Parable of Change

Georgia is where my sister lives with her family. Her oldest child, my goddaughter, epitomizes Black girl magic. She is a leader. She is a scholar. She is an athlete. She has an adept consciousness of Black history and Black cultures. She knows when to prioritize self-care. She refuses to back down from difficult challenges whether it means winning or losing. And she turned eighteen on New Year’s Day.

January 1 marked a momentous moment in the maturation of my niece to adulthood. Becoming eighteen also signaled my goddaughter’s entry into the suffrage. Voting, along with earning, is a right the late Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar contends defines American citizenship. However, Black women and girls like my niece were legally prevented from exercising this right upon promulgation of the U.S. Constitution. They were excluded from this right in the ensuing centuries that included the Civil War and the rise and fall of Reconstruction. They were barred from this right following ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 due to poll taxes, literary tests, and anti-Black campaigns of intimidation and domestic racial terror.

They continued the struggle to realize this right at the dawn of the twenty-first century, breaking barriers and situating themselves at the vanguard of social movements for equality and freedom, as Johns Hopkins University historian Martha Jones meticulously documents. That voter suppression measures didn’t disappear but instead mutated is a reminder of the ongoing importance of struggles for change.

The Combahee River Collective’s 1977 declaration of independence rings true today: when Black girls and women and are free and equal, we are all free and equal. This maxim, underscored in the franchise, is my goddaughter’s inheritance.

A couple days ago, my niece exercised the right to vote when casting her first ballots in the two hotly contested Georgia Senate races: one between Rev. Raphael G. Warnock and Senator Kelly Loeffler and the second between Jon Ossoff and Senator David Perdue. These elections would determine the Senate’s balance of power and the proposed legislative agendas and judicial nominees of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris.

Inertia or change was at stake.

In advance of the elections, the educator in me decided that, upon the polls closing, I would tell my goddaughter via Houseparty how proud I am that she voted regardless of the candidates she voted for. And I did. Her engaging in the democratic process was what’s essential. The godfather in me, however, contemplated conveying different words once the election returns started to come in.

I imagined myself reiterating the critical status of the Georgia runoffs in helping to enable or dismantle democracy in a polity already ravaged by the twin viruses of Covid-19 and racism. I imagined stating to her that a vote for Warnock and Ossoff was paramount and that such a vote didn’t mean romanticizing the current Democratic Party.

I envisioned asking my goddaughter several rhetorical questions: which candidates share your views on healthcare? Which of your potential Senators support the Movement for Black Lives and which ones believe BLM and M4BL to be violent threats to the republic? Who acknowledges the election of Biden and Harris as legitimate? Which candidates believe in your right to choose what you may do with your body? Whom do you trust to advance legislation to reduce inequality? Who takes issues facing young people seriously? Which candidates will work to ensure that you, your family, and loved ones are better off six years after they take office?

I ended up saying most but not all of that. My niece’s ballot box decisions were hers alone to make.

This wonderful reality is a consequence of change.

Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff defeated the incumbents in breathtaking fashion, thereby giving Democrats control of the Senate in the new Congress and contributing further to the Georgia Blue wave. They accomplished a feat thought unlikely a year ago. Warnock will be the first Black Senator in Georgia history. Ossoff shall replace an opponent several years his senior. The late Georgia Representative John Lewis, mentor to both Senators-elect Warnock and Ossoff, declared in a posthumous op-ed that democracy is an act, not a state. Georgians and many people around the country had much to celebrate as a result of collective democratic (small ‘d’) actions.

Then terror struck less than twenty-four hours later. A violent mob of white nationalists in support of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building, stampeded past police officers, climbed the Capitol walls, and breached the halls of the Congress.

Their goals: instill fear and disrupt the process to certify Biden and Harris as the next President and Vice-President. Positions and statements of the Commander-in-Chief emboldened the mob’s resolve.

The mob eventually was quelled. One person was shot and killed during the siege. Whilst Congress did subsequently certify the Biden-Harris administration, the damage was done.

The siege should remind the nation and world of the toxic ahistorical rhetoric of The Lost Cause proponents on the one hand and the nineteenth century nadir of Reconstruction on the other hand, wherein white supremacists rejected Black enfranchisement and humanity through terror, coercion, and disinformation. We can’t ignore the siege taking place directly following the wins of Warnock and Ossoff.

Now what do I say to my goddaughter?

In 1935, the polymath W.E.B. Du Bois remarked in his magisterial work Black Reconstruction in America, “The unending tragedy of Reconstruction is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance”. We still haven’t learned. But we can learn and we can change. We must. This I will tell to my goddaughter.

Yes, change is demanding.

The word ‘change’ neither is reducible to the three laws of thermodynamics, nor an invention of former President Barack Obama. In politics, change is an effective slogan until it becomes an ineffective slogan (Obama ran for president on the Change movement; his 700+ page presidential memoir, A Promised Land, doesn’t list ‘change’ in the index). Those who condemn change like the mob at the Capitol may invoke hatred. Yet as Audre Lorde teaches us, hatred is a tool used by folks who don’t share our life visions. Anger, in contrast, occurs between peers, friends, and colleagues, and it can be used in the service of overdue change.

Change is more than a platitude. Georgians know this.

Think of Stacey Abrams. Despite losing a fraught and potentially historic gubernatorial race, she remains steadfast in combatting voter suppression and mobilizing new and previously disenchanted Georgia voters. Think of the arduous organizing of Black women across the state who helped turn a longstanding Red state Blue. Think of Georgians espousing a range of creeds who have chosen love and a bright future over hatred and a divided past. Think of older obstacles to change detailed by Du Bois in a 1903 study of Georgia’s Dougherty County, which he dubbed “the Egypt of the Confederacy.”

Change happens.

The story of Lauren Oya Olamina in Octavia Butler’s prophetic novel, Parable of the Sower, upholds this adage. It’s 2024 when we encounter a teenage Lauren. The United States is a dystopia. Southern California, where Lauren lives, is a microcosm of a country spiraling out of control. Pessimism is pervasive.

Amidst chaos, terrorism, despair, and threats to everyday ways of life, Lauren is resolute that another world is possible, however arduous or improbable it is to realize it.

Lauren, we learn, creates a philosophy called Earthseed. It’s creed: “God is change.” Lauren Olamina also remarks relatedly, “Kindness eases Change.”

There are as many adherents to the growing Earthseed community as there are detractors. Ultimately, Lauren is us, for the call to build Earthseed is a wider invitation to believe in our respective wills and the power of individuals and groups alike to institute future change beyond slogans. It’s an invitation to *be* a change, not merely observe it.  

My niece has chosen to be a change. May we all take heed of this parable.

Neil Roberts

Neil Roberts (@neildsroberts) is chair and professor of Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College, where he also directs the W. Ford Schumann ’50 program in democratic studies. He served as president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2016-19. His next book is How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism.