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People often say that we are too critical of America. In their mind, this country has made so much progress. “Didn’t we give you a Black President?” they ask. “You all are making too many things about race.” “You’re not the only people struggling.” “You’re a Marxist.”
So many things are said in response to us. We just are wondering: when will there be a time in this country where the country and its people really love us and fight for us? As Elie Wiesel wrote, “the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.”
So many would like to believe that they are not indifferent to our plight and reality. So many would like to really believe that they love. Yet we are constantly faced with the statement: I believe Black lives matter, but. But. Just sit with that. The audacity.
If there is ever a but on the other side of another’s humanity and struggle for dignity, it is not them that you love, it’s only the idea of them that makes them useful for your belief that your life matters more. At every moment, our people have had a deep love for this country.
This country is ours—flaws and all. It is we who have been the perfectors of democracy, as Nikole Hannah-Jones writes. That we are still here is not a testament of the moral goodness of America, this type of passionate pursuit of a more democratic world. No. It has not.
It is that Black people have been willing to stare in the face of white supremacy, anti-blackness, economic injustice, and the tragic experience of second-class citizenship, and have the will to survive in spite of. No book can contain the profound power of their endurance.
The tradition that we come from in the Black freedom struggle has a long history of challenging America while also living in America. Loving a place that has not loved you back. We have endured slavery’s bitter rod. We have endured lynch mobs. We have fought in the wars.
We have endured segregated barracks and bathrooms, schools and communities. We have endured state-sanctioned terrorism and the criminalization of our body. We have endured theological malpractice and political oppression in order to keep the myth of white Christian America alive.
We have endured being locked out of spaces that people promised us that we could walk in after we put on our boots and strapped them real tight. We endured so much—like Langston Hughes, we are those who are “bearing slavery’s scars.” Yet, we too are America, this is our country.
“I love America more than any other country in the world,” James Baldwin writes,”and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” We want this country to be what it can become. We refuse to settle for simple charity and humanitarian work.
Work that does nothing to change the given system of injustice, political disenfranchisement, and economic disinheritance. It is this refusal, this courageous act of imagining a world that has never been, that has kept us going. It is impossible to endure without dreaming.
Yes, people speak of King’s dream of 63. But since then, for us, it has been a nightmare. Yet, we refuse to stop dreaming. It is our dreams that allow us to imagine the possible, to be critical of the present, and pressing toward a more perfect union, a real democracy.
In this vision to shape a new world, a sort of resurrection, it is our artist, healers, and revolutionaries that we need. In their creativity, our artist keeps hope alive by exposing the myths and keeping us planted in reality, but dreaming of a day where life is made new.
In their willingness to mend that which is broken, our healers take us to the place where people are wounded and broken believing what is lost can be restored again. They take the broken parts of ourselves and helps us see the beautiful, the strong, the resilient, the joyful.
In their willingness to deconstruct the oppressive, our revolutionaries keep our eyes on the social suffering of God’s creation, showing us the way of solidarity to break the bonds of segregation, violence, and showing us how to build a life together that is just and free.
I believe with Baldwin, that “though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” How we dream today determines the world we see tomorrow. I just pray to God that we can dream again.
