Some notes on radical revolution

Breaker: Look, Bill, if this is about reliving the 60's, you can forget about it, buddy. The movement is dead.

Strannix: Yes, of course! Hence the name: movement. It moves a certain distance, then it stops, you see? A revolution gets its name by always coming back around in your face.

- Under Siege

With last week's suggestions on how to fix things, they came from two different angles. Authorizing the study on reparations would be a way of taking on structural racism: what is in place systemically, how did it get there, and how do you address it. Reading diverse characters and authors is more for addressing individual racism - not necessarily as a conscious feeling of hatred or superiority, but an ease in accepting that problems created through the system are the sole responsibility of the system's victims.

There is a constant back and forth between those two aspects. As the system enforces black poverty and criminal prosecution, it enforces the mental image of black people as criminal and poor. When people have that mental image in mind, it makes it easier to accept individual elements of that system as acceptable and fair. There is starting to be some momentum, where with copious filmed evidence people are beginning to see that there is a real problem with police brutality, but that acceptance is by no means universal.

Because of that, resolving racism requires addressing it from both ends. Fixing policies is not enough, changing hearts is not enough - it all needs to go together.

There is so much racism built into various institutions (including police roots in antebellum slave patrols) that it is hard to imagine success without a total uprooting of all systems.

I have never seen Under Siege, but I have caught bits of it while flipping channels. The other two bits looked kind of dumb, but that exchange about revolution and movement stuck with me.

When the system is corrupt, it seems perfectly logical to burn it up or tear it down - revolt against the system. It seems logical, but then over and over again you end up with another bad system. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

I suspect that happens because people stay too much the same. Too many people still value having someone to look down on. It is still too common to side with the strongest, even when they are in the wrong.

How we reinvent or replace some institutions will be tricky enough to figure out anyway, but it is also necessary to reinvent ourselves.

The things that I think about and write about will keep going back and forth because of that.