Do Twitter fingers seem to be more effective than holding hands? There's a recent phenomenon I've been noticing across social media platforms that is seemingly a little disturbing to me. Younger black people, my peers, have been insisting that we will not just sit back and be disrespected and mistreated by our racist, white nationalist counterparts, but will retaliate with "these hands," as if our ancestors, grandparents, and great-grandparents were passive, and as if their fight somehow was simply not enough.
I am slightly baffled by this tone-deaf statement, "we are not our grandparents." To a degree, I actually believe it to be true, but in a different context. There were civil rights leaders, who, at the time, were what would be considered millennial age today (even teenage age) who did not sit back and watch their people get treated unequally and less than, which typically resulted in either jail (numerous times) or death.
Recently, we remembered the brutal murder of the chairman of Illinois' Black Panther Party chapter, Fred Hampton. Once he became the leader of the Chicago chapter, he organized weekly rallies, worked closely with the BPP's local People's Clinic, taught political education classes every morning at 6 a.m. and launched a project for community supervision of the police.
Think about The Big Six, which included U.S. Rep. John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr, James L. Farmer Jr, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and Whitney Young. Think about Ruby Bridges.
Colin Kaepernick is literally trying to start a movement and is facing injustice because of it. So look around at our peers and ask, "what happened to the nitty-gritty work?"
This is not to discredit the various organizations that do focus on resisting the current racist, homophobic, misogynistic state of this country because there are many. And these organizations work diligently to fight for what our predecessors fought so long and hard for. I think the most real and relevant question we should ask ourselves is: When will we become our grandparents?
