It Is MLK Day. Do Not Despair. This Year Especially, We Have Work To Do.
Sherrilyn Ifill
Jan 19, 2025
With delicious anticipation, we imagined it. The first Black woman president, being sworn into office by the first Black woman Supreme Court Justice on Martin Luther King Day. It was a very particular, powerful, vindicating dream. Especially for “the 92%,” especially - the Black women who had worked hard, stood ten-toes-down for democracy, demanding to be seen – flexing our economic and organizing power over decades to arrive at this moment – there was to be sweet satisfaction in the confirmation of our ascendant political power.
But this was not meant to be. In what seems a cruel irony – the candidate who, in his racism, his misogyny, his rapacious cruelty and indecency, stands for everything we have stood and worked against – will instead be inaugurated as President on King Day this year. The disappointment, the insult even, feels profound and bitter for tens of millions of Americans who believed that voters in this country would turn resoundingly away from fascism and towards democracy.
Rather than focusing on the disappointment, I have come to another way of looking at where this country finds itself on Martin Luther King Day 2025. In fact, I have come to see how critical it is for us to prove, this year especially, that we have truly absorbed the work and words of Dr. King. King Day always calls on us to challenge ourselves and our country, and this year is no different. In fact this year demands that we honor Dr. King’s work and his unceasing belief and demand that we do the work of confronting the truth that lies at the heart of this country and the truth of our own hearts, as prerequisites to building and sustaining a nation that would resemble “the beloved community.” The dream of the historic inauguration so many of us imagined today would have truly been a dream. But dreams are for those who have the luxury of sound sleep. The work of democracy building is fueled by snatches of rest and oblivion. We must be ever watchful.
The dream we imagined for this day might have lulled our country into a deeper slumber. It may have encouraged us to believe that the disease so deeply encoded in America’s DNA could be overcome without the kind of reckoning and confrontation with truth that Dr. King so powerfully demanded of this country more than 50 years ago. We might have lied to ourselves and allowed too many of our allies – those who insist that it is not “strategic” to talk about racism and misogyny too much, those who continue to insist that it is really “class not race” despite all evidence to the contrary (and as though the two are not fundamentally entwined) - to dominate public discourse with a watered-down narrative of reconciliation. Those who are always anxious to absolve our country of a past it has never truly confronted, and those who refuse to accept that the work of holding at bay the dangers of white supremacy lies at the core of democracy work in this country, might have guided our country away from seeing that any victory would be short-lived.
https://sherrilyn.substack.com/p/it-is-mlk-day-do-not-despair-this