Making Real the Beloved Community

As we close Black History Month, a period that highlights and honors the contributions of Black Americans to our collective history, I think about the complexity, the pains, the joys, the trauma, and the triumph that is the Black experience in the United States. Taking in all the images, stories, and commentary, I was reminded by journalist Michael J. Harriot that if we’re looking for notes on how to stop an oppressive regime on U.S. soil without resorting to violence, we don’t have too far to look. Rewind the tape 75 years and look to Black people. Black people have shown us that the powerful bend in response to pressure, that we can change the course of history through nonviolence and civil disobedience.

Since our nation’s founding, we have seen a cycle on repeat: Proponents of multiracial democracy make progress toward their vision, and that progress is followed by white supremacist backlash that is fierce and violent. The cycle looks like enslavement followed by the Black flourishing of the first Reconstruction, then followed by the violence and oppression of lynching and Black codes of the Jim Crow era. It looks like the victories of the Civil Rights Movement (often referred to as the “Second Reconstruction”) followed by the era of mass incarceration, followed by the election of the country’s first Black president and the swelling of the Black Lives Matter movement marked political progress, then followed by the rise of authoritarianism. 

While this moment feels unprecedented, we have been here before, and the abolitionists and civil rights leaders of old showed us how to win. I’m heartened by these past victories. We must encourage people to be on the right side of history. No one can be on the sidelines, and we all have a role to play in the future we want to create. 

During this time of racist backlash, censorship, fearmongering, hatred, and rising authoritarianism, advocates must stand firm on the shoulders of those who faced even more daunting odds in the past, and on the principles that Dr. King characterized as a “beloved community.” King defined the Beloved Community as more than political participation, more than civil and voting rights. He articulated a concept of radical citizenship that included a living wage, decent housing, health care, quality education, and the freedom to live in peace.

A revitalized reconstructionist vision of the United States needs to include free and fair access to the ballot, good jobs with thriving wages, a fair and equitable tax system, sustained investments in public goods like affordable housing and care. The creation of these conditions will enable people to fully express their economic and political power.

Walking the road to the beloved community

We must now center the Beloved Community by developing and practicing new norms, new institutions, and new forms of power

How do we move from authoritarianism to reconstruction? How did our forebearers do this impossible work in the face of violence and fear? Their moral courage should inspire, and their bravery in action and in ideas must be lessons to us all. They paved the way with every march, sit-in, and stance of nonviolent protest. The footprints of their resistance are a guide. Their approach is resonant in a conversation between Paulo Freire (a liberatory Brazilian philosopher, educator, and activist) and Myles Horton (a white American who grew up poor in West Tennessee and whose Highlander School was an incubator of the Civil Rights Movement). In a conversation between the two, recorded at the twilight of their rich lives, Freire quotes poet Antonio Machado, who wrote: 

Caminante, son tus huellas 
el camino y nada más; 
Caminante, no hay camino, 
se hace camino al andar.

Traveler, your footprints 
are the only road, nothing else. 
Traveler, there is no road; 
you make your own path as you walk.

There is no time to waste. We must now center the Beloved Community by developing and practicing new norms, new institutions, and new forms of power, a vision I shared in my published essay in Nonprofit Quarterly on what it will take for our nation’s third reconstruction.

Reject divisive beliefs, embrace inclusive values

Transforming social norms is the most important and most difficult task required to bring about a lasting reconstruction. Norms are sticky—those who attempt to change them often fail—and they shape our policies, our institutions, and our daily practices. Yet our norms have transformed drastically over the course of U.S. history. Take, for example, the logic of race that shapes society. At the founding of our nation, our norms sprung from a logic of white supremacy and an overt, naturalized racism. A logic of segregation followed enslavement, and norms of covert racism and an embrace of multiculturalism both followed the Civil Rights Movement. 

Today, we see resurgent white supremacy and patriarchy. Norms that are nationalist, individualist, and othering are now shaping individual interaction, institutions, and policy. It has become normal to center white anxiety and grievance over empirical reality and the experience of other groups.

What will it look like to build the norms of the Beloved Community? At the Beloved Community’s core is a social contract that says that all people have—by right of their innate humanity—freedom from deprivation and the ability to experience dignity, peace, and joy. 

In our current moment of upheaval and discontent, there is space for new narratives to settle in as resonant truths and for those truths to take hold as new norms. Now is the time to begin living by that new social contract. We are seeing the people of Minnesota do just that, and we must aim for no less. We must demand the eradication of white supremacy and ground our interactions in a logic of equity, belonging, shared fates, collective thriving, abundance, self-determination, and greater purpose.

Create people-centered institutions

The norms of the Beloved Community provide a solid foundation for structuring our institutions. Looking back, we see that our institutions have never served us all. From the overt racism of slavery, white manhood suffrage, and Jim Crow to the “race blindness” that has structured our educational, health care, financial, and criminal legal institutions over the last 50 years, our institutions have served to reproduce and magnify the inequality that is present in our country.

Over the past year, we’ve seen institutions quickly fall in line, complying with the demands and adopting the norms of the current administration. This is a reflection of the current state of institutions: privatized, co-opted, and captured. 

What do the institutions of the Beloved Community look like, and how do we walk the path to them? They look like structures and systems where the relationship between corporations and government is transformed so that institutions serve citizen and consumer interests, not the other way around. It looks like money out of politics, co-governance and expansive voting rights, workplace democracy, and ultimately a more representative and accountable government.

Even as the oligarchic power structure (the tech bros and corporate behemoths who both respond to and direct government) has a stranglehold on institutions at the federal level, states and localities are walking the path to the Beloved Community. They are setting the stage for public banks. They are establishing small-donor public financing programs. They have developed co-governance models that foster direct democracy and citizen leadership and participation. We do not need to—nor can we—wait to build the institutions of a Third Reconstruction. That innovation is happening in our communities, being proffered by the people—if only we would heed their brilliance.

Build governing power for the people

Doing all the preceding things will allow us to focus on building real people power. Over the past 250 years, we have seen power held and hoarded by the elite: white men, landowners, the wealthy, monied interests. Nevertheless, we’ve also seen it held and exercised by organized everyday people: abolitionists, suffragists, members of the Civil Rights Movement, the labor movement, and more.

Today, we are seeing the consolidation of authoritarian power in the executive branch, fueled and funded by the rich elites and the politically powerful. The power they hold is formidable, but we can take it back, and the past instructs us how to do it. 

Here at Dēmos, we see the path to that power clearly. How do we know? Ask Black people.  

Today, we must organize—on the doors, at the workplace, in our communities, and even within philanthropic circles. Organizing is indeed a tool to take power back, but it is also how we build a new kind of power—the power of the Beloved Community. This is a power held by the people, where the people write the rules and make decisions. Here at Dēmos, we see the path to that power clearly. It is a critical component to winning; it is a proven recipe. How do we know? Ask Black people.