Learning from Our Stories of Resistance

I started the Autobiography of Ida B. Wells today. I bought it two years ago at a used bookstore because I knew of the SF High School of the same name. I had never heard of Ida B. Wells after being an African American Studies Major and getting a MA in Sociology. It's lucky that SF Unified made the decision to not name every school after a dead white guy so that I could stumble upon this woman's legacy of perseverance and resistance. I'm about 20 pages in and already both of her parents have died in a plague, she has started working at 14 to care for her 7 younger brothers and sisters and she's sued the Railroads for forcing her out of a ladies train car for being Black. This is before the GOOD STUFF like her extensive civil rights work and writing career!

There is a reason that we don't hear these stories. 

For every MLK there are countless people who spent their lives working towards justice in little ways and big ways that were/are never shared with the world. It makes us feel like change is impossible, like it's too hard and nobody has done it before.

But it has been done, it continues to be done and we need to start digging up every last story we can find to prove that resistance is ordinary and change is inevitable. 

Hidden Figures did this brilliantly. As much as Katherine Johnson was the main focus of the film I was completely taken with Dorothy Vaughan. She made sure that an entire department of Black women had job security for the future, that had GENERATIONAL impact. She knew that her success was important but she had a department of women looking up to her and she had to take them with her.

We can all move forward if we take care of each other, she understood that.

Every time I watch a new movie or read a new book with people of color at the forefront I am reminded of how few stories of our lives are in the world. I am validated in ways that I didn't think possible, in feelings that I thought were odd, experiences I assumed were just my own. And so I will spend the next 4 years and beyond devouring every last story of ours I can.

I will take solace in stories of love and resistance, of stories of ordinary people living ordinary lives and making their communities better. Then I will take that inspiration and continue to do the work.