Wokeness without works

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. offers a dispiriting assessment of the condition our condition is in:

The racial reckoning led to lots of talk but little real change

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... In many ways, the racial reckoning ended on Nov. 3, 2020. Instead of Democrats winning a huge majority in the House and enough Senate seats to get rid of the filibuster, as polls suggested was possible, they won tiny majorities in both chambers. Major changes to improve Black people’s lives require funding, and the federal government is where a lot of the money is. With such small majorities during Biden’s first two years in office, a sweeping pro-Black agenda was immediately off the table, because centrist Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) weren’t likely to be on board.

... From its start in 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement hasn’t had a formal organizational structure or a singular leader. That was both intentional (many of the activists didn’t want that kind of leadership) and unintentional (the movement was so broad and diffuse it was hard to organize, even in informal ways). So there was no organization that the millions of people who protested Floyd’s killing could join, nor a clear set of goals they could embrace and urge their local politicians to adopt.

... But overall, we have wokeness without works.

This seems spot on. Here on the home front, the San Francisco Police Department incurs no penalty for killing unarmed individuals with abandon, while residents are frightened by (some real, some over-hyped) property crime, and the sight of homeless people suffering. We want the irritants swept away, sometimes literally; we replaced a progressive D.A. who might have held police killers to account; we elected a police flack to the Board of Supervisors. That's backlash in San Francisco. We make noises about caring for impoverished people, for Brown and Black lives -- but, as almost always, we make those lives carry the burden of our distresses. 

Yet I am struck by one line here: "... there was no organization that the millions of people who protested Floyd’s killing could join, nor a clear set of goals they could embrace and urge their local politicians to adopt." 

This complaint makes me feel old. I've seen something like this before. It feels much as I think many of us ally folks, especially those of us who were white, felt in the late 1960s and early 1970s -- the Black Freedom movement had been our guiding moral star amid the horrors of the country's immoral war in Vietnam and the country's turn to Richard Nixon. That movement was splintering into its component threads under violent state repression and simple exhaustion. The leaders who survived needed to rethink, retrench, and regroup. Allies often became wandering lost sheep -- and did a lot of floundering because the unifying lodestar of Black freedom was clouded over. That was the 1970s -- for many in my generation.

We all had to learn new ways for new times, new ways that built on what had come before.

But since freedom is a constant struggle, movement veterans and new blood took up struggles old and new, many local, all vital. The drive to give organizational form to the moral imperatives raised up by the Civil Rights struggle was rekindled over and over. And new cycles of organization and uprising began, to be repeated as long as white supremacy and other injustices coexist with the national dream of freedom.

Maybe we can't -- at the moment -- drive forward toward freedom and justice at the scale we could imagine in 2020 and wish had born more fruit. But what else is there to do but try and try again in whatever organizational forms fit the moment?