These words were written as the introduction to a racial justice workshop that I co-facilitated with my Allies for Change colleagues, Dionardo Pizaña and Dessa Cosma, on January 12, 2021.
We are gathered on the twelfth day of a new year.
We are gathered in the eleventh month of a world-wide pandemic that has rocked our nation and changed our lives. None of us has been exempt from the impact of this pandemic, but the impact has been particularly virulent for people with disabilities and for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. This COVID-19 crisis has laid bare the gaping inequities that people of color and people with disabilities have faced for far too long.
We are gathered three days before the national holiday that honors the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We are gathered seven days after an historic milestone when voters in the state of Georgia elected their first Black Senator and first Jewish Senator, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
We are gathered six days after hundreds of self-proclaimed white supremacists and white nationalists carried out a terrorist attack on our nation’s Capital, smashing windows, ransacking offices, threatening to kill senators and representatives, and seeking to overturn the lawful certification of the new and duly elected president.
Three days ago, Annaliese Bruner, an African American writer and editor based in Washington DC, published an article entitled, “My Grandmother Survived the Tulsa Massacre. 100 Years Later, I Watched a Mostly White Mob Attack My City.” In May 1921, violent mobs of white terrorists destroyed the Greenwood section of Tulsa, transforming a prosperous African American community into a smoldering pile of rubble and killing as many as three hundred Black residents.
There are lessons I have re-learned during this second week of 2021.
If I, a White person, claim to be deeply concerned about systemic racism, I must grapple with the fact that since the birth of this nation, and long before its formal birth in the 1776, there has been not one era or generation when Black Americans could trust that they would be accorded the same safety, freedom of mobility, and access to housing, healthcare, employment and unencumbered voting that white enjoy. Not one generation or era when their communities were not subjected to the threat of, or enactment of, white violence and discrimination that most often goes unpunished.
I must grapple with that fact, not by turning inward and being swallowed up in guilt, self-loathing, or despair, but by redoubling and deepening my commitment to use my voice, my time, my vocational agency, and my monetary resources to confront and dismantle racism at the personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels.
I need to listen to and learn from Black, Brown, and Indigenous leaders in this struggle who know, from experience, that freedom and racial equity are a constant struggle and a very long road. They know that we need to have a long view in this work as well as short-term goals. And because it is such a long road, we need to develop and nurture truth-telling relationships and communities of support and accountability where we help each other become “long-distance runners for justice.”*
That is why we are gathered here on this twelfth day of 2021. To dive deep and come up stronger for the life-long work of racial justice.
* I am indebted to Ruby Sales for introducing me to the term “long-distance runners for justice.” Ruby Sales is an African American social justice activist, scholar, public theologian, and the founder & director of the Spirit House Project.