Have you ever heard people say that as the older generation of racists dies out, racism will die out too? If you look around at the most violent and radicalized racists in our time and notice their youth, you know that racism is not going anywhere without our deliberate and committed efforts to defeat it. Many of the folks you see being violent and hateful in the photos of the Civil Rights movement are not today’s perpetrators. But they taught their children and grandchildren. The ideology of white supremacy is not dying out as some expected.
It seems like every week we hit a new low that puts an asterisk on any progress we feel we’ve made with regards to racism in this country. Voter suppression becoming law in many states, bans and noise about anything “woke” from school curricula, and incidents like the one in Aledo, TX where students staged a mock “slave trade,” remind us that ugly history is ever-present.
In a speech at Oberlin College in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “We must help time.”
“Let nobody give you the impression that the problem of racial injustice will work itself out. … Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.”
– from “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now as in the 60s, “we must help time.”
I believe that’s what all of us who are committed to homeschooling woke are doing. We’re helping time. By being intentional about helping our children take a sober, truthful look at history, we are helping time. We are not going to sit around and wait for our society and our communities to get better on their own. We are going to equip our kids to know better, do better and create a better future. Because we must help time.
I feel this urgency and calling in my own homeschooling life. And it’s the fuel behind every new project I launch. Including merch.
Everyone who sees this shirt wants to know, “what does that say?” and after you tell them, they want to know, “what does that mean?” It’s a great easy conversation starter and spread this idea. We must help time.
Tell me, besides #homeschoolingwoke, in what other ways can we “help time”?
Cheering you on,
Delina