As of the drafting of this blog post, the Nation just celebrated Martin Luther King,Jr.’s birthday. This country has come a long way, in terms of publicly recognizing and honoring a handful of People of Color (POC) for their extraordinary visibility, insights, and humanitarian work. This is to say that this country still has a great deal of work to do in order to recognize the many who have been toiling away to serve the greater good for all of humanity. It is not enough to recognize a few specific and well-known personalities once a year, or to dedicate space in textbooks to celebrate the work that required whole and expansive communities of unknown activists to achieve. These unknown activists/change makers were and are, like most of us, regular people committed to positive change. Engagement that highlights policies, practices, and beliefs that stand in the way of true equity for all, and that bring about awareness leading to positive movement(change), gains momentum over time. Rarely are these grassroots efforts initiated or sustained on large-platforms, by well-known people; yet, we have a habit of reducing the magnitude of what took hundreds/thousands of ordinarily valuable people to carry out over years(continuing into the present) to a few – regardless of skin color,religious/spiritual leanings, or gender. Consider this: less visible consistent acts that bring about positive human change occur daily by people who, without them/us, grandiose visions and movements could not be possible, as momentum builds and spreads, progressively, among the people.
Note: This post was written on January 23, 2019.