There Are No Final Victories
After signing several policing reform bills into law last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo addressed some remarks to protestors who had been in the streets.
“You don’t need to protest, you won. You accomplished your goal. Society says you’re right …” He might just as well have added, “You can go home now.”
Coretta Scott King message in a preface to My Life With Martin Luther King Jr., (1993) was very different.
“We need to remember that the struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation. … You finally win a state of freedom that is protected forever. It doesn’t work that way.
Andrew was wrong. Coretta was right. It is never time to go home.
You never have won. There are no final victories.
The specifics of laws and programs never meet aspirations. Solutions create their own problems. Progress always meets resistance.
The power and intent of Black Lives Matter goes beyond police practices, calling into question the community attitudes and social, economic and political structures that made those practices possible. Kneeling on the neck of a prostrate black man until he dies or shooting a black man in the back has roots that go deep into our history.
The law can change some things. Some things we have to change in ourselves. The law deals with specific actions, specific programs, specific organizational structures, specific grants of authority to do things. But you can’t legislate: stop being racist; treat everyone equally; don’t be stupid. By its nature, the law by itself is never enough to change community attitudes. It is attitudes and practices embedded in our white community that have to change.
Machiavelli pointed out a long time ago that “there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success … than to initiate a new order of things.”
Although the policing reform bills that have been introduced in many jurisdictions and passed in some are welcome, they deal with symptoms, not causes. Even these have failed to pass in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
In my experience, when something has to be done, legislators tend to focus on quick fixes that deal with the immediate symptoms. They are easy to think up. They have intuitive appeal. They don’t deal with complexities or underlying causes. They don’t change anything fundamental. They don’t trample on entrenched toes. They don’t require allocating additional real resources (raising taxes). They are easier to pass.
We shy from solutions that deal with underlying causes and make all of us change our ways. In part, because there is little public understanding of the dynamics and interconnectedness of the economic, social and community practices that are the cause. There is no agreement on the appropriate solutions and little patience for the effort necessary to make the changes that would be effective.
This may be a time when more than the usual can be accomplished. The support for change is broader. People are marching who have never marched before. People who have never spoken out before are speaking out.
More and more of the focus is on voting. Organizations across the country are registering voters. Influential voices from all parts of the community are urging people to vote.
A protester in Phoenix captured the attitude with the handwritten message on her T-shirt, “Today we march, November we vote.”
The power to change the law rests with those we elect to office. Every major decision is made on election day. The day after election day is another beginning.
“The struggle is a never ending process.”
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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