Dear LeBron, There Is a Movement and There Always Has Been

By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News

25 July 20

SPN aired recent remarks you made on Black Lives Matter, the protests, and race in America in general. You spoke out. It helps when you do that. Steph Curry, Carmelo Anthony, of course Colin Kaepernick, and a lot of other athletes are speaking out as well, and it’s definitely a good thing.

In your most recent remarks, your frustration and anger were clearly evident, and with the state of affairs in this country, well-justified. When asked about the movement to address police violence, you said, “It’s not a movement. I don’t like the word movement, because unfortunately, in American society there ain’t been no damn movement for us. There ain’t been no movement.”

I need to disagree on that last point. There has been, and there still is today, tremendous injustice perpetrated upon black people in America. No doubt about it, no denying it. But it’s important to remember that positive change has occurred over the years. The rise of Barack Obama to the US presidency is a clear indication that this is not the America of darker times gone by.

Periods of change in world history have often come about as a result of movements. As that applies to the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for African Americans, you can start with the Underground Railroad of the early 1800s, a system of escape routes and safe houses to help escaped slaves get north to freedom. The system was organized by free blacks and Northern abolitionists, and was a movement unto itself.

Abolition was the larger movement. Abolition led to the American Civil War, the end of slavery, and ultimately a total reordering of American society. At every step in the process, white people – what southern blacks called “high-minded white people” – were involved in the campaigns for change.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s had a racial composition very similar to the Abolition Movement of a century earlier, led by blacks whose lives were on the line and aided, at lesser risk, by white intellectuals who believed that the movement must succeed.

There is today a movement sweeping the United States and many other countries as well to call out and address police violence in the US and authoritarianism around the world. It is breathtaking in its intensity and uncontainable in its scope. We can see an opportunity now for great change.

Police violence is as American as apple pie, albeit it in a far darker and more destructive way. Police violence is an outgrowth of a violent culture founded on genocide and slavery. A man cannot defeat it; a movement can. Today in America, Black Lives that Matter are leading that movement with the most enthusiastic support from high-minded white people, mostly young, that any movement on race relations in American history has ever seen.

Whether you set out to be a part of that movement or not, I think you are in it and in a unique position to influence it.

Thanks for listening.

Marc Ash
Aspiring high-minded white person

Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.