Tending to the Work of Just Peace
“There are Black people in the future.”
The first time I read this quote by artist Alisha B. Wormsley, my reaction was “of course.” My next thought was what I think Wormsley wanted: “But why don’t we see them?” I am a fan of speculative fiction, which includes science fiction and other futurist genres. There is a hope for “what could be” in those works: the potential for moral imaginations to become moral realities. Yet, Wormsley’s art was a reminder that what we consider a just future could not be just if it perpetuated our deep systems of inequity to their absurdist conclusions.
The Star Wars franchise has Black characters that are criminals, caricatures, and bit players. When a Black character seems poised for something profound, they are sidelined in the story. Star Trek is often lauded for representations of racial equity in the original run in the 1960s. It has also been criticized for shifting racial stereotypes onto alien species. These shows can never quite break away from the biases that we have today, even as they imagine their futures.
Yet, a just peace demands that we think beyond where we are now to where we could be and then create that society where our successes are intertwined.
As we work toward this state, we unveil those overlapping systems that have kept marginalized communities marginalized. To attack one system is to invite backlash from them all. These are systems of power that want to preserve themselves, so they are structured in ways that create the illusion of proximity to power, inspiring marginalized communities to battle each other to preserve the systems. I am reminded of a remark by Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” I do not know where we are in the transition from the old to the new, only that we need a “new” that does not need to be remade as quickly as we make it.
Cultivating a just peace means learning core principles from bad acts, not just saying the bad acts should not be repeated. The case of Star Trek is instructive. It recognized that racism is bad but not the principle that discrimination is bad. In the decades since it first aired, new iterations of the show have grappled with the principle of discrimination rather than just the acts of racism. As a society, we look at large-scale loss of human life, caused by other humans, and continuously say these events are bad and we should not do them. I wonder what our society would look like if we took the principle that all humans deserve a life of dignity seriously. I would hope that we would not wait for the next mass loss of human life to be finished to say it was bad, and instead ask what enables us to take life.
Cultivation is a process that takes time. The systems that affect us and the cultural exclusion we take as normal are not the way things have to be. They are simply the way things are. They grew over time so that they obscure our vision. We must clear our sight, cut through what hinders us, and lay out a new way of being. That work is generational and is one that must constantly be tended to protect from encroachment of what was there before, from aberrations that organically emerge. Identifying what is wrong now is only one step in the work that needs to be done. The harder work takes time and must be collaborative. We must understand that what works in one context will not work in another; environments are different.
Particularities are important. The examples illuminate the principle. Antisemitism is different from sexism is different from racism is different from ableism is different from classism is different from. . . . And in those differences, we see the commonality of dehumanization, oppression, and marginalization. Because I recognize my personal stake in combatting Islamophobia and racism, I know that antisemitism and sexism must also be opposed. They are specific manifestations of broader tendencies. The languages of hate, of separation, and of “othering” are the languages that lead to laws that make discriminatory fantasies a reality and make it so much easier to hurt each other. A just peace is recognizing that my success is tied to yours and structuring society so that we are reminded of our connection in real and tangible ways. Perhaps then, when we read the quote, “There are Black people in the future,” it will not be an indictment, but a matter of fact.
by Hussein Rashid, assistant dean for Religion and Public Life