Jamala Rogers

The Plain View Project used an algorithm to search through thousands of social media rants by past and current police officers. The hatred and bigotry against Black folks, women, Muslims and the LGBTQ community were unapologetic.

These 400 years of mutating slavery is worth uplifting for serious critique. It includes the captivity of a people and our enslavement. It includes Jim Crow and slavery by another name (forced, mainly unpaid labor). It includes all forms of segregation and second-class citizenship. It includes mass incarceration. Many of these manifestations and systems are still current and often co-exist with one another.

As a Black, voting woman, I have serious concerns about my right to exist as a free citizen with all the protected fundamental rights including the power over my own body.

This country is at a serious crossroads, democracy is hanging in the balance. Most of us don’t know much about this country’s history or how government functions. It’s time to learn. It’s time to stop the advancement of a dictator.

I am not from the school that believes love neutralizes hate, or that you pray for your enemies and everything will be alright. I wish it was that simple. Black folks need to go on the offensive and I don’t mean being hyper-vigilant 24/7. That’s the kind of stress that’ll kill you.

A major political and cultural shift to the right came with the election of Donald Trump as the 45th U.S. president. We’re coming up on the fifth anniversary of the Ferguson Uprising. This year will mark the 400th anniversary of my people’s kidnapping to these shores. How are we assessing our past and applying the hard-learned lessons to our future?

Women of color, and especially Black women, are leaning in, stepping up and growing into various leadership roles in our racial justice movement and beyond. I bear witness to their brilliance and to their resistance. I’ve seen their writings, their organizing, their passion to fight the stereotypes, practices, laws and policies that restrict or stop their professional and political growth.

In the spirit of a few Black athletes before him, Kaepernick has used his status to elevate an issue that white America continues to ignore and earnestly take on—the issue of race. He added his voice to the national debate about the treatment of Black and Brown people by so-called law enforcers. He took on the powerful NFL and won. Whether Kaepernick gets an NFL contract or not, his place in the struggle for human dignity and racial justice is noteworthy.

King had many profound insights about life in the U.S. that can still inform our quest for racial and economic justice. Because the mainstream media has us stuck on dreaming, it has taken years to uncover the nuggets of wisdom in King’s many speeches and writings that expose the barriers to peace and prosperity for all American citizens.