Each day feels like a new dumpster fire, but our country’s failure to provide us basic safety isn’t new. I want to talk about how we can learn from the history of American Reconstruction & turn this moment into a bottom-up deconstruction of our racial and gender caste system.

After the Civil War there was a fundamental distribution of power from Southern slaveholding oligarchs to Black Southerners. Institutions became more inclusive. Inequality declined for everyone. The abolitionist movement ruptured our racial caste system. The First Reconstruction.

In a backlash, Jim Crow reasserted a racial caste system for the new era. But organizing through the Black Freedom Movement ushered in the Civil Rights Era - the War on Poverty, Voting Rights Act, Immigration and Naturalization Act, Fair Housing Act. A Second Reconstruction.

The ensuing backlash has since come in many forms, from the war on drugs and Southern Strategy to attacking the safety net and rolling back Civil Rights and worker protections.

But the Black Lives Matter Movement is one of the largest movements in U.S. history, and it unfolded alongside the Immigrant Rights, Women's, Climate Justice, and other movements that are (1) operating across multiple constituencies and (2) in deep fusion with each other.

There are identifiable actors we can go after who wield power to write rules that sustain an inherently violent hierarchy. They're the corporations, institutions, and politicians that make it possible for the richest country in the world to simply decide to let COVID-19 kill us.

Take Walmart, whose marketing claims “Black Lives Matter”, and yet they force Black, brown, and immigrant workers to work in the middle of the pandemic in unsafe conditions, for poverty wages.

The GOP is trying to defund the post office and delegitimize vote-by-mail to keep us from voting safely. Trump encourages militarization and violence against protesters. Where we have power, they’re scrambling to take it away.

But the ascendance of multiple intertwined movements is cause for great hope for this moment to lead to transformative change and a Third Reconstruction. https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/from-uprising-to-reconstruction/