Own.

Thomas Chatterton Williams on the noble reality of daily struggle ...

With a certain critical outlook, then, it has become all but impossible to take “yes” for an answer—to allow for the possibility that the ozone hole can be closed. “We can choose to be sated by more cops in jail, by the cathartic promise of trials and convictions and the suggestion that this system can self-regulate,” Cheney-Rice argued. “Or we can insist that bargaining for mere survival is not enough.” His reaction was typical. Immediately after Chauvin was convicted, Ibram X. Kendi, arguably the most prominent voice on race in America, appeared on CBS. “Is justice convicting a police officer, or is justice convicting America?” he intoned. “The problem is structural. The problem is historic. . . . Justice has convicted America. Now we must put in the time transforming this nation.” And yet the conviction of Derek Chauvin is a measure of justice. Not total justice; that does not exist. His individual punishment does not guarantee that abuses and gross violations of human dignity will never occur again. But it does signal that when they do occur, the system can hold the guilty party to account. It means that the system is not destined to be indifferent to or complicit in the justification of murder. The United States is not a perfect nation, but it has been powerfully altered since the days of Emmett Till, Rodney King, and even Eric Garner. Have we reached the summit? Not even close, and yet we would be deluded not to glance back from time to time to marvel at the plunging landscape.

Too many of us refuse to do that. It is not only that we are stuck, fixated on all that has yet to be perfected. It is that there is a certain intellectual and moral prestige in wallowing in our dissatisfaction: one may be depleted and set upon from all angles, but at least one is not corrupt or stupid. In this view, the system does not and cannot pretend to function, even—perhaps especially—when it is slowly, unceremoniously working. The real shame is that there is no space for the current and quotidian in such a dynamic, only the delayed and utopian. There is no patience for the undramatic, efficient, spiraling ascent of progress. “A minority that has agreed to believe that its life has been transformed for the better . . . is always anxious that it may have been tricked,” Leon Wieseltier observed. “It is easier to believe that the world does not change than to believe that the world changes slowly. But this is a false lucidity.” Not everything that adversely affects me is the product of my racial identity. Not everything that positively affects me is the result of my heteronormative masculine privilege. “A normal existence,” he continued, “is an existence with many causes.” What is powerful enough to deliver us from the incessant torment of being socially conscious is the daily business of living. The groceries have to be purchased and the floor has to be vacuumed. Imagine how exhausting it would be if the world really did require a total remaking in one stroke.

Toni Morrison, though hardly indifferent to the corrosive effects of racism, similarly warned against granting it too much power over our lives. “The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction,” she once remarked.

It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

Morrison’s point was not that we should despair at unending injustice, but that we should ignore it as best we can and do the real work of living—our own work. Racism is a rigged game that one player can never win.

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