“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”
On March 1st, 2020, the late Representative John Lewis spoke these very words on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The same site where years prior, then activist Lewis, led Black Americans on a peaceful protest that fundamentally wanted one thing to come from the necessary trouble they were causing: equality. The day would be known as Bloody Sunday.
In the election cycle that just transpired, and honestly for the past four years, myself, and millions of Americans heard conservatives and the President of the United States warn against loss. Loss of what I am unsure, and as a Black American I can only fathom what delusions of grandeur have done to White Americans who choose to perpetuate their self-prescribed bliss, however; this fear of loss has created, kindled, and now I fear will sustain a fire that I am also unsure of how Americans will subdue.
As I watch White people storm the capitol building, tear down the outside barriers, and break their way inside the chambers — all while police standby — I am in awe. I am not in awe because what I am seeing is at all shocking to me, but rather because I am finally seeing what Black people have known of Whiteness all along come to fruition. That Whiteness veils those who wield it with impunity, and allow the abandonment of the…
