When You Can’t Make Dollars, “Make Change”: A Think Piece

When You Can’t Make Dollars, “Make Change”: A Think Piece

Before we start this journey I would like to introduce two fun facts about myself that will help us throughout this reading.  Number one is, I am a word girl. I have always had a love for words and their meanings. So, this piece will be full of definitions, analogies, and examples. Number two you do not have to agree with  anything I say hereafter.

My goal is not to persuade you, my only goal is to express my opinion and to make myself open enough to listen to others. Now that we’re good, let’s Make Change.

The first concept I want to define is change. The word change, as a verb, means, make different, replace with something else or put on different clothes. These are the definitions we will rely on for the rest of this piece. In Shaun Kings, “Make Change” we are introduced to a man at a pivotal season in his life. A man that is faced with the question of purpose. The question we all strive to answer at some point in our lives, “What am I on this Earth to do?” When King asked himself this question, he was jolted into a world of activism, particularly the Black Lives Matter Movement. A movement that up until a point, no one even considered necessary. As a 21st Century African American, I have even thought my position in this country was secure. Not by myself or my peers, but by our grandparents and aunties and uncles. Rosa Parks had done all the sitting, right? Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken all the speeches, right?

Whether we all had that naïve philosophy or I was alone, the flood of live streaming of African Americans being murdered shocked all of us. This wasn’t just Rodney King being mugged by a group of police officers. These were videos of men and women, girls and boys being gunned down, choked out, and suffocated in broad daylight. This may not have been a new phenomenon but it damn sure wasn’t mainstream until now. Shaun King saw his purpose as heavy, to seek justice for these families. His struggles with this show us the fork in the road that is the Black Lives Matter Movement. Where does activism and change actually meet? When do the lines unblushing and we can feel relief? Kings answer? Never.

History is defined as the branch of knowledge dealing with past events. But who decides the “events”. Who gives the word on which histories will be written, shared, and copied. King presents us with the idea that humanity and our history are on a cycle. We go up, then down, then up, then down, simply put. The more broad explanation for this comes from a German historian Leopold von Ranke. He took on the task of creating a timeline of history chronologically, without missing any twists or turns. From this von Ranke came to one conclusion, humanities evolution is not linear, and it never was. Our species is never always advancing or always declining. We have famines in the sales years that countries gain independence. We see civil wars happening in parallel with pioneering space explorations. Von Ranke’s philosophy was new, Revolutionary even. While Charles Darwin was selling the idea that we are constantly on an uphill crescendo, von Ranke saw it differently.

That is where we meet, “The Dip”. We, as African Americans, have known for a while that our rights and privileges as citizens were subpar to our neighbors. But we lived with it, we created a culture around it, we played with the cards we were dealt. One day, I was watching the news and there was a boy, only 5 years older than myself at the time, that got shot walking home from the store. It was 2012 and my life was becoming flooded with images, news articles, and now videos of young Black Americans taking their last breath, on camera. That is where I believe we are at the end of part one of Shaun King’s Make Change. We are taught the concept of cohabitation. The suggestion that more than one thing can and will be true at any given time. The Black Lives Matter Movement was not started as an exclusion movement, it was never meant to seclude the other colored lives. It was created from that push and pull of purpose that fell onto the shoulders of the African Americans who had previously thought our work was done.

We were wrong.