The average Black friend group and the average white friend group. (Ingraham, “Three Quarters of Whites”)
For other people, the message of “Black Lives Matter” resonates clearly. In this slogan, they hear, “Yep. Black Lives Don’t Really Matter” or “[Insert name of any Black person] Could Be Next,” thus leading them to suggest that something needs to be done about racism in US society. Supporters and participants of this movement, like those of previous Black social movements, believe that “we must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other—we are not drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently worthwhile to contend even with the inexorable forces in order to change our fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the world!”9 Again, different life experiences lead to alternative perspectives of how the world works, what our roles are in it, and what we can do to change it for the better.
Photo by Mariah Warner.
The phrase “Black Lives Matter,” generally speaking, is an odd thing to hear in the first place, particularly in the twenty-first century. If we could travel in time and report back to Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth, they might be surprised to learn that a major social movement that began nearly a century and a half after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment (which abolished slavery) and during the first self-identified African American president’s second term in office is premised on the notion that Black people’s lives are in a precarious position. Indeed, that is the point: “The brilliance of the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ is its ability to articulate the dehumanizing aspects of anti-Black racism in the United States.”10
Many Americans often feel a sense of cognitive dissonance when they hear this slogan chanted in the street, printed on T-shirts, and debated by pundits on the evening news. On one hand, native-born Americans and immigrants alike have been taught that if people play by the rules and work hard, everybody has an equal opportunity to succeed. The path mapped out toward the American dream is indelibly imprinted on our brains; our shared language of individualism and value of meritocracy is practically learned through osmosis. We find comfort in knowing the formula to American-styled success like we know the back of our hand. On the other hand, a movement that suggests that some lives matter less/more than others has developed well past the historical era when Black Americans were first eligible for full citizenship. Something does not compute. Right?
These two dueling ideas existing at the same time is discombobulating. Martin Luther King Jr. predicted that this weird sensation might arise, noting that the thing about a Black political movement is that it “is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”11 His insights are as true now as when he was alive.
What are these flaws? Where did they come from? How do they evolve and persist? People in US society tend to have different answers to these questions because they have different historical narratives about these aforementioned flaws. And the truth of the matter is that most white Americans are simply not proximate to some of these problems, especially that of racism, or at least not in a way that disadvantages them. What this means is that despite the fact that anti-Black racism is pervasive in US society, there are many people who are shielded from even taking race into consideration. Racism is so embedded in our language and rhetoric, our political and economic institutions, and our social interactions (or lack thereof) that without any intention to do so, scores of people end up perpetuating racism by simply going about business as usual.
A NOTE ON THE STATUS OF BEING WOKE
Just so we’re all on the same page, we should mention that having knowledge about the facts of racism and the mechanisms that (re)produce racial inequality doesn’t necessarily make someone “woke.” There are many people who know the facts and use them to insist on anti-Black narratives and pursue public policies that enhance inequity. Knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient component of being antiracist. You have to put your knowledge to use in order to eradicate the problems of racial injustice.
By moving beyond the dominant colorblind or postracial narrative of US society, we gain more leverage to answer those questions as well as a few others: How could we ameliorate these flaws? What could our society look like if these flaws did not exist altogether? The contemporary Movement for Black Lives has served to highlight many of the modern-day factors that prevent the United States from listening to its better angels, thus providing an illustrative teaching moment for those who are interested in working toward developing an antiracist society. We hope to provide readers the tools to partake in the debates around race, to navigate spaces of contestation on issues of racism, and to participate in antiracist movements in contemporary US society in a more fully informed way. We wrote this book for students of racial justice to critically engage and interrogate these factors. Stay Woke is for those who seek to engage in life in the United States from a different perspective.
We focus on Black lives, specifically, for three reasons. First, anti-Black racism is deeply embedded in the foundations of this country, including its founding documents, its institutions, and its policies, past and present. Second, from birth to death, Black people, on average, experience a very different United States than do members of other racial groups. When these experiences accumulate, layering one on top of the other, it becomes clear that there is a necessity for a social movement that reinvigorates calls for racial equality and racial justice in the twenty-first century. We do not mean to suggest that other groups do not matter, which brings us to the third reason: when we lump together the beautiful and the terrible histories and experiences of “people of color,” we do all of them a disservice. The history of genocide and contemporary marginalization of Indigenous Americans, the history of slavery and contemporary mass incarceration of Black Americans, the history of exclusion and contemporary double standards set up for Asian Americans, and the history of colonization and contemporary demonization of Latinxs are inextricable intertwined, but they are not synonymous. Our intention is not to participate in an Oppression Olympics but instead to avoid universalizing the experiences of Americans across ethno-racial groups.
Coming back to the issue at hand—the matter of perspective—we use this chapter to outline some cold, hard, uncomfortable facts about the precariousness of Black life in the United States. Our aims are to make sure that we are all on the same page about the matter of Black lives and also to illustrate the axiom that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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Some Uncomfortable Facts
The twenty-first-century Movement for Black Lives began to stir in 2013 after a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin. In reaction to