In a time when Donald Trump risks moving our country closer to war, the lessons from the "No Kings" rallies become more urgent. Along with thousands of others, I marched in Louisville, Ky., the city where Black protesters demanding justice for Breonna Taylor helped ignite a fire that led to the racial reckoning of 2020. I couldn’t help but think of those marches as I walked through the city a couple of weeks ago, and I marveled at how I have never witnessed anything quite like what I was now seeing: Downtown Louisville filled with white people seeking a redemptive revolution. And it was beautiful.
When it comes to the work of social change, there is power in division — particularly when it is white people who are divided. This month marks my 20th anniversary investing in the work of racial justice. During my first 10 years, I focused on frontline activism with issues ranging from education to health, housing, immigration reform and faith-based organizing. My second decade was largely spent researching and writing about the history and evolution of American ideas on race, religion and politics. Due to my time living and working in economically impoverished Black and brown communities, my perspective is often quite different from those of either my liberal or conservative white friends.
But what I saw in Louisville at No Kings testified to the fact that the white consensus that has held our nation in bondage is shattering — and every time white consensus shatters, it opens the door for revolutionary changes.
From politics to religion, I have often found that white liberal and conservative assumptions and convictions are more in keeping with each other than the Black and immigrant communities that took me under their wings, a phenomenon I refer to as white consensus. But what I saw in Louisville at No Kings testified to the fact that the white consensus that has held our nation in bondage is shattering — and every time white consensus shatters, it opens the door for revolutionary changes.
When our nation was founded, slavery was not an unavoidable evil. Nor was it as entrenched as it would be when cotton became king. It was an evil of choice. Those who supported slavery actively worked to entrench the institution ever deeper in both the American economy and psyche. With rare exception, even white leaders who opposed slavery felt it was a monster they were ready to do business with.
This truth is what underpinned the Constitutional Convention’s Three-Fifths Compromise, which provided enslaving states additional representation in Congress. And it was upon that compromise that white consensus was built into our institutions, making slavery ever more central in American life. As slavery reached the zenith of its power, abolitionists would destroy the white consensus upon which it depended. A Civil War erupted and doors to radical change opened.
During Reconstruction, a new battle raged for the hearts and minds of Americans. But this would be a war the South won. Not everyone celebrated Jim Crow but, like slavery, it was a monster the nation was ready to do business with — and, yet again, the monster was allowed to dictate the terms.
The white consensus that segregation created stood for a century until it was shattered again, this time by civil rights advocates whose victories provided the nation with redemptive political possibilities such as the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, and establishing the War on Poverty. But hopes of radical change evaporated as the Vietnam War intensified and wars on drugs and welfare largely replaced the War on Poverty. These tragedies laid the groundwork for the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Twelve years later, Bill Clinton brought the “New Democrats” to power. But his administration only intensified the wars on drugs and dismemberment of welfare, testifying to how both parties operated under the same white consensus that proved as anti-Black as it was anti-poor. The new white consensus was hailed as colorblind progress.
The beginning of the end of this era began when a Black man took the presidency and cell phone cameras began documenting America’s racial violence. Somewhere between the chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “Make America Great Again,” the white consensus was shattered once more. But unlike the Reagan Revolution, the MAGA movement proved unable to create white unity in Donald Trump’s first term—and an interracial, progressive coalition secured the election of Joe Biden in 2020.
When Trump announced his third run for president, I feared he might seek to create in a second term the white unity he had failed to generate in his first. In times past, the moral exhaustion and spiritual superficialness of white moderates and progressives led to waving the white flag of surrender and accepting white unity on toxic terms. And after Trump took office in January, businesses and billionaires bowed. The media mourned the absence of the resistance, leading many to believe the days of a committed anti-Trump movement were over.
But at No Kings in Louisville, instead of white flags of surrender, I saw a grizzled Army Ranger holding a sign that read “Veteran Supporting the Constitution.” Next to him was a man wearing pink shorts and horn-rimmed glasses. His sign read “You know it's bad when the introverts show up.” Their presence proclaimed that the depths of America’s divisions contain possibilities: The chance to forge new and revolutionary coalitions and alliances.
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Times of pain and peril are also times of possibility. Times of division are times to dream. When billionaires bow to a would-be dictator, everyday Americans have the responsibility to take a stand on the shared convictions concerning freedom, liberty, and justice for all.
As the cost of resistance rises and Trump seeks to make democratic hopes seem impossible, we must remember, as historian Linda Gordon writes, that “social movements have changed our world as often and as profoundly as wars, natural disasters, and elections.”
There is no way to make the social revolution America is experiencing painless, but it is still in our power to make it redemptive. While the truth is that I don’t know how long white Americans will stand upon democratic convictions and the hopes they create, all I can say for sure is that it was good to see so many in Louisville standing on the frontlines and burning the white flags of surrender. As woefully short as our nation has fallen in creating a land of liberty and justice for all, it has also proven to be a vision whose inspiration continues to survive the storm.
