I HAD A DREAM!

“Sixty years ago, Martin Luther King talked about a dream. Sixty years later, we’re the dreamers,” said civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton, leader of the National Action Network, one of two groups that organized the 60th anniversary of the “March on Washington”.
On August 28, 1963, approximately 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. to march for Jobs and Freedom. That day, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech became a powerful symbol of the push for racial and social equality.
On Saturday August 26, 2023, from about 10 am to 3 pm, my wife and I along with tens of thousands of people gathered in that same spot to declare that “the dream” was in jeopardy!
Indeed, as we were listening to fabulous speeches by dozens of civil rights activists, including Dr. King’s son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, at around 1 pm, a self-proclaimed White supremacist, entered a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla.
The racist then began his carnage. He first used an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle and a Glock handgun to cut down a Black female Uber driver as she sat in her car. The racist then chased a 19-year-old Black male through the Dollar store before shooting him multiple times. Finally, when his third Black victim entered the store, the White supremacist blasted him dead as he entered the store.
Ladies and gentlemen, I say America has slid backwards in its fight against hatred and bigotry. The “Dream” has turned into a nightmare. In fact, MLK had made that same conclusion 4 years after his famous speech in Washington.
Indeed, in a 1967 NBC interview, MLK lamented that his 1963 “DREAM” that one day people would no longer be judged by the colour of their skin, had turned into a “NIGHTMARE” and his society was now “poisoned to its soul by racism!” During that famous interview, Dr. King said that he believed HIS country could only be cured through “a cosmic discontent enlarging in the bosoms of people of good will”! A cultural change was needed!
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” Frederick Douglas
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. urges us to accept “the reality that we live in a society in which racism has been internalized and institutionalized,” a society that produced “a culture from whose inception racial discrimination has been a regulating force for maintaining stability and growth.” However, to counter the permanence of racism, Bell advocates that our fight against it must be equally persistent.
Many people in this province believe that we live a colour-blind society, the notion of “race” does not exist biologically and that we’re all from the same “human race”! I too had that dream once! While “race” is indeed a social construct developed by White supremacists, racism exists in this province as anywhere else where White supremacy has infiltrated its society.
The notion of colorblindness is dangerous, as it prevents us from seeing the systemic injustices all around us! In Quebec, anti-Black racism is often discarded socially as well as in the media, as being an American invention. As Émilie Nicolas clearly explains in her superb article “Maîtres chez l’Autre”, “we prefer [in Quebec], most of the time, to imagine that race is a concept that has had no impact on our history, but only on that of the United States” (translation). As if somehow, Quebec would be protected by an invisible dome over the province from the disease of racism.
So, as Dr. King also said so many years ago, I call on ALL relatively conscious good people “to lift our national policy” of colorblindness “from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity”! We should never give up and never give in!