Fighting for a Fantastic Future: Restoring the Romance of Black History Month
Some words on beauty in the midst of contention.
“History is full of examples of this kind of (compensatory) religion where the church puts on revivals, calls “sinners” to repentance and seeks to save their souls while the great social evils — poverty, unemployment, slavery, disease, crime, war, racial discrimination, political and economic injustice—go untouched and unchallenged”. — Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays
“As a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible”. — Toni Cade Bambara
After a January that felt like a year in 30 days, February is here. And not a moment too soon. This is a February with its own center of gravity. The reason for this claim is not hard to identify. In the United States, President Trump is administering a full-scale attack on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access, through executive orders, Senate appointments, reclassifying federal employees through Schedule F orders. And that’s not to mention a likely unparalled assertion of executive prerogative in modern Presidencies, the 14th amendment and Congress’ power of the purse be damned.
In such moments, the quality and emphasis of our religious traditions is of public significance. It is paramount that religious and ethical traditions across the board, in tandem with political traditions, confront what I call the attack on acronyms. The attack on DEI, as brazen as it is, is not a singular attack. It is using DEI as the marketing message for a simultaneous attack on ESG or environmental, social, and governance policies at the corporate and community level.
The DEI attack mobilizes racial fear based on demographic anxiety and the twinned assumption of white deservingness, over and against a purportedly undeserving, entitled population called “people of color”. The DEI messaging also establishes a bassline for propaganda on ESG, denying climate science and extreme weather effects — at a time when fires raged in LA, when rising sea levels are projected for frontline communities across the world — as nothing more than an expression of equity or “green new deal ideology” as last week’s White House Office of Management and Budget once issued, then rescinded memo put it.
It would be simple to say that holistic Christianity requires a concurrent focus on revivals and repentance, alongside combating the great social evils that Dr. Mays notes. But twenty years of preaching, including ten years of pastoring, has taught me otherwise. For instance, in the lived experiences of a faith-rooted nonprofit, a congregation, or denominational initiative, an emphasis on individual piety often causes community service and perhaps community development to come to the fore, but doesn’t always get around to confronting social evils. All this done in the name of God. The other alternative is prioritizing the work of confronting social evils, overturning the combined effects of colonialism, capitalism, and what Dr. emilie townes calls the cultural production of evil. Under the latter scheme, individual dimensions of repentance, renewing the mind, and personal inspiration retain their importance, but within a wider, larger framework of love, justice, and turning the world as we know it upside down for the common good of humanity. All this, in the second scheme as in the first, in the name of God. Mays rightly calls, in essence, for a fighting, humanitarian Christianity in the face of brazen injustice, disingenuous messaging, and white supremacy repackaged as meritocracy, color blindness, and the like. His point emerges from Christianity but the lessons travel: the best of Hindu activism opposes the corruption of that faith and its distortion in India, the best of black secularists like Anthony Pinn call for complex subjectivity and civic commitment in their own ways, so on and so forth. Cultivating the will to struggle, over time, across election and business cycle fluctuations, is a hallmark of what political and ethical commitment requires of all of us.
But this is not enough. The struggle for justice must also be sweet, beautiful, and romantic, in the politically inspiring sense of that term. The righteous, perceived rightness of a cause is insufficient motivation to stick out the inevitable frustrations, betrayals, misunderstandings, pettiness, and institutional pushback that attend any work for justice, fairness, and the like, in any sector, any era, any country. Perhaps this is part of what Toni Cade Bambara meant when she remarked that it is the duty of the artist to make the revolution irresistible. What I mean is that the work of the next decade requires a usable, beautiful vision of the future. Consider this thought in the form of the following inquiries.
How pleasant would it be to have a gorgeous park in every neighborhood of our cities, towns, suburbs?
Wouldn’t it be divine to have more time for leisure, for our family care, for art, rather than a sense of contracting out our bodies, partly for principle and enjoyment, to be sure, but ultimately for survival?
Shouldn’t the production of concerts, murals, music and cinema be seen as a social must-have, the doorways into community joy, rather than the first area to cut in philanthropic and public budgeting priorities?
And isn’t it the case — last rhetorical question, I promise — that public policy is establishing social preconditions for the beautiful experiences, the meaningful forging of human lives, families, and societies?
Beauty isn’t an afterthought to handle while securing a just world at the top agenda item. It’s the reverse actually: we want a just world, it seems to me, so that human creativity can be unleashed without the albatross of economic necessity.
This could also be formulated this way: the division of labor and wealth in capitalist societies, with drudgery at the bottom shoring up penthouse luxury at the top, is not simply unjust, but an unseemly, ugly, unsavory way to organize a society. It should leave a bad taste in our mouths and to experience such an arrangement and worse, to be told that this is the best world we can envision or execute. Against this sort of political emotion and agitation-based aesthetic, we can and I pray, will desire to create a more luminous world, one where the terms and standards of beauty are widely held and determined by each community.
I’m in this justice thing, as I hope we all are, to make a country that has room for the marvelous and the magnificent in every state, every city. And not just a country and its component parts, but the world in the best spirit of internationalism. I want a world where artesian water is available to every black child, elder, young adult, and middle-aged person. This is the dream, the demand, the desire we must experience in our lifetimes. Not just liberation, but lush liberation for our people as resplendent as a botanical garden, a self-curating ecosystem.
This black history month, let’s keep the fight and pushback in this unique month, while also holding on to the sublime and the beautiful dimensions of our ideals, which motivate the work and frame the horizons towards towards we aspire.