We Are Indomitable
Racism Is The Sin Of Our Time
Today is my birthday, and the acquitted lynching of Cyrus Carmack-Belton brought Breonna Taylor to my mind, who also was born on this day.
At the end of my last Unbound Sprint, I was preparing to make an exciting announcement. That was disrupted by mean-spirited and callous accusations about my moral character and political commitment. Hurt and overwhelmed, I postponed it.
This week the acquitted lynching admittedly knocked the wind out of me, and I have decided to postpone it again, to get this message out from my heart:
Racism is the sin of our time.
And the unspeakable horror of this verdict, and every verdict where the lynching of Black people is rewarded with freedom, is simply incomprehensible.
I remember in the 2010s it seemed like every 48 hours there was a new lynching. I remember the wave after wave of social media videos displaying the last moments of life of so many precious Black people. I think about this every day, I carry this in every grove of my bones, I feel this every time I tell my son ‘I will see you so soon’.
I am not one of those fake and embarrassing so-called Christians that think all we need to do is pray; that is a form of sacrilegious cowardice that makes God weep in disappointment and tries to drown God in anguish. Prayer is necessary and insufficient. We must strategize. Black people and those who love us need to be very clear-minded and deliberate about how we respond to these absolute horrors. We do need to pray. We do need to love our children and our people as long and as deep and as hard as we can. And we also need a revolutionary strategy for the governing institutions of our society to be a force for breaking FOREVER the sinful scourge of racism.
There is an unsettling reality those of us who unflinchingly love life and tenderness and softness and deep laughs and dignity and God’s creation must come to terms with: re-enslavement and the sadistic annihilation of Black life are the fundamental goals that the forces for a New Confederacy have at heart for the future of Black people on this Earth.
We must be constant in prayer and permanently readying for anything anywhere at any moment. To give in to the nihilistic impulses and reckless abandon of individual action is to surrender to the false prophet of retribution. To give in to the cowardice of not calling the New Confederacy’s primary goal for Black people in this country re-enslavement and annihilation is to worship at the altar of unbelievable brutality and indescribable indifference.
When we say faith without works is dead, we mean that we must pray and strategize. We mean that political power is the potential for us to accept the gifts of God. We mean that revolutions like the Haitian Revolution, the Taiping Revolution, the U.S. Reconstruction Revolution, the decolonization of Africa, the socialist revolutions in China, Vietnam and Cuba and many more are grand human attempts to embrace the organized emergence of God's plan. “The Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” The imperialists would do well to remember this abiding reality.
But there is always joy in the mourning. The audacity of the Black freedom struggle is that we are clear that we too are ultimately indomitable, and we will never settle for anything less than the absolute freedom of all of the Earth and of all Black people everywhere forever.
The greatness of the best of Black people is that we are for an iron-clad, unconquerable and total freedom. The self-evident righteousness of the freedom of Black people to simply live life is a resounding reminder that we will win.
But first we must weep.
Breonna Taylor was murdered by police who raided her apartment in Louisville, Ky., in March 2020. (Julio Cortez / Associated Press)