Earlier this summer you may have seen or heard of this acceptance speech at the BET Awards by Jesse Williams, an actor on the ABC show Grey's Anatomy:
This speech elicited a variety of reactions from across the pop culture landscape and has only been exacerbated by the tragic events around Alton Sterling's shooting this week.
While many will focus on the larger racial and social implications, the role of police in society, the language used etc. I want to focus on one key line: "We are going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their functions and ours." This is not a new concept but it is a revolutionary concept because it is the same message Jefferson is sending in the passage we are currently looking at: That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. These statements represent a continuity of American thought, that governments must evolve and if they do not then they must be replaced. Call it "Political Darwinism" if you will, survival of the fittest on full display. As Stokely Carmichael ended in his famous Black Power speech "Move over or we're gonna move on over you". So this leads to a critical question, what is the tipping point? How do we know it's time to start over and not just tweak the system we are currently in? How do we reach the "consent" necessary for this and does that even matter? After all, newspaper writer H.L. Mencken once said: "It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause." So what do we do with a country that was born of revolution and yet has the oldest Constitution in the history of the world? Have we changed? If not, is that because of our greatness and the lack of necessity or are there other issues at play? After all the first U.S. government lasted less than 20 years under the Articles of Confederation. Despite their best hopes, the Founding Fathers would never have believed the Constitution would still be in-tact today in 2016, even with amendments. So what makes people revolutionary? The Black Lives Matter group has been fighting a battle against police brutality and a disproportionate amount of African Americans being arrested, profiled and ultimately injured or killed while in police custody. Their tactics have been straight out of the "Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Rights Playbook", non-violent protest, spectacles and empowering speakers to represent them. While it has increased awareness, little has changed when it comes to their goals. The problems they meant to solve are not going away and social media has made the problem even more obvious. Anyone with internet access can see Alton Sterling being shot and killed on demand, a horrifying and desensitizing notion. Especially when you consider that just a generation or two ago the first live murder on television was Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. This gives credence to Malcolm X in his most famous speech "The Ballot or the Bullet" who argued that "liberty or death brought about the freedom of this nation" . "If we want our rights, then we must fight for them". This is a line from the John Adams mini-series but it is not too far removed from what Jesse Williams is saying at the top of this article. Jefferson says that revolution comes when all peaceful alternatives have been exhausted and is justified when securing "safety' and "happiness". I do not want the Black Lives Matter group to turn violent, their entire goal is to stop the violence. It would be tragic to see them befall the same tactics that led to this crisis in the Hammurabi world of "an eye for an eye". On the other hand, the Declaration shows a path of legitimacy towards violence. After all, if revolutions are to be fought for government structures that "shall effect safety and happiness" than that is exactly what Black Lives Matters want. Jefferson claims that revolutions should not be for "light" or "transient" causes. This problem is neither light (death is pretty severe) nor transient (Emmit Till, Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Grey, etc.). Now has every peaceful alternative been reached? That remains to be seen, we do not have the benefit of hindsight with this current American predicament. All we have is the knowledge that American revolutions have been few and far between. Our government, since its violent inception, has been one of the most stable in the modern era. So I guess this begs the question once more, just how revolutionary are you?
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