Amid Reactionary Backlash, We Must Reinvigorate Our Movement for Racial Justice

The early days of the COVID-19 shutdown necessitated a particular stillness. In the quiet and uncertainty of the pandemic’s first months, there was more time to pay attention to what was happening in the world around us, beyond the narrowing bubbles of our own personal lives. As the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery garnered media attention, people in cities across the country left their homes. Tens of thousands took to the streets to speak out against enduring racial injustices that had defined the United States since its inception. Copies of books about anti-racism and racial injustice flew off the shelves. Nearly 400 years after the first “20 and odd” Africans arrived in the colonies, it seemed like the world was on fire as uprisings gripped cities across the nation.

The fervor of protest reached beyond the U.S., with people across the globe rallying around the movement for Black lives. The energy was palpable, as more and more people stood in solidarity, calling attention to race-based injustices from the state-sanctioned murder of Black people to the persistent economic inequities facing Black communities. In the wake of these mass protests, corporations, universities, and other financial and cultural institutions were pushed into action, investing more time and resources toward diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures. It was a great reckoning around race that had been centuries in the making, or so was said.

To reckon is to tally. Throughout the latter half of 2020, the masses seemed to be calculating the immeasurable toll of four centuries of systemic and structural racism in the U.S., but what happens after we take count? What becomes of the discoveries of reckoning?

In the four years since, the backlash against DEI initiatives has grown, with many companies rolling back or completely gutting programs and many universities cutting funding to associated departments and campus organizations. After four years of a staunchly pro-police Biden administration, which passed some of the largest police budgets on record after riding the momentum of the defund the police movement into office, police-perpetrated violence has continued at near-unchanging rates with more recent killings of Black people like Sonya Massey and Ma’Khia Bryant receiving far less media attention.

Summer 2023, the Supreme Court ruled to end affirmative action measures and the ripple effects of this decision are still unfolding. Smear campaigns launched against the term “woke” by Elon Musk and others have completely divorced the word from its original meaning and reduced it to an ambiguous catchall insult against anything moderately progressive. Critical race theory has been castigated as ruining public schools despite it being a college-level, highly specific legal theory that the vast majority of K-12 students will never encounter. With neo-Nazis once again openly parading through public spaces, a radical right movement anchored by white nationalist identity politics has boldly reasserted itself. Four years of white supremacist dog whistles and a social media landscape saturated with race-baiting troll accounts and hate language have created the perfect conditions for a stark reemergence of “Conservative grievance politics,” a political current has been seeding itself since well before 2017’s Charlottesville, Virginia, attack.

As diversity initiatives are defunded, identity-based scholarships are struck down, and words like “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” have become slurs, there has also been a concerted effort to minimize or erase the brutal history of race relations in this country, with some states even going so far as implementing curricula that teach the “benefits” of slavery and opening hotlines where parents can call into to complain about race or gender-based topics and ban books by Black authors. Any meaningful racial justice legislation like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is incredibly unlikely to pass in Congress with the reinvigorated MAGA-allied conservative majorities in both the House and Senate.

There is always a reaction to progress, but the pace of this most recent backswing pushing against some of the most substantive outcomes of 2020’s racial reckoning and of the last half-century of civil rights organizing, has been distinctly swift and aggressive. After our nation’s most recent reckoning with race, how did we end up in a place where we are less honest about racial injustice and inequity, more falsely colorblind, and less outraged about the ways anti-Blackness permeates this society and culture?

In his last book, Where Do We Go From Here, published one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. took stock of a political landscape following earlier victories of the civil rights movement. Following the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling and 1964 Voting Rights Act, King acknowledged how far from over the movement toward justice and equity was, expanding his lens to focus more on economic issues that centered racial justice but also moved beyond a single-issue focus. We can look to King’s work in 1968 and the movement for justice picked up by Fred Hampton and the Rainbow Coalition one year later as powerful examples of how we might move forward in this moment. Both models expanded their frameworks to include class-consciousness as an integral piece of the movement for racial justice and broader political equity. At the crux of Blackness, its construction and marginalization as a racial category, is the exploitative nature of capitalism, which necessitated an underclass that was most conveniently tied to an unchanging, hereditary construction of Blackness as a racial category.

The backlash against DEI initiatives has grown, with many companies rolling back or completely gutting programs and many universities cutting funding to associated departments and campus organizations.

President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming second term is already characterized by his cozying up with billionaires like Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, an economic plan that would regressively raise taxes for workers while cutting funding to programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that help working families make ends meet, and an attack on the funding programs administered by the Department of Education. Under this agenda, preexisting economic disparities, which overwhelmingly affect Black communities, will become even more acute. Turning our attention to the ways this economic system creates the conditions of oppression and exploitation for Black communities and proactive coalition building with an anti-racist and class-conscious framework — in the style of the Rainbow Coalition — can rejuvenate our movements.

The way to embolden, reimagine and reawaken a progressive movement for racial justice is to reaffirm the movement’s connection to larger issues of class equity and anti-imperialism. A just world for Black people is necessarily economically just and anti-imperialist. There is no such thing as a single-issue voter and the movement for racial justice has never been a single-issue movement. Black liberation and civil rights organizers have always taken a multifaceted approach, focusing on access to community programs, food assistance, employment opportunities, community economic development and public services like education.

The movement for racial justice in the U.S. has also always been deeply connected to anti-imperialist movements across the world with civil rights leaders learning from India’s independence movement and Black liberation organizers supporting anti-imperial and decolonial movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. We must remember the long, hot days of 2020, when artists in Gaza painted murals of George Floyd in solidarity with Black Americans amid their ongoing struggles for liberation and autonomy, and reenergize ourselves by standing with Palestine and the movement for global human rights. One of the simplest ways to show solidarity is joining the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement boycotts. We cannot ignore the global implications of anti-Black oppression as Black people in the Congo and Sudan are forced into slave labor to make tech industry bosses richer. It’s more important than ever to begin widening our framework and acknowledging that racial justice and Black liberation have always been intersectional in every way.

We must meaningfully expand discussion around issues like the murder of Black people by police to include the murder of Black trans women and the routine and systemic mistreatment and abuse faced by queer and trans people who interact with the carceral system. We must recognize that the same rhetoric about “cleaning up our communities” and unsubstantiated myths of crime that are currently being leveled against undocumented people and migrant workers have been used against Black people for decades. We can take backlash as an opportunity to reenergize around our connection with other people in a time when the protectors of the status quo would like to see people more disconnected from each other so they are easier to conquer. Our energy lies more than ever in building coalitions across organizing lines and single-issue priorities, and in the words of King, “our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.”

If the ideological opposition is looking backward, building myths around a fictitious “golden era” defined by exclusion, marginalization and exploitation, the best strategy for us is to look forward. We must see beyond the false logic of narratives that misrepresent our visions of free futures. Reactionary forces want to trick us into believing that a more equitable world for someone is a less equitable world for someone else. Online rage-baiting flattens ideology and deceives people into thinking that racial justice means an inversion of oppression where those who were once the oppressed become the oppressor. One of the first principles I learned from intersectional, Black feminism is that a more just, equitable and loving world for the most vulnerable among us is necessarily a more just, equitable and loving world for everyone else.

Rage dissipates, but empathy endures. Building the future of racial justice and reinvigorating the movement in more sustainable forms requires calling forth the energy of the chants during 2020’s reckoning, when people raised their voices in unison to shout, “The people, united, can never be defeated.”