Campaigning in 2016, Bernie Sanders said frequently of his millennia supporters: “There has never been a generation less racist, less misogynist, less homophobic, less xenophobic than this one.”
Pew Center research supported his claim. And on May 25, when the murder of George Floyd was televised across the nation, they and their Generation Z comrades surged forward. A relentless demand for racial justice rang out from legions of multiracial, multicultural protestors — in major cities and rural small towns — even in the face of violent police retaliation.
As skeptical an observer as Ta-Nehisi Coates admitted, “I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I see hope and I see progress right now at this moment” (“Ezra Klein Show” podcast, June 5). He joins many other people of color inspirited by the spectacle of the multiethnic alliances that have sprung up, a seemingly organic phenomenon, a dammed up river overflowing the banks.
The river crossed oceans as protestors throughout the world joined the Black Lives Matter movement. Seeing anti-racism demonstrations in Japan — the hugely monocultural society of my ancestral lineage, it was a slap upside the head: this change is big. I was moved to tears.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
A friend reported that decades ago, in a commencement speech, the comedian Stephen Wright said, “And about the world, I’m sorry. We broke it.” I wonder how much of the brokenness of the world my boomer generation passes on to this one rising up has animated the explosion of discontent and refutation we witness today.
The veil has been pulled away as a new generation points an angry finger at our original sin of racism — Native American genocide and the enslavement of African people. We are a country built on “Red soil and Black blood.” Racism birthed our nation and defined our model of economic growth. And these instincts recur in the predatory capitalism and wealth inequality we suffer today, as we careen toward climate disaster.
It is these same plutocratic power mongers who have so adroitly weaponized racism. Michael Dyson reiterates James Baldwin’s view that America is “split in two — not between North and South but between the powerful and the disenfranchised.
“Racism … remains the nation’s greater peril. But the powerful maintained the status quo by sowing discord among the disenfranchised. Poor white folk, rather than uniting with their socioeconomically oppressed brothers and sisters … channeled their anxieties into a vengeance against blackness” (“What Truth Sounds Like,” 2018, page 7).
Is it too much to hope that this artful and calamitous sleight of hand can now be unmasked, the big con exposed?
When Trump staged his diminutive Tulsa rally, the sight of armed white supremacists raised the pervasive fear. Can our president incite the vengeance against blackness and bend the river that rolls toward justice into some retrograde whirlpool, a painful and destructive stasis? Will Trump’s authoritarian forays consolidate into an explicit election fraud? Dangers threaten.
After the Parkland shootings, at a local demonstration, a high school organizer admonished his elders. “It’s not enough to slap us on the back, ‘Good Job’ and drop the baton in our laps.”
At 71, I choose not, even masked, to demonstrate, but I haven’t gone into retirement. Since Trump’s election, I have facilitated six dialogues bringing Democrats of differing perspectives together at the Sojourner Truth School, attended sessions run by the Better Angels organization to foster mutual understanding between “Reds” and “Blues,” and last year published a chapter on “Teaching about Racism and the Implications for Practice” for mental health workers.
I acknowledge also that we Boomers have a proud history of protest. We pressed for a paradigm shift that this generation may swell into a paradigm explosion. But the challenge raised by Heather Cox Richardson has yet to be met.
The same people who are out in the streets need to be running for office, need to be registering people to vote, need to be changing the public narrative that says if you want to be a good American, you aren’t going to do it by making a gazillion dollars and screwing over all your workers, but rather by creating healthy, safe, just communities that offer everybody equality of opportunity. And that’s a systemic change. (“Stay Tuned” podcast with Preet Bharara, June 11).
But I lift up my eyes and see a new generation with a changed “public narrative” pressing ahead. WEB Dubois spoke of his tenuous “hope not hopeless but unhopeful.” I remain mindful of the hopelessness of a society manipulated into ever deeper divisiveness, and yet am filled with a not unhopeful hope.
Norma Akamatsu lives in Northampton.