After the 2024 presidential election, many African Americans—Black women specifically—upon seeing the re-election of Donald Trump, reasoned to “sit out” politics, policy fights, and protests because America made its choice: a racist and convicted felon. Four months later, the “sitting out” sentiment hasn’t changed.
I recently saw a post on X commending Black people for not protesting on the streets, despite everything conservatives have done policy-wise to entice protests from Black people. The rationale behind the post is that with various states passing laws against protests, Black people would be subject to police brutality or, even worse, death.
If Donald Trump sends you to prison in El Salvador for spray painting a Tesla, rest assured, protests by Black people in opposition to the Trump Administration will likely result in abuse of Black people. Vandalizing the Capitol in the name of Donald Trump, however, will earn you a presidential pardon, but I digress.
Black people have “protested” in other ways. We’ve used our careers, our art, our voices, and our work in communities to resist the Trump Administration’s and political conservatives’ efforts. These efforts are admirable and should be commended. Certainly, we can do more with our time and talents out of a prison cell, can we?
Regarding that same post on X, someone reposted while adding the comment that “sitting out” isn’t actually a good thing, and Ms. Jill Scott Heron is correct. It is not a good thing. It’s not a good thing because sitting out isn’t a movement, it’s a decision not to move. What we need is a movement, not for folks to sit out, and here’s the thing about a movement: they require sacrifice.
Because what some Black people understand and others must realize is that freedom aint free. None of this—the “freedom” of inclusion and integration into America and Americana (as though George Washington Dixon’s Zip Coon is our model for success)—came without a cost. Seemingly, while many of us hold the keepers of the Black Freedom Struggle in high regard, we too often fail to recognize that struggle comes with costs.
We remember Andrew Young, John Lewis, and Jesse Jackson, who leveraged their time in the Civil Rights Movement into prominent political roles, including ambassadorships, Congressional Service, and a presidential candidacy. However, we often overlook Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Ella Baker, who continued the struggle until their passing.
We memorialize the assassinations of Dr. King and el Hajj Malik el Shabazz, but we forget or are completely unaware of the many other martyrs of the movement, like Lamar Smith, who was shot in front of a Mississippi courthouse in 1955 for organizing Blacks to vote, or Vernon Dahmer, a wealthy businessman who lost his life in a fire set at his home because he offered to pay the poll tax for Blacks to vote.
Before the Civil Rights Movement, several key movements and initiatives emerged, including the Double V Campaign, the Anti-Lynching Movement, Radical Reconstruction, the Abolitionist Movement, the Underground Railroad, Marronage, and various rebellions, as well as individual efforts to escape, sabotage, and learn how to read and write. Black people died throughout these moments in history, and each of these is the foundation that we stand on today.
Tragically, however, some of us believe that those folks paid a cost so that we no longer have to. Nothing could be further from the truth. But we don’t want to pay the cost. We wish to enjoy the spoils of taking part in an America we’ve long been denied. We’re captivated by materialism, placated with representation, and satisfied with a form of activism that is more performance than protest.
Honestly, who are we trying to fool?
All the movements and campaigns I mentioned earlier are part of the Black Radical Tradition. That is the collection of cultural, intellectual, and action-oriented labor aimed at disrupting social, political, economic, and cultural norms, originating from anticolonial, antislavery, and anti-imperialist efforts. Non-Black folk have joined in this effort. However, it is Black folk, including the less privileged among us, who lead and drive these efforts, and these efforts are made as a down payment for the future at the expense of the present.
The freedom fighters of the past that we revere paid for us with the prime portions of their health and strength. They didn’t sit out because what they knew was true then is true now: we cannot rely on white America.
White people are required to do one thing to change society: a willingness to include Black people, other people of color, and the poor in the democracy. History has shown their unwillingness to do that. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, while supposedly not fond of enslavement, not only didn’t end the practice, they practiced fully. Abraham Lincoln only emancipated Africans because he had to, not because he wanted to.
JFK and LBJ were reluctantly pushed into advocating for the civil rights of Black people. It took whitewashing Dr. King’s legacy for Ronald Reagan to endorse the King holiday, and Joe Biden chastised Black folks for demanding that he do anything more than promise to put a Black person on the Supreme Court.
Therefore, Black people have historically had to risk life and limb to change this country for the better. The Reconstruction Amendments, the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act were the results.
Again, we will have to extend our efforts to salvage the nation; not to return it to the status quo, but to cultivate the world that we want to have.
I understand the desire not to extend our efforts. We did in 2024, and Trump won the election. Now feels like a time to focus on us. I get that. However, we are a communal people, and when we’ve fought for our rights, all have benefited because our liberation enables the liberation of all. It’s unfair that we have this fight and this responsibility. But history shows us that ours is a history of liberating by any means necessary.
So Black folks… we have a decision to make: sit out or stand up. Are you more concerned with keeping what little you have, or are you willing to give up what it is in order to gain so much more? Because liberation isn’t about salvaging what remains. Liberation is being motivated by the imagination of what is to come.
