letter from the executive director
November 1, 2024
Let me not bury the lead: no matter who wins this year’s election, the work of The Center will be as important—if not more so—than ever. We are here for such a time as this.
With only a few days remaining before the 2024 presidential election, I find myself reflecting deeply, not only on this election but on all the elections I’ve participated in since my first in 1984. Of these, the 1988 election between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis remain especially vivid.
It was November 8, 1988—a typical Election Tuesday. I remember the evening clearly. I wore beige khaki pants, a Wharton Business School sweatshirt, a dark blue jacket with a yellow hood, argyle socks, and Dockers Vargas boat shoes. Picture something like Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties. Wanting to fulfill my civic duty, I headed to a polling station set up at a neighbor’s house down the street from Harambee. The line was long, but eventually, I cast my vote. Jogging back to Harambee, where I worked, a bright light suddenly shone on me; the red and blue lights of a police car began flashing. Two officers approached, questioning me on “where I was coming from” and “where I was going in such a hurry.” I explained that I had just voted and was heading back to work. They didn’t believe me, accusing me of fitting the description of someone who had allegedly broken into a nearby house. I felt stark disorientation. I had just exercised one of THE most quintessentially American rights–voting–and yet even that didn’t shield me from suspicion and harassment.
At the time, I was working for Harambee Christian Family Center as Program Director, leading youth programs focused on racial justice and reconciliation. I was a committed Christian who adhered to “respectability politics.” Still, none of that mattered. It was also in 1988 that I encountered my first explicitly racist political ad: the infamous “Willie Horton” commercial.
The ad highlighted William Horton, a Black man with a violent criminal record, and used him to imply that Dukakis’s policies put Americans at risk. Referring to Horton by the nickname “Willie” (a name he had never used), the ad exploited racialized fear, painting Dukakis as “soft on crime,” especially crimes involving Black men. It featured a grainy, menacing image of Horton, evoking fear and reinforcing stereotypes.
I wish I could say that this was the last racialized political ad in my lifetime, but it wasn’t. And if voters and politicians had firmly rejected that kind of racial fear-mongering, perhaps we wouldn’t see the blatant racism in today’s campaigns. But instead, this slow tolerance of racial fear tactics in presidential campaigns grew over the years.
Before “Willie” Horton, there was Reagan’s 1980 campaign, where he coined the term “Welfare Queen” to evoke racial stereotypes. In 1992, Bill Clinton seized on the Los Angeles riots to reassure white voters, later giving a speech in which he described Black communities as lacking “families, order, or hope.” His wife, Hillary Clinton, during a speech supporting his crime bill, described certain young Black children as “superpredators” without conscience or empathy, declaring, “We have to bring them to heel.”
Even President Obama, while campaigning in 2008, spoke to a predominantly Black audience about avoiding “cold Popeyes for breakfast”, “a bag of potato chips for lunch”, and “eight sodas a day”—words that sparked criticism for playing into stereotypes about Black families.
And then, Donald Trump: in his first campaign speech, he cast Mexicans as “rapists.” He declared the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” — both racist and xenophobic terms. During this election cycle, he’s even gone as far as to question his opponent’s racial identity.
In a democracy, citizens, at least in theory, should have the final say. If that’s the case, why do so many allow this kind of racial rhetoric to continue, election after election? Why do we, as Americans, tolerate it—and worse, let it grow louder and more accepted? How have we come to a place where a comedian, in a political rally, can make blatantly racist jokes without a single rebuke? These are questions worth asking, and answering, as we face yet another election.
At The Center we strive to disrupt racialized rhetoric that produces real life physical violence and psychological harm. This election season and beyond we implore you to join us in this fight!
John Williams
Executive Director
August 5, 2024
When I was in the sixth grade, my dad bought a used copy of Volume III: Ebony Pictorial History of Black America. The book, its corners tattered from prior use, was slyly placed on the living room coffee table for guests to look at.
And like any eleven year old cooped up in the house, I was curious and bored -- but I quickly became enraptured with the pictures and stories within the pages. As I thumbed through the vivid black and white prints, the still shots of the blood running down John Lewis’s head and Elizabeth Ann Eckford in the crush of a mob of white students on the Central High school lawn captured my imagination. Those iconic photos would later be reference points to America about our racial history. Foolishly, I never once asked about volumes one and two.
Like most in this country I had an atrophied understanding of our racial history. Despite the fact that my undergraduate degree was in African-American studies, I graduated with highest honors, and was invited to be a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society; or the fact that both my parents were teens in the midst of the Bus Boycotts -- I knew very little about our history. Unfortunately, I know I am not alone.
How many of us are missing volumes one and two? How many of us are only consuming a third of the story?
In 2015, it felt like the world, and myself, were bracing for change. I’d been running my law firm for twelve years at that point, my kids were off to college, and a volatile political election was on the horizon.
In June of that year, I’d been invited to go on a southern civil rights tour. We traveled by van, from Little Rock to D.C. In those lightning quick five days, I stood where Elizabeth Eckford stood, and learned the details of how local black organizations led the movement to desegregate Central High school. I met the famed and late congressman John Lewis. He regaled us (for longer than his staff intended) on how he developed his powerful oratory skills by preaching to his chickens on a sharecropper farm in Georgia when he was a little boy.
By the time I returned home, I knew that I had to retire from practicing law and work to fight for racial justice. This experience made those pictures that stood stagnant on my family’s coffee table come to life.
When I first became the director of The Center eight years ago, my primary goal was to help participants see the catastrophic impact of racial violence on minoritized communities. The celebrated writer Ta-nehisi Coates encapsulated my thinking perfectly:
“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
Over time The Center developed a framework for understanding the racial history of the United States. Throughout world history there has always been ongoing acts of violence, resistance and resilience consistently and persistently. Little did I know when I first started this work the deep, hidden complexities and long impact that violence holds.
These last few months have felt as if this country, and the world have been collectively bracing from one violent conflict to another. Just like we can smell a rain storm long before the first drop falls, it smells like more violence is in the air.
We generally think of violence as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, as erupting into instant sensational visibility. But that is only volume one of a three volume set. Volumes two and three help us to understand that violence can take on many forms: financial, physical, psychological, spiritual and rhetorical. Violence is so prevalent that there are over 50 different words that describe it.
What is more, violence can be described as fast and slow. Fast violence erupts in such a way that it is unavoidably regarded as active. Slow violence occurs gradually and out of sight, causing delayed destruction. It is dispersed across time and space. A type of violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all, practically invisible.The causes of slow violence are detached from their political origins through the passage of time because time masks and obscures perpetrators of violence from sight. But without a spotlight on the causes of violence that unfold gradually, the embodied impacts of violence often come to be understood as personal and private matters, in which victims are blamed for the harm inflicted on their bodies (Christian, J. M., & Dowler, L., 2019). Historian Kris Manjapra describes slow violence as ghostlining. Ghostlining is the cunning practice of “unseeing plundered parts, and unhearing their historical demands for reparative justice.”
Slow violence is when a presidential candidate, during a panel interview, accuses the hosting black organization of being “lazy and stupid.” It is when the presidential candidate accuses his opponent, a woman with Black and South Asian heritage, of switching her race to help win an election.
Slow violence is Sonya Massey believing she had to say "don't hurt me" when a police officer enters her home when she called for help because she watched Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, George Floyd, Donovan Lewis, Keenan Anderson be killed by the police. And yet, she is still murdered.
Slow violence is believing that the conflict between Palestine and Israel began with the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and not understanding that the seeds of colonial violence and systematic displacement can be traced back to the late 19th and early 20th century.
Finally, slow violence is believing that the current genocide and turmoil in the Congo is because of its leaders and citizens’ inability to govern themselves rather than interrogating the centuries long imperial involvement by Belgium and the United States.
Without shining a spotlight on the causes of violence, in each of the cases mentioned above, the acts of violence are minimized and people are instructed to not dwell on the past.
The Center aims to unite people in grappling with difficult history and to challenge the persistent notion that the impact of violence should be forgotten, distorted, or made invisible. We strive to combat both fast and slow violence that obscures the root causes of historical harms, which devastate individuals and communities. In the coming months, we anticipate a continued rise in such violence with decades-long impacts. In response, we invite you to broaden your focus beyond the immediate and shocking instances of fast violence. Instead, consider the gradual, often hidden causes of violence that attempt to disconnect the cause from the effect. Join us in addressing these deep-seated issues for a lasting change.
Stay curious and pay attention - to all the volumes.