For many blacks in America, especially in the era of Trump, writing is not simply a creative or intellectual exercise; it’s a vehicle that makes space for resistance, black resistance. Using various mediums to write, including blogs and social media platforms, black people express themselves openly and thoroughly to diverse public audiences. Many blacks not blinded by the illusions of postmodernity, the illusions of the cultural logic of late capitalism, employ writing as a tool to resist being pressed small, to resist being silenced, to speak for those (e.g. Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin) who can no longer breathe because some white police officers don’t believe black lives matter. Our woke generation, owing significant credit to the black radical traditions and generations that came before it, is using written expressions to engender pioneering tools to defeat white supremacy one blow at a time, understanding, as Audre Lorde perspicaciously asserted:
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
In one of the greatest novels ever penned, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, writing in 1952, masterfully depicts blacks living in a Kafkaesque nightmare of dehumanizing invisibility. Although Ellison’s captivating portrayal is well-intentioned, blacks were not and are not suffering from invisibility, but from, as leading public intellectual and Georgetown University Sociology Professor Michael Eric Dyson posits, “hypervisibility.” This vicious, suffocating hypervisibility attempts to erase blacks, erase our voices, our humanity, our aspirations, our efforts to benefit from and participate in democracy. If blacks were truly “invisible,” then white supremacists would never have and would no longer engage in intentional efforts to obliterate our existence. “Invisible” people are not maliciously targeted; hypervisible people are.
Writing is a powerful form of resistance. We, black people, those drawing from and invested in the rich radical traditions of freedom fighters such as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, write to communicate our existence, to assert that even in the face of the deleterious legacies of slavery, Jim and Jane Crow and the New Jim Crow, even in the face of a racist occupant (President Trump) in the White House, a building devised by the exploited genius and labor of enslaved blacks, even in the face of unconscionable killings of unarmed black children and adults in public space at the sinister and unaccountable hands of white police officers, or, to be more precise, white terrorists operating with state power, we’re still here. And, to quote Sean “P. Diddy” Combs:
“We ain’t, go-in, nowhere…We can’t be stopped now.”
The more blacks seize the power of writing as an indispensable tool of resistance, the more avowed and undercover white supremacists will not be able to stop us from propagating our messages across the nation and globe. During slavery, racist whites made it illegal for blacks to read (or attempt to learn to read). One of the dominant reasons they denied blacks the right to read that receives little attention is these racist whites understood the inextricable link between reading and writing. Racist whites understood that the more blacks became proficient readers, the more they would become proficient writers able to promulgate their opposition to the systems of oppression dominating their lives, which, of course, they knew would inevitably lead to the undoing of such systems. Although these systems have not been completely eradicated, black freedom fighters, heroes and heroines refusing to be crushed by colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation, wielded the transformative power of reading and writing to emancipate blacks from numerous years of brutal bondage.
Armed with this powerful history and wisdom, history and wisdom that expose limitless democratic possibilities available to us through strategic reading and writing practices centered on love, truth and justice, we, blacks and our faithful, trustworthy comrades, are rewriting American history and writing our own chapters, in our own voices, in American history, telling the truth about America and invalidating invidious and malevolent lies told about us. From the moment white folks invaded America, a nation founded by Native Americans, moral and spiritual decadence began to be an essential part of the true essence and composition of America. This historical decadence legalized slavery and Jim Crow, and it is what normalizes the daily lies and corruption of Russia’s greatest ally: Donald Trump.
The Movement for Black Lives, however, resists this decadence. So many courageous black warriors for truth, liberty, and justice are working together to create a new America:
”An America as good as its promise,”
as Barbara Jordan, an important leader in the Civil Rights Movement and first Southern black woman elected to the United States House of Representatives, stated. As Barbara Jordan’s distinguished example proves, the fight for truth, liberty, and justice must include a serious commitment to progressive, transformative writing. Yes, we must do more than write to transform America, but without using writing as one of many invaluable tools at our disposal to dismantle the slave master’s, Jim Crow’s and the white supremacist’s house, this new America will never materialize. Fortunately, in word and deed, many blacks and our allies are working tirelessly to achieve Dr. King’s “Dream” for America. To realize King’s “Dream,” though, we must face a difficult truth he divulged:
“America may go to Hell.”
Well, it’s time to send the America of the plantation economy, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration (the New Jim Crow) to Hell. Why? Because a Kingian democracy is not possible without doing this. Working from a Kingian lens, let’s rewrite America, remaking the nation as one where liberty and justice are truly for all.
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