, from sexual and physical violence and exploitation, from racism and white supremacy, from a nation stolen by white colonizers, and they ran to hope, hope of what is possible outside of impossible conditions and subjugation.
To try to make their running reducible to fear and survival, therefore, is a tragic misreading of the full significance of enslaved blacks’ running, and such misreading results in failing to conceive their running as a vehicle for reclaiming their own bodies, their own black bodies, their own black humanity.
◊♦◊
Our black ancestors have supplied us with examples of what authentic resistance looks like in practice. Because of their heroic and indelible example and legacy of resistance, Shirley Chisholm chose to run, run for United States president, evincing for Reverend Jesse Jackson and President Barack Obama what was possible before they ran for the same position.
Why did Jackson and Obama run? To instigate the change America needs to see; to bring hope and opportunity to all, even those who once had only three-fifths of their humanity recognized; to strike mighty blows at the vicious enduring legacies of white supremacy and Jim and Jane Crow.
This rich black tradition of resistance, one forever etched in history, our psyches, and lives with the precious sacrifice of black (and much white) blood, calls us to continue to run. While the Black Lives Matter Movement is inspiring and remains a robust and efficacious agent for producing essential change in America, we must never become stagnant, for, at no time in their history, have black people been impotent and immobile.
Joel Rubin, underscoring how movement is inextricably linked to the essence of black life, writes, “Blackness as an identity has never been fixed to place but rather finds itself articulated through space and, more importantly, time. Movement has defined black identity and served as an origin in and of itself.” We do not have the luxury of resting, of becoming docile, complaisant; we must stay in inexorable motion toward justice for all.
◊♦◊
When innocent black lives are terminated in public space by racist and unscrupulous white police officers, without any accountability for these vile murders, black resistance must grow more intense and shrewd. When it can be successfully argued by a grand jury that it was “reasonable” for a white police officer, Timothy Loehmann, to kill 12-year-old Tamir Rice, playing with a toy gun alone outside a Cleveland, Ohio recreation center, black resistance must grow more intense and shrewd.
A more intense and shrewd black resistance necessitates heeding the still resounding cry of the brilliant intellectual and champion for justice William Edward Burghardt Du Bois for blacks to relentlessly pursue and demand political power. If we truly desire justice to be served for racist white police officers who murder our innocent, unarmed black boys, girls, men, and women—most often in public space—then gain and effectively wield political power.
For burgeoning black political power to materialize, more and more black folk must band together to force the American political and (in)justice systems to value black lives. The Black Lives Matter Movement possesses truly utopian energies and revolutionary potential to transform these systems, but the Movement must become more inclusive, more coordinated, more comprehensive in its approaches—never becoming satisfied with token “wins.” We shouldn’t rest until we fundamentally transform America, a transformation that will move America closer to one as good as she was promised.
◊♦◊
Why do we run? To resist, to advance change, to promote solidarity, to transform America into a nation where black lives have just as much value as white lives.
Even if our running for justice and radical transformation doesn’t achieve any of our yearnings, history will record that we didn’t “go gentle into that good night,” to borrow from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. History, instead, will judge us kindly as those noble warriors Jamaican poet Claude McKay extols as “Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”
—
—
Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash
