The Arc of the Moral Universe of Long
I know that anxiety is high. People have legitimate concerns about the tone and tenor of this election, its outcome, and the aftermath. No matter who wins, we have discovered alarming things about the venal spitefulness of some of our neighbors and about our own capacity to hate them. I know I have.
Still, regardless of the outcome, Kamala Harris have moved the arc of the moral universe for men and women of color, white women, and children of immigrants—and, I dare say—for everyone else, like it or not…just by running for President in one of the shortest campaigns in American history.
Abolitionist Rev. Theodore Parker, in 1858 wrote to people in utter despair over the brutal enslavement of people of African ancestry:
“Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”
Less than 10 years later, Lincoln would pen the Emancipation Proclamation, call for the abolition of slavery through the 13th Amendment, and issue an Executive Order, prohibiting the abuse of people in loans and other matters due to their past as enslaved people. He was hailed as a hero for refusing to punish leaders in the Confederacy, pardoning or commuting the sentence of 265 white, male traitors, though he approved the execution of 38 Dakota man who fought for the liberty of their people.
Still, the arc was bending.
From the time Parker penned this statement to just over a century later when another minister famously took it up and made it his own, America saw a slew of executive orders and Amendments meant to restore rights to people who never should have had them abridged and the rise of vicious Jim Crow segregation and rampant discrimination against Black people as well as people, they argued were “non-white”: Jews, Polish people, the Irish, and Italians.
Bending.
But it bends
At the same time Rev. Dr. King summarized Parker to “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” the arc began to move in earnest such that the restriction of voting rights of Black people stricken as a social, legal, and moral norm began to be abolished.
At the time King proclaimed his vision of the arc of the moral universe, and just before he was assassinated, Barack Obama was born. He would be so taken by King’s statement, that 50 years later when he became President, he would have it stitched into the rug in the Oval Office. And in his lifetime, our country has seen sweeping change: marital beating and rape are illegal, women don’t need a husband’s permission to medical treatment or reproductive care, women aren’t fired for simply being pregnant, restriction of voting rights is an aberration, LGBTQ people can have their marriages socially and legally recognized, and people with disabilities are not longer being institutionalized or sterilized. And, though there is still ground to take, the movement is inexorable. Justice is inevitable.
A year after Obama was being welcomed into his family and just after Dr. King’s killing and a month after 4 little Black girls were exterminated in a bomb blast that destroyed their church, Kamala Devi Harris was born. Shaped by those same forces of civil rights and social justice, she would become a respected prosecutor and attorney general, creating the means for people who had been incarcerated to have a pathway back into their communities. After having served as Senator, she became the first woman or person or color elected as Vice President. There she has broken over 35 legislative ties in the Senate, the most in history. She is already history. She’s already bent the arc.
Toward justice
Regardless of the outcome of this election, Harris has won. She’s called attention, relentlessly, to the unworkability of applying ancient Mosaic/Biblical laws created at a time when people believed that men’s ejaculate contained entire human beings (and that masturbation was tantamount to murder) to modern issues like the reproductive realities of women and girls as people rather than as incubators, the challenges of an economy that allows for what will soon be a trillionaire class, and our place as a force for causing peace rather than as peacekeepers through militarism.
Is she perfect? No more than Lincoln.
But we will bend her and she will bend us toward justice. Just like King bent President Johnson, the alien cowboy thrust into the presidency at gunpoint, into creating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most sweeping combination of legislation this country has ever seen.
We’ve got this.
