JANICE OFF THE MIC

The Matter of the Matter

How the Hell Did We Get Back Here?

When I first took the microphone in 1985, I understood that talking about racism was not enough.

We had to understand how racism worked.

We worked to give our listeners the concepts and the language to identify systemic and institutionalized racism, not simply as individual acts of prejudice, but as forces embedded in the structures that governed our lives. We wanted people to be able to carry those conversations from the broadcast into their homes, their churches, their organizations and their communities.

We translated the national dialogue of Black struggle and located it within our history.

We talked about the journey from slavery through Jim Crow, through the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and through the continuing struggle for political power, economic security, educational opportunity and the preservation of the extraordinary cultural richness Black people created along the way.

And we warned.

We warned about political missteps. We talked about the difference between representation and power. We talked about the necessity of strategy. Not simply reacting to the latest assault, but understanding where we were going and what would be required to get there.

The focus remained where I believed it belonged: our people, our communities, our economic well-being, our education, our political power and our capacity to determine our own future.

By the time Barack Obama was elected President, many of the themes we had been discussing for years moved directly into the center of the national conversation.

The election of a Black President was an extraordinary historical achievement. But it did not repeal history.

It did not dismantle the structures we had spent decades learning to recognize. It did not make accumulated Black political power permanent. And it certainly did not mean that those threatened by that power had surrendered.

We Knew Who Trump Was

Black people did not need Donald Trump explained to us.

We had seen the vocabulary before. We recognized the appeals. We understood the usefulness of racial grievance to people seeking political power. We knew what it meant when Black advancement was recast as somebody else’s loss.

And we understood something else.

The danger was larger than one man.

Trump represented a threat to the central unfinished work of the Black struggle: the continuing pursuit of freedom, liberation and genuine justice within a democratic society capable of delivering them.

Yet, somewhere along the way, something happened.

We moved from the long, difficult work of building power to an almost permanent posture of responding to threats against it.

We react to the latest executive action.

The latest attack on voting rights.

The latest assault on Black history.  The latest effort to remove our books, our language, our institutions and our experiences from public life. The latest declaration that inequalities produced over generations somehow no longer require remedy.

One assault arrives before we have organized around the last one. And that is where my concern becomes something deeper.

Eminent and Imminent Erasure

I am concerned that we have arrived again at a place of both eminent and imminent erasure. I choose those words deliberately.

The erasure is imminent because we can see it taking shape around us. But I call it eminent because those fueling it appear to have a vision of what comes after the erasing.

The objective is not simply to remove Black history from a classroom, dismantle a program, prohibit certain language or weaken a voting district. Those are instruments.

Erasure has an intended destination.

It is a place racists in America have imagined for Black and brown people for generations. A society in which we may live, work, consume, entertain, and even occasionally achieve, but in which we accept a secondary and submissive citizenship, with diminished political power and diminished agency over the conditions of our own lives.

We should understand the distinction.

A people do not have to disappear to be erased. We can be made extraordinarily visible as athletes and entertainers while becoming increasingly invisible as historical actors. Our culture can be consumed while our history is prohibited. Our labor can be necessary while our claims upon the nation are dismissed. Our votes can be courted while the political power those votes produce is systematically weakened. Our presence can be tolerated while our agency is constrained.

That is erasure.

And there is nothing accidental about it.

What the Erasure Tolls

The danger before us is not merely that somebody wants America to forget what happened to Black people.

The greater danger is that forgetting becomes a political instrument for determining what Black people are permitted to demand now.

If there was no history of dispossession, there is no claim for repair.

If there was no institutional racism, no institution would be obligated to remedy it.

If inequality has no historical cause, then inequality becomes our individual failure.

If Black political power can be portrayed as illegitimate rather than hard-won citizenship, then taking that power away can be presented as restoration rather than disenfranchisement.

That is what erasure tolls.

It exacts a price.

The price is memory. The price is history. The price is political power. The price is our standing to demand remedy for what was done and what continues to be done.

And ultimately, the price is agency.

That is why I refuse to treat what we are witnessing as a collection of unrelated political controversies.

It is about power.

It is about citizenship.

It is about agency.

And ultimately, it is about who will be permitted to define America and who will be expected simply to live in the America somebody else defines for us.

The Matter of the Matter

For more than forty years, I have watched us study the system, challenge the system, organize against the system, build institutions, elect representatives, create intellectual frameworks, develop movements and accumulate political power.

We knew this terrain.  We studied it.  We developed language for it.  We built political power against it.

So how did we end up responding to each threat instead of recognizing the architecture being constructed around us?

How the hell did we leave that long, linear struggle only to arrive at a place where we seem to be running like mice through a maze of terror and threat?

Who built the maze?  Who keeps moving the walls?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all:

Why are we still running the maze instead of developing a strategy for getting out of it?

That is the matter of the matter.

The answer cannot simply be another election. It cannot simply be outrage. It cannot be waiting for someone to rescue us from the latest emergency.

We have history. We have institutions. We have extraordinary intellectual resources. We have political experience purchased at tremendous cost. And we have generations of Black strategic thought from which to draw.

What we need again is the discipline to understand where we are, how we got here, what power we actually possess, what power we need to build, and what we intend to do with it.

Perhaps coming back to OUR COMMON GROUND means returning to precisely that work.

Not because the conversations of the past have all the answers.

But because they remind us that we once understood the necessity of asking the right questions.

And we need to start asking them again.

BEAR WITNESS

Janice Graham
Executive Producer and Host
OUR COMMON GROUND with Janice Graham

“Transforming Truth to Power, One Broadcast At a Time”