By: Brijea Daniel (’20), Staff Writer
It’s August 28th, 1963. More than 200,000 Americans have gathered in Washington D.C. for the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. will deliver the iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. This march is an act of defiance that will be written as one of the biggest protests in American history and it is happening as we speak, right outside your front door. Now is the time to take a stand and march for your rights; now is the time for action, and you know it.
You also know that you can’t participate even if you wanted to. You have a condition that severely limits your mobility, and you are forced to watch from your television and miss out on an event that changed the course of history. Since your condition is not physically obvious, your peers repeatedly make snide comments about your absence from the march. You continually hear to criticism aimed at those who choose to sit out of protests, and you begin to resent your inability to stand on the front lines.
Now, 50 years later, we are still protesting for our rights, and the same obstacles to activism exist. Disabilities are just one of the many reasons that some black people find it difficult to be present for protests. Social anxiety, work and poverty are all viable reasons to choose to not stand on the front lines of a protest. Not wanting to physically protest in order to protect your own emotional wellbeing is also a reason in itself. Mental and emotional health is crucial yet often overlooked within the black community.
Choosing to miss out on a protest does not mean that you lack rage or a revolutionary spirit. It can mean that you are physically restricted, or unable to due to unavoidable variables. It can also mean that you are aware of the many forms of advocacy and activism and want to fight for your rights in a different way.
It is important to recognize how inconsiderate it can be to criticize someone’s presence, or lack thereof, when you have no idea what that person is going through mentally, physically, or emotionally.
For instance, my own grandmother suffers from osteopetrosis (also known as “stone bone”), a very rare bone condition that makes her bones denser than normal. Despite being very hard, her bones were considerably easy to break. From the outside, my grandma looked like a physically healthy child. She chose to keep her condition a secret from her peers in order to live a normal, functioning life.
When the March on Washington took place, my grandmother was 15. As much as she wanted to join her friends in making history, she physically couldn’t. She repeatedly dealt with criticisms from her peers concerning her lack of presence at the events. One time, a peer even assumed that she didn’t march because she didn’t care about the Civil Rights Movement due to her very light complexion.
To combat her feelings of inadequacy, my grandma started to bring water and homemade snacks to those who marched for longer periods of time. She also wrote columns to express her anger and exhaustion, all while dealing with the snide comments from those who did not know and couldn’t possibly understand.
Because most black people share a common goal in this fight for human rights, it becomes easy to forget that we are not a monolith. We cannot forget that many of us suffer from mental and physical disabilities. We cannot forget that being on the front lines can be emotionally debilitating for many of us. We cannot ignore the journalists, the donators, the artists, and the musicians that use their talents to voice their exhaustion and anger in a way that makes them comfortable.
There is no place for division in this fight, especially over something as trivial as the way we use our talents to protest for what we believe in. What matters is the active decision we make to continue to fight.
