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Dear Black People, It’s Time We Divest from The American Experiment
“For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” ~ Audre Lorde
There comes a moment in any experiment when the results become clear, when the data can no longer be ignored, when the hypothesis must be rejected.
America has conducted its great experiment in democracy for nearly 250 years, and we, Black people, have been both its unwilling test subjects and its most loyal participants. We have invested our bodies, our minds, our culture, our dollars, our very souls in the hypothesis that this nation could transform itself from a slave republic into a true democracy.
From Reconstruction to Civil Rights, from Obama to George Floyd, from integration to “diversity and inclusion,” we have watched this experiment cycle through its phases — progress, backlash, progress, backlash — each time believing that if we just invested more, participated more, proved ourselves more, the experiment would finally yield different results.
But any scientist will tell you that when an experiment repeatedly fails to produce the desired outcome, it’s time not to adjust the variables, but to question the fundamental premise.
For far too long, we, as Black Americans, have found ourselves waiting — waiting for a moment that feels like it belongs to us. We’ve seized opportunities, only to see them ripped away time and again by the hands of politicians, the weight of biased policies, or the silence of allies unwilling to step up as true co-liberators.
In these moments, especially when corporations are complicit, our response has often been swift: a boycott. But is a boycott enough? Does it dismantle the system that oppresses us, or does it offer only a glimpse of progress — a flicker of change that leaves the foundation intact?
Let me tell you about a moment that cleaved American history in two: Montgomery, Alabama, 1955. In those segregated streets — where every sidewalk, every storefront, nearly every corner marked the boundaries between…
