The Meaning of “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize”
By: Lynn Burnett
Tags: BlackLivesMatter, Freedom, George Floyd, Civil Rights, Systemic Racism

This is the fourth piece in my “freedom as a long distance struggle” series that I wrote for my Patreon supporters. It was originally published on October 18, 2020.

A month after the May 25th murder of George Floyd, Sherrilyn Ifill (of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund) tweeted: “It’s not a win if this time next year we have Juneteenth off; politicians are saying ‘Black Lives Matter;’ Lift Every Voice plays at NFL games, & Mississippi has a new flag, but we have no new tools, laws or investment for ending voter suppression & educational, economic, criminal injustice.” It was around this time that I started feeling that it was important to write something about freedom as a long distance struggle, because by then the high point of momentum and pressure had already passed. I was worried that a cascade of symbolic and aesthetic changes were creating a false sense that the pressure of the moment was leading to more change than was actually happening.

As I felt the pressure peak and then begin to subside, I posed a question to my Patreon supporters: “What does “freedom as a long distance struggle” mean to you in this moment?” In that piece, I reflected on the fact that moments of high-pressure are rare and transitory, and to be effective rely on foundations that have been laid during day-to-day movement work over a long period of time. I followed up with a piece on self-care in movement history, and then another on building intergenerational movement community. All of those pieces were about freedom as a long distance struggle; a marathon, not a sprint.

But what’s it all working towards? When we say “keep your eyes on the prize,” what’s the prize, and how do we stay focused on it and not get distracted?

My mind sweeps back to a not-too-distant point in history, to the abolition of Jim Crow in the mid 1960s… after which Martin Luther King (amongst many others) said that the movement had shifted from a struggle over civil rights to human rights; from a struggle over desegregation and the right to vote to the right to fair and equal housing, health care, schooling, economic opportunity, and a fair and equal justice system. Today we use a different term for what King referred to as human rights: we call the denial of those rights — or the racial inequity reinforced by those systems — systemic racism. Systemic racism was the mountain that the tidal wave of the civil rights movement broke against. During the final years of his life, King emphasized time and again that human rights would be much more difficult to achieve than civil rights.

The prize was never taking down Jim Crow, as revolutionary as that was. The prize was, and remains, taking down systemic racism. Systemic racism had been a primary target of the Black freedom struggle long before the civil rights movement, but the Cold War made that struggle more difficult. Conservatives leveraged tensions with the Soviet Union to whip up domestic fears about Communism, and used those fears to demonize struggles for equal housing, healthcare, and job opportunities as communistic. In the Cold War climate, Black freedom fighters had to back off challenges to systemic racism for a time, and limit themselves to attacks on Jim Crow. Martin Luther King himself avoided pushing for more expansive human rights early in his career in order to avoid being redbaited. His later full-frontal attacks on systemic racism are often represented as King becoming more radical, and although it was true that King had greatly matured, it is also true that he held such “radical” views all along… it had simply become safer to express them by the late 1960s.

In our school systems, the Black freedom struggle is often limited to a sanitized version of the civil rights movement. By focusing only on Jim Crow, our schools fail to examine the larger prize of the Black freedom struggle… the prize we are still striving for today, and will be striving for the rest of our lives.

In keeping our eyes on the prize, we bring ourselves into deep alignment with core traditions of the Black freedom struggle. But how do we keep our eyes on the prize? To circle back to Sherrilyn Ifill’s point with which we began, we need to stay vigilant regarding policies and statements that are merely cosmetic. We need to be aware of the fact that policies passed during high-pressure moments might sound good, but that they often have little funding or few enforcement mechanisms to make them real (Brown v. Board being the most infamous example). We need to be aware that a mayor might say something like, “We have made major strides in shifting resources away from our police department and towards community needs,” and that statement might get a lot of news and therefore might seem to represent reality… but perhaps the police budget has been cut by only two percent. People with political power know how to make empty pledges: we need to call them out. People in power know how to distract the public: we need to know how to keep the public focused on what’s real and meaningful. People in power know that high-pressure moments will pass, and that most people won’t pay close attention after the pressure fades: we need to help people learn to embody freedom as a long distance struggle.

We need to know what the prize looks like, and we need to accept nothing less.

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