May the sleeping giant wake.
It’s time to build a movement for justice,
unlike anything this nation has ever seen.
And I hear a rumbling, a stirring, an awakening,
Sometimes, the sound is so faint, I worry
it’s my imagination, my optimism getting
the best of me.
I pause, listen, and wait.
Here it comes again.
I want to rush to my window, fling it open,
stick my head way out, and look around.
Is it happening?
For real this time?
Is the sleeping giant finally waking up?
God knows, we’ve slept too long.
Many of us, myself included, slept through
a revolution.
Actually, it was a counter revolution, that
blew back much of the progress, that so many
racial justice activists and freedom fighters
risked their lives for.
This counter revolution occurred with barely
a whimper of protest,
even as a literal war was declared
A war on drugs, a get tough movement.
That war was not really a war on drugs, but
on people, overwhelmingly poor people, people
of color, who were taken prisoner en masse,
And then released, relegated to a permanent
second class status, stripped of basic civil
and human rights,
Such as the right to vote, the right to serve
on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination,
Employment, housing, access to education,
and basic public benefits.
Branded criminals or felons, millions of people
discovered that the very rights supposedly
won in the civil rights movement no longer
applied to them.
The get tough movement resulted in the quintupling,
of our prison population in a short decades
and the birth of a private prison industry
that makes money off of the caging of human
beings.
An industry that is a hungry beast, with insatiable
appetite.
The private prisons and detention centers
that started off caging drug addicts and small
time dealers, are now caging millions of people
every year, dubbed illegal immigrants.
As James Baldwin wrote in a letter to Angela
Davis in 1970, when she was sitting in her
jail cell,
“If they come for you in the morning sister,
they will be coming for us that night.”
I am listening carefully at my window now.
I hear that rumbling sound, signs of an awakening
in the streets.
I heard the awakening on the stage today.
My heart leaps for joy.
People of all colors are beginning to raise
their voices a little louder.
People who spent time behind bars are organizing
for the restoration of their civil and human
rights.
Young people are becoming bolder and more
defiant.
And challenging mass incarceration, and mass
deportation, and police violence, the mass
criminalization of our peoples.
And people of faith are finally beginning
to wake up to the uncomfortable reality that
we have been complicit,
In the birth and maintenance of a system predicated,
on denying to God’s children the very forms
of compassion, forgiveness, and possibilities
of redemption that we claim to cherish.
I wonder, if we’re prepared now.
Are we ready to pick up where Reverend Martin Luther
King Jr. left off?
At the end of his life?
At the very end?
When he saw that nothing less than a radical
restructuring of our society could possibly
ensure dignity and justice for all?
In 1967, he said “we as a nation must undergo
a radical revolution of values, when machines
and computers, profit motives, and property
rights, are considered more important than
people,
the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,
and militarism, are incapable of being conquered.”
That quote is from his speech declaring his
opposition to the Vietnam War.
I remember my early stirrings, the beginnings
of my real awakening,
I was a civil rights lawyer, and firmly committed
to social justice,
But it took me a long while to begin to see
the bigger picture.
It was only after years or representing victims
of racial profiling, and police brutality,
and trying to assist people who have been
released from prison get housing, access to
basic public benefits, reunify with their
children,
And face one legal barrier after another to
their mere survival.
That I finally began to wake up to the reality,
that social justice advocates like me were
not wrestling with mere social or legal problems,
we were dealing with a vast new system of
racial and social control that had been born
again in America,
a new caste like system.
It is a system that cannot be reformed, and
thereby redeemed, any more than it would have
been possible to reform slavery or Jim Crow,
and thereby approach justice.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand
that we can’t even begin to reimagine our
justice system without confronting the realities,
of our corrupt pay to play 2-party system.
And we must face the realities of a global
capitalism.
An economic system in which capitalists are
always in search of a new plantation.
The cheapest labor it can find.
This relentless search for a new plantation
inevitably treats people, and entire communities
as disposable,
left behind jobless, without any guarantees
of healthcare, quality education, or meaningful
work at a living wage.
Look at what happened to Detroit, and countless
cities in the U.S. and around the world, devastated
by deindustrialization, as factories closed
down and moved overseas,
while hundreds of thousands of people were
suddenly left to fend for themselves.
These disposable people in our capitalist
system are then turned into commodities themselves.
They are ushered into private prisons run
for profit, they become convict labor, making
furniture, answering phones for corporations,
that will refuse to hire them on the outside
upon release, because they’re felons.
In this capitalist system, capital is free
to cross borders, it can cross nearly at the
speed of light.
All money can be wired across the globe, capital
can freely cross borders, but people cannot.
And when people try, when they dare to flee
war and violence, when they dare to flee poverty
and devastation,
Caused when capital got up and ran, they find
themselves ushered into those prisons run
for profit,
all the while politicians engage in racial
scapegoating and fear mongering, and threaten
to build a wall.
Enough.
Will the sleeping giant finally wake up?
We must be willing to accept that it is our
job as people who care about justice, not
simply to reform isolated institutions,
Or to organize racially distinct groups of
people, but rather to begin to reimage or
legal, political and economic systems, so
they might, they just might begin to work
for us all.
Are we willing to do this work?
Are we willing to rise to the challenge, this
moment in our history presents?
Are we willing to connect the dots, between
racism, materialism, and militarism?
Are we willing to embrace all people of all
races, ethnicities, faiths, genders, and sexualities,
people of all walks of life?
Are we willing?
Are we ready to build a movement for all of
us, or none?
Answering these questions requires deep reflection,
reading, discussion, debate, but it also,
and perhaps most importantly requires us to
get up, get out,
join hands with our sisters and brothers,
across all lines of difference and begin working
together, for one another.
It may require great courage at times, to
stand up for, and to stand with, the “least
of these”, the criminals, the felons, the
despised, the so called “illegals”,
and to insist on their humanity, dignity,
and value in the eyes of God.
People may be reluctant to see that the woman
who crossed the border illegally in the hope
of a better life, deserves our sincere compassion.
Just ask the young man who sold some weed
to help the mother of his child pay the rent.
It will not be easy for people to learn to
care for the drug dealer, as well as the drug
addict.
Or to see that the victim of a horrible crime,
as well as the perpetrator, are both children
of God and are worthy of our profound care
and concern.
Cultivating such a shift in consciousness
will require the birth of a movement unlike
anything his nation has ever seen.
One that is rooted in the awareness of a fundamental
dignity and humanity, of each and every one
of us, no matter who we are, where we came
from, or what we may have done.
I know there are many people say such a movement
is impossible.
Many more say that something less will do.
And yes, some progress can be made without
building a truly transformative movement,
without reclaiming and reimagining our democracy.
Yes, we can win by saying whatever the pollsters
tell us will work.
And we can appeal exclusively to people’s
self-interest, and their purely selfish concerns,
But if we choose that path, we cannot pretend
we are traveling a road that will lead to
higher ground.
What we face is not merely a social, political,
or economic crisis in this country, it is
a spiritual and moral one as well.
In the end, if our advocacy fails to build
a new moral consensus, if it fails to help
cultivate, an ethic of genuine care,
compassion and concern for every human being,
of every class, race, and nationality, the
reforms we achieve will not bring an end to
caste like systems in America.
Mass incarceration and mass deportation will
remain just downsized a bit.
Or a new system of racial and social control
will emerge, one that we cannot foresee today,
just as it was impossible to foresee the system
of mass incarceration just 40 years ago.
The evil of these systems, lie not in their
cost, inefficiency, or impracticality.
The evil lies, in the belief that some of
us are disposable, unworthy of moral concern.
And until we challenge that core belief, systems
of racial and social control will continue
to be born over and over again,
and thrive in this country for a long, long,
time, and our democracy will remain a fraud
perpetrated upon the world.
I hope and pray that the rumblings that I
hear on the streets, and the beautiful, brilliant
rumblings, that I heard on the stage today,
are a sign that the sleeping giant is awakening,
and that we are willing, and we are ready
to get to work making America and ourselves,
what we must become.
