Post-George Floyd, Pre-January 6

A look inside the 1776 Unites project

Today I’d like to present a recording that captures part of a meeting held under the auspices of the Woodson Center’s 1776 Unites project in December 2020. (If you want to watch it, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.) It features Robert Woodson himself, along with Carol Swain, Wilfred Reilley, John Sibley Butler, and a handful of others. It wasn’t originally meant to be presented to the public, but it’s something of a time capsule that captures the unsettled and unsettling questions of that period. The unrest of the “Summer of George Floyd” is only a few months in the past. The election has been called for Joe Biden, and we’re in the midst of Donald Trump’s first efforts to overturn the results. None of us know what January 6 has in store.

Almost three years later, we’re still talking about these events. Some of the remarks (including, with all modesty, my own) now seem prescient. As Bob Woodson says, “Racism continues to exist … but it is a problem, it is not the most important problem. The biggest problem is class.” He notes that progressive policies always seem to benefit middle-class and wealthy people the most, and he calls for a renewed attention to the poor and working class. I say that the time is right to call attention to the grieving mothers who have lost children to urban violence. Treating the perpetrators of this violence as victims of “systemic racism” is profoundly backwards and erases the stories of the members of those communities who have a legitimate claim on our sympathy and support. Bob then mentions a project called Voices of Black Mothers United that will bring attention to that very issue.

Bob wasn’t fooling around. He helped to launch Voices of Black Mothers United, and it’s now doing important work to bring attention and aid to the families of victims of urban violence. (You can watch my conversations with founder Sylvia Bennett-Stone here and here.) On the one hand, it’s gratifying to be able to look back and say, almost three years later, that so many of us were right about so many things. On the other hand, being right is not enough. More work is required. In some ways, though, I feel that the wind is at our back. Even some on the left (like Jay Caspian Kang and Tyler Austin Harper) now recognize the wrong-headedness of affirmative action as it’s been practiced. That’s a good sign. Perhaps, three years from now, we’ll be able to look at the fallout from 2020 from a better place, and to view it as an historical phenomenon, because it will be a thing of the past.