Stop Saying Rosa Was Tired: The Myth of Passive Change

Rosa Parks was not just too tired when she refused to get up from her seat on a Montgomery bus. I had heard this fact before, about two years ago on social media, but I never dug any further. I also never repeated it to anyone because it didn’t fit with the narrative I had been taught in grade school: that one day a woman stood up for herself, Martin Luther King Jr. had her back, and they worked for a little while until segregation was over and the war against racism was won. However, in my Women and Social Movements class, I learned Claudette Colvin was the first person arrested for resisting bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama. That the NAACP couldn’t get behind her fight because she wasn’t the role model they needed. That had the NAACP started the bus boycott with her on their pedestal she would have been dragged through the mud, and as a teenager carrying the child of a married man, there was plenty of mud for dragging. Meanwhile, Rosa Parks was extremely active in the NAACP and was pristine enough to be made an icon. Rosa Parks was not tired from a long day’s work, she was tired from a long fight against segregation. So why do we keep repeating that Rosa Parks was just a tired lady flying solo, accidentally inciting a movement?  Why are students still being taught, in layman’s terms, that Martin Luther King Jr. effectively ended racism on the strength of his convictions and a couple of years work?

Individuals have always been the unit on which history is made. Groups of people working for a similar cause are reduced to their lowest common denominator, the brunt of the work placed on the shoulder of one to three charismatic individuals. For that matter, history is spoken of as being made in single moments, disregarding the preceding minutes, moments, months and even years of preparation that took place. There are surely many reasons for this: it is easiest to digest, it’s relatable, it’s impossible to learn everything, etc. and they are valid reasons. However, I think one of the biggest reasons is that by breaking the timeline of societal change into the smallest and most easily digestible chunks for the masses means that people get the idea that history is made like lightning strikes. It is sudden and unpredictable, the right person at the right time. And if history is only to be made in short bursts, why would anyone try to effect change at all? Leaders for social change are chosen seemingly by random, Rosa Parks just a seamstress, MLK a simple minister. Reducing movements to individual people in specific moments discourages the real effort it takes to make change happen because we cannot all be the chosen person, and we cannot all exist at the proper moment for large-scale change to occur.

This is partially why I think there is so much shock and disgust regarding global protests and rebellions in the present day. History has taught us that change is not that hard, that there are clear winners and losers and an obvious right way to do things. We are currently living in a time of change and we are in search of this easy history: an easy way to pick the side of the victor, while we, the un-chosen, watch it all unfold from afar. There are always protests, and there are always people calling them “annoying” or “inappropriate” because, in general, we are unfamiliar with the course of history. However, movements are messy, motives are shaky, and the world is full of gray areas. Once people think that change is defined as passivity, active work toward anything is subversive and unnatural. This is not limited to the Civil Rights Movement or Black Lives Matter or even just movements in general- the idea of passive change can be internalized and applied to just about anything in life. Celebrities become symbols of all luck and no talent, movies are either a waste of time or a masterpiece with no regard to the years and work that go in, and people everywhere are just waiting for something to happen to them.

Stop being fooled into thinking change is sudden. Stop repeating the lie that Rosa Parks is tired or that Abraham Lincoln ended slavery or Martin Luther King Jr. singlehandedly stopped racism. Respect change by at least attempting to remember every hand that has touched it. I am not proposing some grand conspiracy that the government is redacting the truth from our textbooks, but the people in power control the narrative and what is more beneficial than a narrative that implies you should be brave and stand up for what’s right- but only if you are the right person at just the right time. There is not always going to be a right person, and the right time is all the time. Putting a face on a movement does not make it one person. For people out there making things happen socially, politically, or personally every day is a movement. Change is not sudden.

Why Trayvon Martin's Death is my 9/11

As I anticipate that most people will find this title inflammatory, I will include a preface: 9/11 is also my 9/11. 9/11 is everyone’s 9/11.

There is no denying the tragedy or undermining the impact of such a significant event, and that is not at all my intent.

There are several reasons why I would put these events in the same category, and I don’t expect everyone to feel the same, but at the basis of 9/11, the impact on people not closely or directly affected is something of a time marker. On each anniversary I recall being asked in my classroom, “do you remember where you were when you heard about the attack?” I imagine in the years following the attack, this was a sensitive moment. Each student would have a story of the time and often a six-degrees-of-separation chain that connected them to an individual there. For me, on September 11, 2001 I had just arrived in Oceanside, California and was soon to be enrolled in kindergarten. I don’t know what I was doing and I definitely don’t remember any moments of tension. My first memory of 9/11 is actually several years after, hearing a memorial broadcast on the car radio while waiting for my mother in the parking lot of a grocery store. Being 19 now, there is no division between pre-9/11 and post-9/11 America; it is all post-9/11 for me. The heightened airport security, the visceral tension and looped memorial videos on September 11th each year, the unfortunate and unwarranted negative attitudes toward Muslim-Americans: these things have always been America for me.

9/11 is also the moment in time where many people lost trust in their own safety, in other people, and for a growing segment of the population, in the government. Many people are quick to dismiss conspiracy theorists, which is understandable, and the theory itself has become a common joke on the internet (“jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”). However, for a large portion of people, 9/11 was fundamentally a shattering of illusions; a symbol that things are not always fair, that life is not required to meet expectations, that we are not always safe.

Something I remember exactly is where I was when George Zimmerman was ruled “not guilty” for the death of Trayvon Martin. Sitting on the couch in the upstairs of my Texas home, I had complete, albeit unspoken, faith in a guilty ruling. At the time, I don’t think even I knew how passionately I felt. I remember the shock and disbelief. I remember getting in an argument over the ruling through text with a friend and classmate and being so heartbroken that I was even having the argument that I lost the strength to continue it. The wounds were too fresh and too raw. I turned to social media for comfort, and though there was some to be found, I felt like I was being punched in the stomach again to find that many people shared my classmate’s views. At 17 years old, the same age as Trayvon when he was killed, and only a year younger than he would have been at the moment of the verdict, my world divided.

For me there is a pre-Trayvon world, where I understood that people differed but believed that when it really mattered they could be sensitive, unbiased, and understanding. I believed that our government and our judicial system was the be-all and end-all, the pinnacle of justice. I still believed that the people I associated with were more likely to share my own point of view.

Post-Trayvon Martin, the world was no longer such a safe place to me. I no longer put my trust in the judicial system. I no longer naively trusted the people around me to be fair and unbiased. Many of my friends, my classmates, their parents and relatives, laid their opinions bare on social media, with little tact or courtesy, and I felt personally attacked. In Trayvon Martin’s death I saw myself, and even more vividly, I saw my brother, who was just 20 at the time. The post-Trayvon world is a place of fear and insecurity.

I know why I should remember 9/11 and I know why I do remember 9/11; but its waves of impact are fading with each generation. With each passing year we become more removed from the trauma and can see only its effect. I believe, however, every individual will have their own event that will strike with the suddenness of lightning, illuminating and capturing a moment of time and replacing illusion with raw truth. This does not make the events of the past any less tragic. It is an unfortunate part of being alive, but a necessary one, that teaches us how to experience and respect the tragedies of others. Though I wish Trayvon’s death and subsequent lack of justice had not had to happen, my disillusionment has served me well today. In a time where deaths continue to occur suspiciously in front of an even broader audience, I am grateful for my own consciousness.

The trial of George Zimmerman for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin was my event.

Trayvon Martin’s death will forever be my 9/11.