There were more protests in one year, 2014, than at any time during the last period of civil rights activism. Black Lives Matter—the hashtag, the organization, and the movement—exploded around the world. Making Black lives matter meant fighting back against the oppression of Black people, which also meant investing in loving Blackness in all its forms.
The explosion of this Black Renaissance came with a swift, strong backlash. Soon after Black Lives Matter began making a cultural and systemic impact, refrains of “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” began to counter it. These Americans denied the existence of racism and branded whoever dared to expose it as people who were “playing the race card,” ostensibly for sympathy or to deny culpability in their own oppression. These Americans framed Black Lives Matter activists as domestic terrorists who posed a threat to the lives of law enforcement.
The 2016 presidential election was the platform upon which this backlash against the Black Renaissance took place. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, expected the allegiance of Black voters and yet became the subject of numerous protests by Black organizers. The Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, allayed the fears of white voters, promising to restore law and order to the country, to support law enforcement, and, after the first Black president, to “Make America Great Again.”
A few months after Trump was sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States—a president who has been accused of groping or otherwise sexually assaulting no fewer than thirty-five women—Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexually assaulting, harassing, or raping over eighty women. Exposure of these allegations prompted a hashtag known as #MeToo, which was the original creation of Tarana Burke more than a decade ago to support survivors of sexual assault to find resilience and hope. Since then, the #MeToo movement has exposed a widespread epidemic of sexual violence, particularly by powerful men like Weinstein, actor Kevin Spacey, and music mogul R. Kelly.
The #MeToo movement has proven to be a radical upheaval of societal norms that degrade, abuse, and devalue women-identified people. It has also amplified the voices of those who are survivors of that harm, and it encourages them to celebrate their resilience in the face of such violence. Harvey Weinstein’s career is now over, and he faces multiple lawsuits and court cases, intended to hold him to account for his abusive behavior over decades. Kevin Spacey’s career has also effectively ended, and the popular television show that he once starred in has been canceled. R. Kelly was finally charged with abusing underage girls.
And still the backlash has been swift. Not only have those who have come forward with their stories, daring to be resilient after having survived such horrible traumas, been interrogated, ridiculed, and picked apart; even those who dare to provide platforms for such voices have received death threats as a result of their service. Beyond the retaliation against individuals, a powerful countermovement now misrepresents this movement as harmful to men.
Three years into Trump’s first term, at the four-hundred-year mark of African American history, white nationalism exploded nationally and globally. Although white nationalism is not a new phenomenon, it had formerly been politically fraught to declare sympathies with white nationalism in public. In 2019 alone, more than 250 people in the United States were killed in mass shootings. The overwhelming majority of the shooters were white nationalists.
Today white nationalists openly serve in the White House and in Congress. Trump’s first year in office saw the designation of a new category of terrorist—the Black identity extremist, defined as a Black person who takes pride in their culture and wants to cause harm to law enforcement officials. Though the designation has recently been dropped after being exposed as fiction, the fact still remains that the backlash against the powerful Black Lives Matter movement that rose in 2013 and exploded in 2014 was deemed a threat by the FBI.
Activists valuing and defending the lives of Black people were considered a threat, but not a president who openly bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” calls immigrants of color to America “foreign invaders,” called Haiti a “shithole country,” and said that majority-Black Baltimore was a “rat infested city.” Trump personified the backlash against all those Americans saying Black lives mattered.
A looming question faces antiracist social movements in the United States: Will the backlash become a force powerful enough to prevail? Or will our organizing become stronger and sharper in the face of such backlash, assured that its presence alone has already declared our victory?
Only time—and strategic organizing—will tell the next four hundred years of African America.
AMERICAN ABECEDARIAN
Joshua Bennett
A is for atom bomb. B is for Blacks belting blues before burial, the blood they let to give the flag its glimmer. C is for cocoon & its cognates. Cocaine, coca-cola, the cacophonous wail of drones filling air with wartime. D is for demagogue. E is for elephants & their semblances, every political animal laboring under some less than human name. F is for foxhole. Firefight. Fears we cathect onto men holding best intentions close to the chest as one might guilt or guns & of course G is for guns, g-men, guillotines draped in flame we dream any hellscape holds if it’s up to snuff. H is for Horsepower. I is for I. I is for individual drive trumps all concern when it comes to this business of living joyously at the edge of wit, watching half a world drown with your hands tied. J is for jeans. K is for Krispy Kreme. L is for loss. L is for loveliness. L is for lean in the cups of boys in white shirts billowing free in Mississippi towns so small, they are visible only when passing through them, like death. M is for metafiction. N is for next: next wife, next car, next life I would spend the bones in this flesh one by one to touch. O is for opulence. Opportunity. Occasional anguish but nothing compared to what I will reach when I peak & P is for Preakness. Poverty & bodies that flee it. Oh body, like a storm of horses. Oh questions we dare not ask for fear of breaking rank or losing funding. Q is for quarantine. R is for repair, Revolution, other conflicts that lack limit in any definitional sense. S is for stars we adore & reflect. T is for tragedy. U is for upper-middle working class when the survey asks. V is for the viola my mother plays in the 1970s as her hometown collapses without fanfare. W is for Windows 98 in the public school computer lab & every fourth-grader playing Oregon Trail there. X is for xanthan gum, every everyday ingredient you couldn’t identify by sight if you tried. Y is for Yellowstone. Y is for the yachts in the docks in our eyes. Z is for zealotry: national pride like an infinite zipline, hyperdrive, the fastest way down.
CONCLUSION
Our Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams
KEISHA N. BLAIN
There’s a saying that has circulated in Black communities for decades: “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
Its origins are unknown. Yet its power is unmistakable. It speaks to all that Black people have overcome that did not seem possible generations before.