SOME WHITE AMERICANS who voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election were antiracist. Others probably dubbed Obama the extraordinary Negro, or set aside their racism. If antiracist Blacks could vote for racist Democrats as the “lesser of two evils” over the past few decades, then surely racist Whites could look at the Republican ticket and vote for Obama as the “lesser of two evils.” To claim that a White Obama voter could not be racist would be as naïve (or manipulative) as assuming that a White person with Black friends could not be racist, or that a person with a dark face could not think that dark-faced people were in some way inferior. But White voters did not win the election for Obama, as the postracial headlines implied or declared. They gave him roughly the same percentage of votes (43 percent) they had given his Democratic predecessors after LBJ. Obama’s 10 percent increase in non-White voters over John Kerry in 2004 and the record turnout of young voters won him the presidency of the United States.1
But racist ideas could have easily lost the election for him. What if Obama had been a descendant of American slaves? What if he had not been biracial? What if Obama’s wife looked more like his mother? What if he had not started his lectures to Blacks on personal responsibility? What if Sarah Palin had not mobilized Democrats with her virtual Klan rallies where spectators shouted “Kill him”? What if the Bush Republicans had not had some of the worst approval ratings ever? What if Obama had not conducted what reportedly was the best presidential campaign in history? What if the Great Recession had not sent voters into a panic weeks before the election? Postracial theorists hardly cared about all those forces that had to come together to elect the first Black president of the United States. But when had producers of racist ideas ever cared about reality?2
The notion of a postracial America quickly became the new dividing line between racists and antiracists as Obama took office in 2009. University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson, speaking for antiracists, stated that the country had not yet “come close to achieving the status of ‘post-racial.’” And the evidence was everywhere. The Great Recession reduced the median annual Black household income by 11 percent, compared to 5 percent for Whites. On January 1, 2009, an Oakland transit cop killed twenty-two-year-old Oscar Grant as he lay face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. All those geneticists, Klansmen, anonymous Internet racists, and of course members of the Tea Party—which formed on February 19, 2009—and other segregationists were organizing like there was no tomorrow after the election of Obama. Between 9/11 and that fateful June day in 2015 when Dylann Roof shot to death nine Bible-studying Charlestonians inside the oldest A.M.E. church in the south, White American Nazi-type terrorists had murdered forty-eight Americans—almost twice as many as were killed by anti-American Islamic terrorists. Law enforcement agencies were looking upon these White American terrorists as more dangerous to American lives than anti-American Islamic terrorists. But these White terrorists are not on the radar of the hawks who are endlessly waging their War on Terror. After Charleston, Americans merely engaged in a symbolic debate over the flying of the Confederate flag.3
Barack Obama had to notice this rising tidal wave of segregationism early in his presidency, years before he ever heard the name Dylann Roof. Or maybe he didn’t. Or maybe he did, and thought that to point it out would have been divisive, like Jeremiah Wright. “There probably has never been less discrimination in America than there is today,” Obama told the NAACP on July 16, 2009. “But make no mistake: The pain of discrimination is still felt in America.” On that very day, someone in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called the police after seeing Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. trying to pry open the jammed front door of his home. When Obama commented that the responding White police officer had “acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home,” when he acknowledged the “long history” of racial profiling, the postracialists trounced to stop Obama’s antiracism before it got out of hand. Obama’s “angry” Jeremiah Wright construction had come back to bite him, as similar statements had for Martin Luther King Jr. and W. E. B. Du Bois before him. Obama has “over and over again” exposed himself as “a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” Tea Party darling Glenn Beck told his Fox News audience. “I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”4
It was a remarkable turn of events. During the NAACP speech, Obama lectured about African Americans needing a “new mind-set, a new set of attitudes,” to free themselves from their “internalized sense of limitation,” and rebuked Black parents for contracting out parenting. For this litany of rebukes of millions of Black people, Glenn Beck and the postracialists did not offer a critical word. Apparently, it was fine for Obama to critique millions of Black people. But as soon as he was critical of a single White discriminator, the postracialists pounced.
Months into Obama’s presidency, the postracialists slammed down their new ground rules for race relations: Criticize millions of Black people whenever you want, as often as you want. That’s not racialism or racism or hate. You’re not even talking about race. But whenever you criticize a single White discriminator, that’s race-speak, that’s hate-speak, that’s being racist. If the purpose of racist ideas had always been to silence the antiracist resisters to racial discrimination, then the postracial line of attack may have been the most sophisticated silencer to date.
All these postracialists had no problem rationalizing the enduring racial disparities, the enduring socioeconomic plight of Black people though blaming Black people, on Fox News, in the Wall Street Journal, on The Rush Limbaugh Show, on the Supreme Court, and from the seats of the Republican Party. Defending racist policy by belittling Black folk: that had been the vocation of producers of racist ideas for nearly six centuries, since Gomes Eanes de Zurara first produced these ideas to defend the African slave-trading of Portugal’s Prince Henry. The postracial attacks triggered counterattacks from antiracists, pointing out racial discrimination from Twitter to Facebook, from Hip Hop to Black Studies scholarship, from shows on MSNBC to Sirius XM Progress, and from periodicals like The Nation to The Root, which then triggered counterattacks from postracialists, who called these antiracists divisive and racist. Assimilationists, stuck in the middle, considered themselves the voices of reasonable moderation. They kept up the drumbeat of the ill-conceived allegory of how far the nation had come and how far it still had to go. The actual American history of racial progress and the simultaneous progression of racism still did not suit their ideology.
Through it all, the postracialists and assimilationists failed to silence all those antiracists giving voice to racial discrimination or to make them conform. Antiracists joined the protest squatters representing the 99 percent in the “Occupy” uprising in 2011. They continue to demand reparations, one of the most notable examples being Ta-Nehisi Coates’s feature story in The Atlantic in June 2014. They have fought the progression of racism in the stop-and-frisk policing practices in US cities and in the Republican-engineered disenfranchising policies. Antiracists helped power the unrelenting LGBT fight for equal rights. In the midst of that struggle, Black transgender activist Janet Mock released her memoir, Redefining Realness. Hailed by bell hooks and Melissa Harris-Perry and an all-star lineup of other antiracist voices, Redefining Realness debuted on February 1, 2014, on the New York Times Best-Seller List. Mock’s thrilling and reflective personal quest for womanhood, identity, and love gave readers an opening into the lives and struggles and triumphs of transgender Americans, and especially Black transgender women. “Somewhere along the way, I grew weary of grasping at possible selves, just out of reach. So I put my arms down and wrapped them around me. I began healing by embracing myself through the foreboding darkness until the sunrise shone on my face.” Mock wrote in closing. “Eventually, I emerged, and surrendered to the brilliance, discovering truth, beauty, and peace that was already mine.”5
Antiracists seemed to be protesting everywhere, especially in front of prisons, struggling against what Angela Davis had struggled against for four decades: the racist criminal justice system (and the prison-industrial complex). In 2010, Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander entitled her bombshell best seller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She exposed racial discrimination at every stop in the criminal justice system, from lawmaking to policing practices, to who comes under suspicion, to who is arrested, prosecuted, judged guilty, and jailed. And when Black people leave those jails that are crowded with Black and Brown people, the slavery ends only so new forms of legal discrimination can begin. “A criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind—discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service,” Alexander wrote. “Those labeled criminals can be denied the right to vote.”6
Michelle Alexander exposed the lie of postracial America in The New Jim Crow. But nothing really jump-started the traveling exposition of the postracial lie better than what happened on February 26, 2012, when neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman stared down a trotting Black teen, Trayvon Martin, as if he’d stolen something in Sanford, Florida. Scared, the unarmed teen fled. Zimmerman defied a police dispatcher, chased after Trayvon, and ended the seventeen-year-old’s life. A series of events followed—Zimmerman claiming self-defense, protests, Zimmerman’s arrest, the murder case, the defense portraying Trayvon Martin as a scary thug, Zimmerman being exonerated, and finally, jurors airing their racist justifications as segregationists rejoiced over the verdict. Antiracists were upset, and assimilationists were of two minds. This emotional swing seemed to intensify with each police killing, including those of mentally ill Shereese Francis of New York, twenty-two-year-old Rekia Boyd of Chicago, and twenty-three-year-old Shantel Davis in Brooklyn, all within months of Trayvon Martin’s assassination. On March 9, 2013, two New York police officers shot sixteen-year-old Kimani Gray seven times. The violent protests that followed Gray’s death—and others—provoked another round of debates between the postracial segregationists, who condemned the violent “thugs”; the antiracists, who explained the racist source of the violence; and the assimilationists, who condemned the violent “thugs” and pointed out the discriminatory sources of the violence.
For many antiracists, the term “thug” had become “the accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays.” This was how Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman explained it in early 2014 after he was subjected to the slur. When the Stanford-educated Sherman shouted into the camera, racist Americans did not see an athlete fired up minutes after his “Immaculate Deflection” that won his team the National Football Conference Championship. They saw a “thug,” like the unarmed thugs officers were killing, and the thugs who were violently rebelling in 2013 for Kimani Gray; in 2014 for Staten Island’s Eric Garner and Ferguson’s Michael Brown; and in 2015 for Baltimore’s Freddie Gray. “Thug” was one of many new acceptable ways of calling Black people inferior or “less than.” Other widely used racist slurs and phrases included “ghetto,” “minority,” “personal responsibility,” “achievement gap,” “race card,” “reverse discrimination,” “good hair,” “from the bottom,” “no good Black . . . ,” and “you see, that’s what’s wrong with Black . . .”7
Hearing the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 punched Alicia Garza in the gut. Seeking relief, she pulled out her phone at an Oakland bar. She only got more upset as she read racist messages on her Facebook newsfeed “blaming black people for our own conditions.” Garza, a domestic workers’ advocate, composed a love note for Black people, pleading with them to ensure “that black lives matter.” Her friend in Los Angeles, anti-police-brutality activist Patrisse Cullors, read Garza’s impassioned love note on Facebook and tacked a hashtag in the front. Their tech-savvy friend, immigrant rights activist Opal Tometi, came in and built the online platform, and #Black Lives Matter was born. From the minds and hearts of these three Black women—two of whom are queer—this declaration of love intuitively signified that in order to truly be antiracists, we must also oppose all of the sexism, homophobia, colorism, ethnocentrism, nativism, cultural prejudice, and class bias teeming and teaming with racism to harm so many Black lives. The antiracist declaration of the era quickly leaped from social media onto shouting signs and shouting mouths at antiracist protests across the country in 2014. These protesters rejected the racist declaration of six centuries: that Black lives don’t matter. #Black Lives Matter quickly transformed from an antiracist love declaration into an antiracist movement filled with young people operating in local BLM groups across the nation, often led by young Black women. Collectively, these activists were pressing against discrimination in all forms, in all areas of society, and from myriad vantage points. And in reaction to those who acted like Black male lives mattered the most, antiracist feminists boldly demanded of America to #Say Her Name. Say the names of Black women victims like Sandra Bland. “We want to make sure there is the broadest participation possible in this new iteration of a black freedom movement,” Garza told USA Today in 2015. “We have so many different experiences that are rich and complex. We need to bring all of those experiences to the table in order to achieve the solutions we desire.”8
WHEN WILL THE day arrive when Black lives will matter to Americans? It depends largely on what antiracists do—and the strategies they use to stamp out racist ideas.
The history of racist ideas tells us what strategies antiracists should stop using. Stamped from the Beginning chronicles not just the development of racist ideas, but the ongoing failure of the three oldest and most popular strategies Americans have used to root out these ideas: self-sacrifice, uplift suasion, and educational persuasion.
Racial reformers have customarily requested or demanded that Americans, particularly White Americans, sacrifice their own privileges for the betterment of Black people. And yet, this strategy is based on one of the oldest myths of the modern era, a myth continuously produced and reproduced by racists and antiracists alike: that racism materially benefits the majority of White people, that White people would lose and not gain in the reconstruction of an antiracist America. It has been true that racist policies have benefited White people in general at the expense of Black people (and others) in general. That is the story of racism, of unequal opportunity in a nutshell. But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of White people much more than racism does. It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the early 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the antiracist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle- and low-income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living.
Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self-interest of middle- and upper-income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor Blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans, and Latina/os to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free of racism. The histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latina/o racist ideas; the histories of sexist, elitist, homophobic, and ethnocentric ideas: all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas, and feature some of the same defenders of bigotry in America. Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves.
Historically, Black people have by and large figured the smartest thing we could do for ourselves is to partake in uplift suasion—a strategy as unworkable as White self-sacrifice. Beginning around the 1790s, abolitionists urged the growing number of free Blacks to exhibit upstanding behavior before White people, believing they would thereby undermine the racist beliefs behind slavery. Black people would acquire “the esteem, confidence and patronage of the whites, in proportion to your increase in knowledge and moral improvement,” as William Lloyd Garrison lectured free Blacks in the 1830s.9
The history of racist ideas shows not only that uplift suasion has failed, but that, generally speaking, the opposite of its intended effect has occurred. Racist Americans have routinely despised those Black Americans the most who uplifted themselves, who defied those racist laws and theories that individuals employed to keep them down. So upwardly mobile Black folk have not persuaded away racist ideas or policies. Quite the contrary. Uplift suasion has brought on the progression of racism—new racist policies and ideas after Blacks broke through the old ones.
Everyone who has witnessed the historic presidency of Barack Obama—and the historic opposition to him—should now know full well that the more Black people uplift themselves, the more they will find themselves on the receiving end of a racist backlash. Uplift suasion, as a strategy for racial progress, has failed. Black individuals must dispose of it as a strategy and stop worrying about what other people may think about the way they act, the way they speak, the way they look, the way they dress, the way they are portrayed in the media, and the way they think and love and laugh. Individual Blacks are not race representatives. They are not responsible for those Americans who hold racist ideas. Black people need to be their imperfect selves around White people, around each other, around all people. Black is beautiful and ugly, intelligent and unintelligent, law-abiding and law-breaking, industrious and lazy—and it is those imperfections that make Black people human, make Black people equal to all other imperfectly human groups.
Aside from self-sacrifice and uplift suasion, the other major strategy that racial reformers have used is many forms of educational persuasion. In 1894, a youthful W. E. B. Du Bois believed “the world was thinking wrong about race because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.” Exactly fifty years later, in 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal echoed Du Bois’s teaching strategy in his landmark manifesto for the coming civil rights movement. But instead of teaching White Americans through science, Myrdal suggested teaching them through the media, saying: “There is no doubt, in the writer’s opinion, that a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.”10
Du Bois and Myrdal believed—like abolitionists before them, like racial reformers today—that racism could be persuaded away through presenting the facts. Educational persuasion came in many forms. Educators could teach the facts. Scientists could discover the facts. Lawyers could present the facts in cases for upstanding Black plaintiffs. Sitcoms and movies and novels could portray the facts of upstanding Black folk. At marches and rallies, Black folk could articulate the facts of their sufferings before viewers or listeners or readers. Networks and documentarians and reporters and scholars could present factual spectacles of agonizing Black folk in their own environments suffering under the brutal foot of discrimination.
These many forms of educational persuasion, like uplift suasion, have been predicated on the false construction of the race problem: the idea that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, which lead to racist policies. In fact, self-interest leads to racist policies, which lead to racist ideas leading to all the ignorance and hate. Racist policies were created out of self-interest. And so, they have usually been voluntarily rolled back out of self-interest. The popular and glorious version of history saying that abolitionists and civil rights activists have steadily educated and persuaded away American racist ideas and policies sounds great. But it has never been the complete story, or even the main story. Politicians passed the civil and voting rights measures in the 1860s and the 1960s primarily out of political and economic self-interest—not an educational or moral awakening. And these laws did not spell the doom of racist policies. The racist policies simply evolved. There has been a not-so-glorious progression of racism, and educational persuasion has failed to stop it, and Americans have failed to recognize it.
Ironically, W. E. B. Du Bois abandoned educational persuasion before Gunnar Myrdal’s advocacy of the strategy appeared. In the midst of the Great Depression, Du Bois looked out at the United States from the peak of a colossal mountain of racial facts, partially filled with four decades of his books, essays, petitions, speeches, and articles. “Negro leaders” thought that “white Americans did not know of or realize the continuing plight of the Negro,” he wrote in a 1935 essay. “Accordingly, for the last two decades, we have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the American people. Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved.”11
In the eight decades since Du Bois wrote his essay, antiracist Americans have continued to strive by similar methods to put the essential facts before the American people. There can be no doubt that the producers and defenders and ignorers of racist policies know the facts. And yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved: indifferent to the need to pass sweeping legislation completely overhauling the enslaving justice system; unmoved in pushing for initiatives like fighting crime with more and better jobs; indifferent to calls to decriminalize drugs and find alternatives to prisons; unmoved in empowering local residents to hire and fire the officers policing their communities. They remain for the most part unwilling to pass grander legislation that re-envisions American race relations by fundamentally assuming that discrimination is behind the racial disparities (and not what’s wrong with Black folk), and by creating an agency that aggressively investigates the disparities and punishes conscious and unconscious discriminators. This agency would also work toward equalizing the wealth and power of Black and White neighborhoods and their institutions, with a clear mission of repairing the inequities caused by discrimination.
Lawmakers have the power today to stamp out racial discrimination, to create racial “equality as a fact,” to quote LBJ, if they want to. They have the ability to champion the antiracist cause of immediate equality, echoing those old chants of immediate emancipation. They have the ability to turn their back on the assimilationist cause of gradual equality and the segregationist cause of permanent inequality. But local and federal lawmakers fear the repercussions from campaign donors and voters. They know that the postracialists would reject any sweeping antiracism bill as discriminatory and hateful toward White people just as enslavers and segregationists did before them, even if such a bill would actually benefit nearly all Americans, including White people. If racism is eliminated, many White people in the top economic and political brackets fear that it would eliminate one of the most effective tools they have at their disposal to conquer and control and exploit not only non-Whites, but also both low-income and middle-income White people.
Those Americans who have the power to end racism as we know it, to become tough on racism, and to build the postracial society that the postracialists actually don’t want to see—these people have known the facts throughout the storied lifetime of Angela Davis. Powerful Americans also knew the facts during the lifetimes of Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, and W. E. B. Du Bois. It is the primary job of the powerful to know the facts of America. So trying to educate knowledgeable people does not make much sense. Trying to educate these powerful producers or defenders or ignorers of American racism about its harmful effects is like trying to educate a group of business executives about how harmful their products are. They already know, and they don’t care enough to end the harm.
History is clear. Sacrifice, uplift, persuasion, and education have not eradicated, are not eradicating, and will not eradicate racist ideas, let alone racist policies. Power will never self-sacrifice away from its self-interest. Power cannot be persuaded away from its self-interest. Power cannot be educated away from its self-interest. Those who have the power to abolish racial discrimination have not done so thus far, and they will never be persuaded or educated to do so as long as racism benefits them in some way.
I am certainly not stating that there are no Americans in positions of power who have ever self-sacrificed or been educated or persuaded by Black uplift or facts to end racial disparities in their sphere of influence. But these courageous antiracist powerbrokers are more the exception than the rule. I am certainly not stating that generations of consumers of racist ideas have not been educated or persuaded to discard those racist ideas. But as Americans have discarded old racist ideas, new racist ideas have constantly been produced for their renewed consumption. That’s why the effort to educate and persuade away racist ideas has been a never-ending affair in America. That’s why educational persuasion will never bring into being an antiracist America.
Although uplift and persuasion and education have failed, history is clear on what has worked, and what will one day eradicate racist ideas. Racist ideas have always been the public relations arm of the company of racial discriminators and their products: racial disparities. Eradicate the company, and the public relations arm goes down, too. Eradicate racial discrimination, then racist ideas will be eradicated, too.
To undermine racial discrimination, Americans must focus their efforts on those who have the power to undermine racial discrimination. Protesting against anyone or anything else is as much of a waste of time as trying to educate or persuade powerful people. History has shown that those Americans who have had the power to undermine racial discrimination have rarely done so. They have done so, however, when they realized on their own that eliminating some form of racial discrimination was in their self-interest, much as President Abraham Lincoln chose to end slavery to save the Union. They have also conceded to antiracist change as a better alternative than the disruptive, disordered, politically harmful, and/or unprofitable conditions that antiracist protesters created.
Antiracist protesters have commonly rejected those racist ideas of what’s wrong with Black people that are used to justify the plight of majority-Black spaces and the paucity of Black people in majority-White spaces. The most effective protests have been fiercely local; they are protests that have been started by antiracists focusing on their immediate surroundings: their blocks, neighborhoods, schools, colleges, jobs, and professions. These local protests have then become statewide protests, and statewide protests have then become national protests, and national protests have then become international protests. But it all starts with one person, or two people, or tiny groups, in their small surroundings, engaging in energetic mobilization of antiracists into organizations; and chess-like planning and adjustments during strikes, occupations, insurrections, campaigns, and fiscal and bodily boycotts, among a series of other tactics to force power to eradicate racist policies. Antiracist protesters have created positions of power for themselves by articulating clear demands and making it clearer that they will not stop—and policing forces cannot stop them—until their demands are met.
But protesting racist policies can never be a long-term solution to eradicating racial discrimination—and thus racist ideas—in America. Just as one generation of powerful Americans could decide or be pressured by protest to end racial discrimination, when the conditions and interests change, another generation could once again encourage racial discrimination. That’s why protesting against racist power has been a never-ending affair in America.
Protesting against racist power and succeeding can never be mistaken for seizing power. Any effective solution to eradicating American racism must involve Americans committed to antiracist policies seizing and maintaining power over institutions, neighborhoods, counties, states, nations—the world. It makes no sense to sit back and put the future in the hands of people committed to racist policies, or people who regularly sail with the wind of self-interest, toward racism today, toward antiracism tomorrow. An antiracist America can only be guaranteed if principled antiracists are in power, and then antiracist policies become the law of the land, and then antiracist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the antiracist common sense of the people holds those antiracist leaders and policies accountable.
And that day is sure to come. No power lasts forever. There will come a time when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that they think something is wrong with Black people. There will come a time when racist ideas will no longer obstruct us from seeing the complete and utter abnormality of racial disparities. There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves. There will come a time. Maybe, just maybe, that time is now.