*This article was written by Director for Race and Democracy Jarvis Williams.
The future of racial justice work is fraught with challenges in this moment. Therefore, Horizons’ Chief Network Weaver, Julia Roig and I spent the entire year of 2024 thinking together and trying to identify ways to support racial justice practitioners and to break down siloes with pro-democracy organizers. Throughout the year, emerging conversations from rising authoritarianism to toxic polarization were all competing to both inform and inspire citizens to think and act differently. The logic of these helpful conversations is relatively simple, what we have been doing of late isn’t helping our political culture to thrive. Therefore, our political culture must change to protect and preserve a desirable political future. And the change we need requires us to become more politically engaged and relationally emphatic.
Admittedly, our political culture seems highly fragmented. There is no shortage of issues that require immediate attention. Some citizens are struggling with accessing clean water to drink, others are worried that surveillance technology is compromising too much of their freedoms, still others are concerned that our political institutions are incapable of delivering reliable services to citizens across the country. These issues, from concerns about the economy to the emerging regularity of climate disasters, all have grand implications for our future political aspirations. And these issues seem to require that we shed the skin of our perceptual differences and plunge into the work of rebuilding our political future. But we are still struggling to identify pathways to better align our future strivings.
In our current political moment, confronting our political culture without falling prey to the cultural appetite of forgetting about race is becoming much more challenging. The desire to advance the political culture by forgetting our racialized past is one of the key cultural practices that practitioners constantly address. Therefore, the leadership at Race Forward presciently entitled their conference series “Facing Race.” And the Horizons Project partnered with this sentiment and offered a few tools on ways to “face race” with futures thinking approaches.
While many conversations are properly concerned with where our political culture is headed in this moment, racial justice practitioners must constantly, yet cautiously, interrogate where our political culture has been. In fact, the diagnosis of our political past is fundamental for charting a pathway to where we are desirous to go. Simply put, we must look back to move forward. And when we conceal our racially significant past, the plausibility of a just future becomes more misleading.
The practice of appropriately recognizing the entanglement of race and democracy animates the agency of racial justice practitioners. The Sankofa bird, derived from the Akan people of Ghana, serves as a prominent symbol of this practice. Of course, every culture has a practice of looking back at their historical record to gain perspective and insight for their collective journey ahead. For example, legal practitioners look to the founding documents and founding citizens to craft their legal opinions. Thus, this practice isn’t novel to our political culture, but looking back at the practice of racial discrimination has never been an easy undertaking.
The main idea of our breakout session at Race Forward’s conference, held in early December in St. Louis, Missouri, was to advance the point that the racial justice future we seek is inexplicably entangled with the past of racial injustice we share. Therefore, racial justice practitioners are constantly interrogating the racial story being perpetuated in our political culture and questioning the reliability of that story to appropriately explain our past and equip our present to “face race” together. It is important to clarify that recognizing our entangled past does not necessarily condemn our present to unavoidably repeat the misdeeds of the past. In fact, it does just the opposite. It actually provides more reliable intelligence. This recognition allows us to readily identify historically significant patterns compromising our collective future much more clearly.
Recognizing this entanglement allows us the opportunity to avoid logical leaps hiding in our political conversations and organizing orientations when we think about race and its functionality within our political culture. Recognizing this entanglement allows us to reinterpret generations of misinformation and disinformation heralded as truth on racialized issues. Recognizing this entanglement allows us to accurately perceive the distance between good intentions and just outcomes. And recognizing this entanglement allows us the opportunity to reevaluate information and strategies that compel blind allegiance towards racially ambiguous notions of progress without demonstrations of integrous reconciliation and financial reparations.
The race and democracy work at Horizons anchors itself in this recognition and strives to demonstrate something different in our work. Therefore, we ask how organizations are specifically recognizing this entanglement in their work. In truth, how organizations apply history has proven to be a useful indication of their recognition. Similarly, we ask how their recognition guides their strategic partnerships. In effect, how organizations understand the past serves as a great indication of who they will strive to partner with in the future. Horizons is extremely clear that demonstrating healthy partnerships anchored in racial justice commitments and practices are essential. And we ultimately try and identify what actions are being advanced within organizations and throughout the ecosystem to concretely advance racial justice.
One useful tool to balance the competing demands of the past, the present, and the future is the futures triangle. During our workshop Julia Roig described how this triangle is a useful tool for exploring what’s possible from different angles. Several organizations and leaders found this framework extremely helpful as a tool to articulate the way their thinking accounts for these competing demands. During our session, we offered participants a chance to use this tool to think about the educational challenge confronting the nation at this moment. And the readouts and follow-up conversations were astounding. People found the tool illuminating, intellectually stimulating and clarifying, and emotionally regulating.
The Horizons team looks forward to continuing to share resources and approaches and to partner together to advance our shared goals in the months ahead.