Recently I’ve had two personal experiences – one with my step daughter and the other with my daughter – that challenged me to reconsider my own ways of understanding and speaking that don’t measure up to the new requirements for anti-racist behavior and building an anti-racist world. These experiences remind me that younger generations bring to the plate new eyes, new sensibilities, and new understandings of racism that is on me (and older people) to soberly and self critically consider. I find it easier to do that if I think of myself as a work in progress and not too old a dog to learn anew.

Somber and simple, but beautiful and moving ceremony on the capital grounds today with the President and Vice President elect honoring the 400,000 dead due to Covid. To think that it took this long for the country to collectively mourn our dead speaks to the utter depravity and immorality of Trump and the Republican Party.

On this holiday celebrating Martin Luther King, the great revolutionary democrat of the 20th century, I’m reminded that working class empowerment depends on people’s empowerment and people’s empowerment depends on working class empowerment. That strategic, dialectical relationship and lever of progressive and radical change goes unappreciated in too many instances.

Back in the day when I was much younger, I remember reading Lenin for the first time and being struck by the emphasis that he, like King, placed on alliance relationships and coalitions at the national and international level. In his view, such alliances were the gateway to freedom and social liberation for the Russian working class. Many decades later, that dialectical relationship and alliance advocated by King (and Lenin) has lost none of its resonance, as I see it.