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The shoreline near the fishing pier after Virginia Beach, Virginia, reopened, Memorial Day weekend, May 2020
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this edited excerpt.
Heffner: Reimagining this next stage of human existence, what is a realistic aspiration that can achieve the ideals that we have not been able to achieve in recent decades and even centuries?
Fort: I actually want to take a step back before we get into what’s realistic or not, and I actually think that what’s so remarkable about this moment is that it gives us an opportunity to completely re-imagine what it would be like to live into the world. What it would look like for us to not have to work to live.
We have so many people who are currently unemployed. So many people who are struggling to eat. We have so many children who are struggling to receive their education because they’re hungry or because they’re crowded in dilapidated housing. So what would it look like for us to back away from what’s realistic, but to think about what’s possible.
In the heyday of slavery, it was not realistic to think about black people being born outside of plantations. And so we have to remember that. We have to remember that the best of what’s happened in the world did not happen because it was realistic. James Baldwin says that I know what I’m asking of you is impossible. But then he said, the impossible is the least that we can demand. In a world that’s marked by so much oppression, a part of what happens is, is that it limits our imagination.
I’m reading this really cool book called The Body Keeps The Score: It’s about trauma and the body and the mind. And it talks about how people who are traumatized oftentimes have this assault on our imagination on thinking about what might be possible. So I actually want to start there. I want to think about what does a world look like where everyone has what they need to thrive?
What does a world look like where no child not only goes hungry, but has the opportunity not only to go to a decent school, but to experience the world where they can go to the park and not be killed by a police officer like Tamir Rice was or can walk down the street like Michael Brown did and eventually attend college, which he was supposed to do two days later. Or who can sleep on their auntie’s couch, like Aiyana Stanley Jones in peace and not be raided and eventually shot and killed at, I believe, seven years old.
Then beyond that, how do we think about thriving and flourishing? I don’t want to fight for a world where we’re just making it. I don’t want to fight for a world where my kids or our kids just don’t get killed by police. I want a world where they can thrive, where they can imagine, where they can think about what’s possible, and actually act on that without being so bombarded with questions of police brutality. So bombarded with the fear of not making it home safely. So I want to think about that. Now, in terms of what’s realistic…
Heffner: You said what’s humane ought to be realistic.
Fort: That it ought to. But in reality we’re fighting against hundreds of years of history. We’re not only fighting against what happened to George Floyd. We’re not only fighting against what happened to Brianna Taylor. We’re fighting against hundreds of years of oppression, racial oppression, class oppression, gender oppression, so on and so forth.
That’s a remarkable thing to remember when we ask these questions of what’s realistic. Well, you know, we’re dealing with hundreds of years of oppression and a lot of people want us to figure that out in a couple of minutes. That’s unfair and I think that we should have the room and space to experiment, to play, to try, to fail, to get back up again, and to keep asking these same questions.
I want to think about what does a world look like where everyone has what they need to thrive?
Heffner: As someone personally affected by this pandemic and seeing communities across the country, but in particular, the disproportionate effect on black and brown communities that also ought to factor in, into what is realistic and what is a humane public policy that values each human life the same way.
The reality of this pandemic and COVID is that we don’t have equal rights. We don’t have an equal right to healthcare. So I wonder personally how that factors into your assessment of what we should be driving towards now?
Fort: With that said imagination needs to be coupled with will and needs to be coupled with strategy. I don’t want to make it seem as if imagination alone is what we need. It’s a crucial part because it actually lets us know what’s possible. It lets us know what’s possible.
Those of us who are interested in changing the world, people also have imaginations that are quite cruel. People imagined black people in slavery. So that’s a side note. But we do need to think about what it takes to actually actualize our dreams.
Activists are doing a remarkable job at that. They’re thinking through, for example, what does it mean to have safety in our communities without not only police violence, but without the role of policing at all, which in many ways is designed to collect, to protect public, to protect private property and manage inequality. So we see activists, we see protestors, we see community people trying to figure out exactly how to do this.
Another example, in the midst of people who are struggling to eat, who are struggling to make ends, meet, struggling, to feed their children, struggling to have education for their seven-year-old or their high school student, we have all of these mutual aid groups that are popping up all across the country.
That is a very real life example of people who normally do not have the resources at scale to do what the government could do are still figuring out ways to protect one another to care for one another, to learn each other’s names, to build relationships that are not predicated on exploitative labors.
I don’t have to meet you just because we happen to work at the same job, but I get to meet you because we live near each other and because we have a common interest in taking care of one another and each other’s families. So I think there’s some very practical steps that do need to be taken. I think this experience has showed us the fault lines of democracy.
Heffner: It may also not be new in the deliberate malice on the part of an administration that’s denied critical services to the populations most suffering.
Fort: I think that it’s like saying that the sky is blue. It’s like saying that water is wet. If you just open your eyes and you’d be honest about what you feel. We know that we are under a misleadership that in many ways does not care, not only about black people, but almost anyone other than his own interests.
And it’s not just Donald Trump, it’s governors and other establishment politicians across the country who are governing their states in ways that are completely inhumane, that are cruel, that are killing people, and so blood is actually on their hands.
