As we wind down the Clapback, we do so with deep gratitude.
For us at Black Innovation Alliance, the last 90 days has been a walk of faith – a journey that we’ve embarked upon with the support of our membership, our board, our partners and our staff.
When we decided to launch the Clapback, we didn’t have a lot of big goals about what we’d accomplish or how people would react.
We simply thought it important to stand up and speak out. Not just in response to the frivolous lawsuit filed against Fearless Fund, but also the consistent backsliding related to issues of racial justice – from failure to reinstate the Voting Rights Act to the Supreme Court deeming Affirmative Action in university admissions unconstitutional.
As we guessed, conditions have only worsened since launching the Clapback. Based on a survey released last month by the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals, “more than 80% of executives with a role in corporate responsibility have either changed the language they use to talk about their work or cut down on external communications about their efforts”.
How can we effectively address racial inequality if we can’t even name it?
This is the battle of the moment.
The good news is that we do not have to fight alone. And we are not beginning from zero. We represent just the current leg in a generations’ long race for racial justice in this country.
In times like this, there are few voices that ring clearer than James Baldwin – one of the greatest writers America has ever produced.
Here are 17 quotes from Brother Baldwin to steady us for the fight ahead, and remind us that justice is on our side.
1.
2.
3.
“Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.”
4.
“It comes as a great shock around the age of five, or six, or seven, to discover that the country to which you have pledged allegiance along with everyone else has not pledged allegiance to you.”
5.
“If any white man in the world says give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing – word for word – he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be any more like him.”
6.
“You have somehow to begin to break out of all of that and try to become yourself. It’s hard for anybody, but it’s very hard if you’re born black in a white society.”
7.
“Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”
8.
“I envisage a world which is almost impossible to imagine in this country. A world in which race would count for nothing.”
9.
“The question of colour hides the graver questions of the self and that’s why the whole thing is so hard to overcome and why It’s so dangerous for our society.”
10.
“Black power frightens them. White power doesn’t frighten them. Stokely is not, you know, bombing a country out of existence. Nor menacing your children. White power is doing that.”
11.
“[This revolution] is for Negroes to liberate themselves and their children from the economic and social sanctions imposed on them because they were slaves here.”
12.
“What [Stokely Carmichael] is suggesting that frightens the American white people is that the Black people in this country are tied to subjugated people everywhere in the world.”
13.
“We have to make our own definitions and begin to rule the world that way because kids white and black cannot use what they have been given.”
14.
“It’s a very mysterious endeavor, isn’t it. And the key is love.”
15.
(In an interview with Robert Penn Warren) “In order to accommodate me, in order to overcome so many centuries of cruelty and bad faith and genocide and fear, all the American institutions and all the American values, public and private, will have to change. The Democratic Party will have to become a different party, for example.”
16.
“The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or my citizenship, or my right to live there, how is it conceivably a question now?”
17.
“Since we live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal, I have been making as much noise as I can.”
On this Thursday, December 7th @ 3P EST, we are convening everyone who signed the pledge to help us commemorate the close of the Clapback campaign and explore the right, next step in advancing the cause for economic justice in our time.
It’s still not too late.
Sign up by December 6th and we’ll send you an invite to join us then.
In Solidarity,
Black Innovation Alliance
It’s not about “We Shall Overcome”, but rather WE ARE OVERCOMING.
And the journey continues. If you haven’t joined the Clapback, sign up here. On December 7th @ 3P EST, we are convening the signatories of the Clapback pledge to debrief from the last several months together and imagine a bright way forward.
