I think what we’re experiencing right now is a sort of marathon of cognitive dissonance, in the way that is reflective of the Black experience as a w… - Clint Smith

I think we tend to have this sort of bifurcated view and overly simplistic view of, like, “Oh, the people in the North were the good guys, and people in the South were the bad guys.” But there were a lot of people in the North, and, as I talked about, in New York City, who were deeply committed to the perpetuation and existence of slavery in the South, because it was beneficial for them economically, it was beneficial for them politically, it was beneficial for them socially. And it was in line with how they understood the role of enslaved people and Black people in this country. They might not have wanted to have owned enslaved people themselves, but they most certainly did not believe in abolition, or they most certainly did not think that they wanted something to prevent the massive influx of capital that they were receiving from continuing to flow into their hands.

I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn't simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn't they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy; it illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, in the most brutal circumstances, attain superhuman heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, the people who maintained it. In overly mythologizing our ancestors, we forget an all-too-important reality: the vast majority were ordinary people, which is to say they were people just like everyone else. This ordinariness is only shameful when used to legitimate oppression. This is its own quiet violence.

The Voting Rights Act was only signed 55 years ago. Tonight I'm thinking about all the Black folks in Georgia who have lived on both sides of it. Who voted in this election and who remember a time when they wouldn't have been able to. It wasn't that long ago. Not at all.