Is it news that people are angry with Marjorie Taylor Greene?

This week, the Georgia Republican took advantage of Twitter’s newly liberalized character restrictions to do what she does best: suggest something unhinged, and sit back while her political opponents’ heads explode in white-hot rage.

“We need a national divorce,” she tweeted. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this.” The next day, she followed up by elaborating that she would like to see “a legal agreement” that would separate states to resolve ideological and political disagreements “while maintaining our legal union.” Rearranged this way, Americans can decide where and how to live, Greene concluded, and “we don’t have to argue with one another anymore.”

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

The Republican representative’s words prompted the outcry you’d expect from Democrats and columnists who questioned both her loyalty to the country and Republican leaders’ cowardice in refusing to rein her in. But Greene’s ideas are not as radical as some might be inclined to think. First, because what she’s calling for sounds not unlike Ronald Reagan’s idea of federalism. Second, because Greene is hardly the first person to suggest that the political party in power is making the United States wholly unlivable. I’m old enough to remember all the liberals who swore they’d move to Canada if Donald Trump won in 2016. (They didn’t!)

What’s interesting about Greene’s call for a “national divorce” is how it fits into a much longer history of similar calls for secession or disunion in American history—and what the growing frequency of such calls tells us about this particular modern political moment. “That it keeps coming up suggests there is something to it, and waving it away with reminders of Appomattox or quotes from Texas v. White probably isn’t going to cut it,” Richard Kreitner, the author of the 2020 book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union, told me. This persistent theme in our politics, he added, “represents an impulse that cannot be simply wished away or ignored.”

This week, I talked with Kreitner about that constant theme—and whether it’s time for the people of the United States to reassess their 250-year union.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Elaine Godfrey: So Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that there should be a “national divorce” between red and blue states. Obviously, this is what Greene is good at—saying something wild, getting a reaction. What was yours?

Richard Kreitner: Calls for secession have been becoming more common, louder, and have come from more prominent figures in the 21st century. So it’s not too surprising to find somebody in House Republican leadership embracing the idea.

She’s calling for a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union. That’s federalism. We can have arguments about what exactly that means, what the Founders thought it should mean, but she’s just arguing that the states should have more powers over things than the federal government. That’s the debate we’ve been having in American politics for decades.

So, to wrap it in this banner of “national divorce” seems to me to be taking advantage of all the talk of a second civil war, the boogaloo bois, and the secession talk that is growing in prominence. But each side has been talking about secession for many years—when they’re out of power. When they’re in power, they say, “Oh no, you can’t do that. That’s treasonous.”

Godfrey: When I think of secession, I think of the Civil War, and then I think of Texas. But you’ve written about how it goes back to the very beginning—how the United States has never been all that united.

Kreitner: My book starts by pointing out that the colonial period lasted 150 years—a very long time, about the same amount of time since our Civil War. And during that time, America was disunited. The colonies were, as Marjorie Taylor Greene would have them now, totally independent of one another. Their only relationship, their only political relationship, was with England itself, and that was a fairly loose relationship.

So this was the original state of things in America, one that the colonists themselves liked very much. They had control over their own affairs; there was very little meddling.

Occasionally, somebody—William Penn, Benjamin Franklin—would have the idea that it would be better to organize some kind of federation of the colonies, with Britain’s approval, to organize trade, land disputes, border issues, relationships with the Indians, and mutual defense. Every time somebody proposed that idea, they were laughed out of the room, because people considered the very idea of union to be antithetical to their cherished liberties.

Forming a union was kind of the last thing on their mind. Then we get to the Revolution. A lot of us are taught in school that the Revolution was fought to create a union, to create a nation. And it’s the exact opposite of that. The Union was created as a means to the end of securing independence from England. It was a last resort.

John Adams, when he goes to Philadelphia, is talking about how different Americans are from one another, how much they hate each other. George Washington in the Continental Army camp outside Boston in 1775 is talking about how much the New Englanders smell. Anytime these politicians meet in the Continental Congress, they’re described as a conclave of ambassadors from different nations. Many of them think a union will not survive after the war.

No golden age of American unity exists that you can point to and say, “That’s when we were united.” Even back then, people were issuing threats of secession when they were out of power, and then defending the Union as perpetual and inviolable once they had the power. Thomas Jefferson does this famous turnaround. In 1798, he mulls whether to threaten secession because he doesn’t like Adams’s administration. Then he wins the election of 1800, and says, “We must hold the Union together at any cost!” The people backing Adams now proposed secession.

Godfrey: Because of the Civil War, we think of secessionist calls as primarily reactionary. Are we right about that?

Kreitner: When I was researching, I was especially interested in whether there were any people whose values and ideals I shared—who had espoused the idea of secession not for white-supremacist reasons or to preserve slavery. I quickly landed on the abolitionists.

Many were in favor of northern secession from the Union in the years right before the Civil War. Their argument was gaining traction in the 1850s because they thought that participation in the Union was an important pillar in maintaining the institution of slavery. They thought that without the guarantee of the federal government’s aid to suppress an insurrection among the enslaved—which is the constitutional guarantee of the Fugitive Slave Act—slavery would be a much more insecure institution, the price of slaves would plummet, and the institution would die out.

John Quincy Adams, back in Congress after his presidency, introduced a petition from a group of citizens from a small town in Massachusetts demanding the dissolution of the United States, because they didn’t want their tax dollars to go toward the support of slavery anymore. These were ordinary American heroes, far from traitors.

Godfrey: Obviously the secession of the southern states was the big culmination of many years of those sentiments. When did we start hearing them again after the Civil War?

Kreitner: The Civil War was a national trauma; nearly a million people died. The fear of disunion persisted in American politics. The idea went underground for years.

In the 1890s, the populist movement and the rise of socialism in the United States were both opposed on the grounds that they were disunionist movements. Populism in the 1930s also dabbles in secessionism. That’s when a bill is introduced in a state legislature calling for secession for the first time since the Civil War, in North Dakota. Then in the ’60s, it starts to become an ethnic thing. There was the Republic of New Afrika, a movement of Black Americans in northern cities that called for the surrender of five southern states as a form of reparations for slavery. Then Hispanic Americans demanded the return of the Southwest that was lost in the Mexican-American War as a sovereign homeland. From a hippie newspaper published on the Lower East Side came a call for the creation of what was called the Underground States of America, which would be a kind of hippie confederacy. Lesbian separatist communes also envisioned themselves as secessionists.

Obviously, these were not order-shattering movements, but the idea lingered. Secession has always been available to malcontents of one kind or another. It defines American history.

Godfrey: So Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tweets are not representative of some new treasonous trend?

Kreitner: The trend is old in the sense that American politics is starting to look rather similar to the way it was in the beginning, which was extremely fractured, totally dysfunctional, with foreign enemies prowling around the perimeter to see what kind of discord they could scare up, and real questions about whether the Union could survive.

We didn’t get through because of some predestined outcome; there’s no guarantee that we’re going to stay together. In many cases, our staying together had to do with mere chance and fear of the unknown—particularly fear of the economic consequences of disunion.

Godfrey: You’re saying that the frequency of these calls is not surprising, but that we should pay attention to them.

Kreitner: We’re totally undecided on this fundamental question of “Do we want to be a multiracial democracy or not?” While we persist in having that fundamental argument, we’re going to see political tensions. And when you see that in American history, you see secessionist movements.

So the course of growing hatred, rancor, and constitutional paralysis continues. I charted quite exactly from 2004, when there were memes going around showing maps separating “Jesusland” from the United States of Canada, to 2012, when you saw all these petitions from every state in the country arguing for secession. Then, of course, in 2016, you have Calexit.

California Representative Zoe Lofgren talked about secession after the 2016 election. She said: “Rational people, not the fringe, are now talking about whether states could be separated from the U.S.” I don’t know if anybody’s quoted her in relation to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I can’t imagine her response today would be: “Oh boy, I guess we both have this idea! Maybe let’s have a substantive conversation about the merits and the drawbacks of being in one country together.”

[Peter Wehner: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s civil war]

In the coming years, especially with the Supreme Court so heavily stacked in favor of the right, the left is going to have a lot more cause for talking about secession than the right. And I think that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s screed—insane and stupid as it is—is an invitation that should be accepted: to talk concretely about whether this thing is working or not.

Godfrey: What would the result of that conversation be?

Kreitner: I don’t know what the end of it is. But the beginning is—instead of piling on and saying, “This is treason. You can’t talk about that; it’s un-American”—that we actually are capable of not only having conversations but also making decisions about what kind of country and what kind of government we want to have.

After all, we’re not seeing any positive arguments for the union. You look at all the commentary, and you don’t see any soaring odes to our shared nationality, why it’s important for us to remain together as a people. My response to Greene is not “I must remain united with this person at any cost,” but “Why would I want to be part of a government where this person is a leading figure? Why would I want to remain loyal to a Constitution so patently broken that somebody like this ascends to the highest ranks of power?”

I don’t have a programmatic view of what should happen, no firm sense of where to draw the new borders or what to do with people stuck behind enemy lines, only an understanding, based on my reading of American history, that this is a persistent theme in our politics and represents an impulse that cannot simply be wished away or ignored.

The number of Black quarterbacks has soared in the NFL over the past 25 years, and it was only a matter of time before two of them faced each other in the Super Bowl.

Sunday’s championship game will pit the Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes against the Philadelphia Eagles’ Jalen Hurts. Only seven Black quarterbacks have played in a Super Bowl, and just three—including Mahomes—have won. That a record 11 NFL teams had Black starting quarterbacks on opening day of the current season suggests that matchups like this year’s will soon be commonplace. But the fact that no such game has taken place before Super Bowl LVII underscores the plight of the Black quarterback for most of the NFL’s century-long history.

Even though most NFL athletes are Black, most teams have been slow to put Black men in a position to call plays. The Eagles, to their credit, have been more willing to offer opportunities than other teams. “I think about all of the [Black] quarterbacks that came through Philly: Randall Cunningham, Rodney Peete, Donovan McNabb, Mike Vick,” Hurts told reporters during a pre–Super Bowl media session. “This franchise, the history we have of African American quarterbacks—that speaks for itself. I told those guys I want to carry that torch for them.”

[Jemele Hill: The NFL’s Black coaches should stop playing along]

Like Black Americans in general, Black players in the NFL have long struggled to have their talents and aspirations taken seriously. In 1920, Fritz Pollard became the first Black quarterback in what was then known as the American Professional Football Association. In his rookie season, Pollard led the Akron Pros to the league championship. But in 1934, the NFL banned Black players at the initiative of the former Washington owner George Preston Marshall, who once said, “We’ll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.” The ban remained in place for 12 years.

When the NFL reintegrated in 1946, the prevailing assumption was that Black athletes weren’t intelligent enough to play quarterback. Run and tackle? Yes. Be the face of a franchise and give direction to other men? No.

In his 2022 book, Rise of the Black Quarterback: What It Means for America, the sportswriter Jason Reid interviewed the former NFL player John Wooten, who co-founded the Fritz Pollard Alliance, an organization dedicated to creating equal opportunities in the NFL. Wooten told Reid,

Your quarterback is really the guy everyone was supposed to follow on the field. But you have these coaches who not only thought we couldn’t play there because we supposedly weren’t smart enough, which was just racist and ridiculous, but the leadership part of it was even a bigger problem for them. They just couldn’t see us being the leaders of teams all over the league. You look back at that time, you just didn’t see any of us at quarterback. Even the few guys who did break through a little, they didn’t really get opportunities. And they didn’t last long.

That was true of Marlin Briscoe, professional football’s first Black quarterback in the modern era. Briscoe was slated to play defense for the Denver Broncos in 1968, but the Broncos’ offense was in such disarray that then-coach Lou Saban gave Briscoe a shot at the coveted signal-caller position. Briscoe excelled, leading the team in passing yards and touchdowns. Despite his success, the Broncos gave him little playing time the next season; he later asked to be released. Briscoe finished out his eight remaining years in the NFL at wide receiver, illustrating the common practice of Black athletes being forced to change positions because they weren’t going to get a fair shot at playing quarterback.

Also underappreciated was Warren Moon, now the only Black quarterback in the NFL Hall of Fame. After going undrafted following a spectacular career at the University of Washington, Moon opted for the Canadian Football League. It was only after Moon dominated the CFL by winning multiple championships that the NFL sought him out. He went on to flourish for 17 years as one of the most prolific passers in league history.

[Read: Lamar Jackson and the NFL’s Quarterback double standard]

The current landscape is much more welcoming than what Briscoe and Moon experienced, but today’s Black quarterbacks are still subject to the same stereotypes and double standards that afflicted their predecessors. Hurts, for example, faced a lot of nonspecific criticism before this season began. Influential commentators hinted that Eagles insiders were “not very comfortable” with him and mused about “what his ceiling is” and whether “he’s already closer to reaching it than most would like to admit.” All quarterbacks are second-guessed, but the supposed discontent about Hurts, in just his second season as the Eagles’ full-time starter, was unusually vague.

The Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson is the fourth Black quarterback to win the league MVP, but if some NFL decision makers had it their way, he never would have played quarterback at all. Despite winning a Heisman Trophy at the University of Louisville, Jackson was asked to run drills as wide receiver at the 2018 NFL scouting combine. An anonymous defensive coordinator told The Athletic last summer that if Jackson “has to pass to win the game, they ain’t winning the game.”

Another team with a Black quarterback went out of its way to express distrust in him. The Arizona Cardinals initially put a “homework clause” in Kyler Murray’s recent $230.5 million contract extension. The clause stipulated that Murray had to study game material for four hours a week on his own without being distracted by the TV, internet, or video games. If Murray violated the clause, he was at risk of defaulting on his contract. After intense public criticism, the Cardinals removed the clause, which was right in line with the antiquated perception that Black athletes weren’t smart or disciplined enough to play the marquee position.

None of this minimizes the significance of the progress that Black NFL players have achieved. But the history that Mahomes and Hurts will make in Super Bowl LVII is also a reminder that progress hasn’t come easily.

MEMPHIS, Tenn.—If the summer of 2020 was, for many Americans, a breaking point, then the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd presented the nation’s leadership class with a crossroads. Would they radically rethink American policing, or would they retreat to the safety of piecemeal reform, earnestly applying Band-Aids over bullet wounds? Two and a half years later, Tyre Nichols is dead, and the choice they made is clear.

It’s not that nothing was done. Some departments vowed to make more data available, and others launched exploratory efforts to let specialists respond to mental-health emergencies. Activists in a handful of cities succeeded in securing cuts to their police budgets. Some cities proposed ending armed traffic enforcement.

But there was no Great Reckoning in American policing. No sweeping act of atonement. No radical reordering. Not even, at scale, the “reimagining” championed by the moderates. In many cases, reactionary backlash has outpaced the changes that prompted it. Society’s moral vacuum had been laid open before us. Rather than plug it, the most powerful among us watched as we were sucked further into the abyss.

On January 7, the Memphis Police Department announced that during a traffic stop for “reckless driving” the night prior, “a confrontation occurred, and the suspect fled the scene on foot.” When officers caught up with the suspect, the department claimed, “another confrontation occurred” before the man was finally taken into custody. Complaining of “shortness of breath,” the 29-year-old was brought to a nearby hospital. Three days later, Tyre Nichols was dead, and a grotesque spectacle of Black death began.

[David A. Graham: How did it come to this?]

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn “C. J.” Davis would later say that she immediately recognized the urgency of the situation. Within days, five officers were fired, and a federal probe was launched. Officials allowed Nichols’s family and their lawyers to watch the videos of what had happened, which they described afterward as “far worse than Rodney King.” Nichols, they said, had been savaged like “a human piñata.” The officers were charged with second-degree murder. Television journalists, some of whom had been granted an early viewing of the videos, counted down to the public release as if it were a sporting event. What we were about to witness, they warned, was disturbing.

At 7 p.m. ET on Friday, January 27, the Memphis Police Department released four video clips. Two, from body cameras, depict behavior both concerning and commonplace. Officers immediately escalate, shouting contradictory commands without considering Nichols’s attempts to comply. They deploy violence—pepper spray, a baton, a stun gun—far exceeding any threat posed to them or the public.

A third video captured the crime. The officers catch Nichols in Brandywine, a sprawling subdivision where brick houses sit clustered around cul-de-sacs. They tackle him to the ground. They pepper-spray his eyes. They strike him with fists and a baton. Two officers hold Nichols down as a third unleashes winding kicks to his head. Writhing in pain, Nichols screams for his mother. A handcuffed Nichols is held upright as an officer delivers punches to his face. A dazed and dying Nichols is propped against a car as officers gather around him and coordinate their stories.

This all happened in one of the spots where Memphis has spent millions on surveillance. Just a few steps away, a camera was affixed on a light pole. Its flashing blue light would have been impossible to miss, had any of the officers ever looked up.

Public commentary quickly converged around three points. The first was that Nichols’s death was as disgusting a display of police violence as could be remembered. Second: The race of the offending officers—all five initially charged with murder were Black—was in some way significant. Third, ongoing attempts to rid policing of wanton violence have clearly failed.

Much has been made of the whiteness of the officers involved in prior such incidents. Now the seemingly new dimension offered by the involvement of Black officers required explanation. To some commentators, the officers’ skin tone validated what they had been insisting all along: that America’s policing problems are not about race. On a single morning after the videos’ release, National Review featured three articles on its homepage declaring that Nichols’s death was not about racism. Even to some on the left, the fact that mass protests had not erupted could be explained at least in part by the officers’ race.

Based on my experience covering policing and unrest, I’d proffer a more straightforward explanation: the timely release of information and forthright steps to hold the officers accountable. Civil unrest arrives most often in response to cryptic, protracted sagas.

Los Angeles burned only after the officers who brutalized Rodney King were acquitted, the final insult in a year-long saga. Ferguson became the site of mass protests when police refused to explain why there was a dead teenager lying in the street, and again when, after three months, residents learned that the officer who shot him would walk free. City officials in Baltimore remained tight-lipped after the rough ride that resulted in Freddie Gray’s death; more than two weeks later, police had still not offered a coherent explanation. Parts of the city burned. By the time George Floyd was killed, Minneapolis and the nation were fed up with more than five fruitless years of protests about policing. After spending months of 2020 holed up in their homes, everyone was desperate to come outside, activists and arsonists alike.

Police and prosecutors across the country—who routinely put on public display guns, drugs, and money seized as evidence in criminal cases—typically insist that releasing basic details about incidents in which officers kill people will irrevocably damage their investigations. They hem and haw about why they can’t release videos, fire killer cops, or secure criminal indictments. Officials in Memphis managed all of it in just 20 days.

[Read: The problem with police shooting videos]

Yet as much as the Memphis Police Department is an example of a newfound transparency that has taken root in the decade since Ferguson, the city has also provided a reminder of the limitations of reform.

Here is a department with a Black woman police chief, a majority-Black workforce, body cameras, de-escalation training, and a duty-to-intervene policy. And Tyre Nichols is still dead: beaten by Black officers in violent scenes captured on the officers’ body cameras after they themselves escalated the interaction. No officers intervened. For all of her clarity and grace, Chief Davis is a breathing reminder that systemic problems will not be solved by representational victories. The solution to police violence is no more the hiring of Black cops than the solution to mass incarceration is gender diversity among prison guards.

Memphis is a city that drips with history. You can almost hear Isaac Hayes behind a piano at Stax as you walk Beale Street. And you can almost see Ernest Withers, twin-reflex camera around his neck, setting up the perfect shot, and Ida B. Wells furiously clacking at her typewriter as she prepares the next edition of her newspaper The Free Speech and Headlight. There’s Martin Luther King Jr. leading the marching sanitation workers—his final campaign.

As I landed in Memphis last week, thick balls of ice began falling from the sky, the start of a days-long freeze that paralyzed the city. Still, the usual cast of characters braved the cold to pay their respects. Family members of George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Stephon Clark made the trip. The Reverend Al Sharpton took a private plane. The Nichols family’s lead attorney, Ben Crump, drove several hours after getting stranded at the Atlanta airport. Vice President Kamala Harris represented the White House at Nichols’s funeral—a short, solemn service in which everyone sang from a familiar songbook. “The only thing keeping me going right now is that I really, truly believe that my son was sent here on an assignment from God,” Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, told the assembled mourners. “I guess his assignment is done.”

After nearly a decade of writing about police violence, I no longer travel to every city that has just experienced a brutal killing. But it had been almost three years since a case like this had forced its way to the front of the nation’s consciousness, even for a moment. It felt important to be in Memphis and witness, with my own eyes, this chapter of our never-ending story. And so I sat, in a chilly overflow room set up in Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, looking up at a television monitor as Tiffany Rachal—whose oldest son, Jalen Randle, was killed by police in Houston last year and who was one of many mothers of the movement in attendance—sang the gospel staple “Total Praise.”

In Memphis, Davis herself commissioned the team that killed Nichols: the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods. The task force of 40 officers would be deposited in the city’s most violent areas and told, as Davis put it, to “be tough on tough people.” Referred to as the SCORPION unit, the team was part of the city’s response to a record-high 342 murders in 2021. As The New York Times reported, Mayor Jim Strickland bragged in his 2022 State of the City address about the hundreds of arrests made by the unit. Meanwhile, Black Memphis was being terrorized.

Such units are known for “weak supervision, a high degree of independence, no accountability, [an internal] feedback loop,” and they are “encouraged to be aggressive,” says Walter Katz, a vice president at the criminal-justice philanthropy Arnold Ventures, who has worked in police oversight since the 1990s. “They have this mandate to stop street crime, and then the mandate tends to be far broader than the actual problem.”

The expansion of these units has mirrored the rise of “hot-spot policing,” in which departments analyze which neighborhoods have the most frequent crime and then send resources and man power. But each department chooses its remedy from a long menu of options. Hot-spot policing is a principle. What matters is the practice. Police could deploy officers determined to build trust in these “hot spots.” Instead, they tend to dispatch men in tactical gear driving unmarked Dodge Chargers, instructing them to make stops until they’ve got guns and drugs to put out on the table.

Since Nichols’s death, Memphis has disbanded SCORPION and announced a review of other specialty task forces. But these teams—described by police public relations as “elite,” known in the streets as “jump-out boys”—exist in cities across America and in some cases have been in place for decades. Many are havens for troubled officers.

“In every city in America, they have got one of these organized-crime units that trample on the constitutional rights of Black and brown communities,” Crump, whose work on these cases has earned him the nickname “Black America’s Attorney General,” told me after Nichols’s funeral. “I have never heard of an organized-crime unit going to brutalize our white brothers and sisters in their neighborhood. Show us that video.”

As Black America pleaded for safety, elected officials in Memphis and across the country provided them instead with police. If the dream is a world in which a 29-year-old Black man can safely complete a drive home unmolested by those who would do him harm, civilian or police, the nightmare in which we reside is one in which Tyre Nichols is pulled from his car and pummeled to death just minutes from his family’s house.

Moments after first watching the video footage of Tyre Nichols being beaten to death, I turned to The Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin’s 1985 essay about what was then the country’s most perplexing true-crime story.

The terror in Atlanta stretched 22 months from 1979 to 1981 and resulted in more than two dozen corpses—all of them Black, most of them children. Nearly everyone assumed that the slayings were the work of a single perpetrator. Many, perhaps especially in Black Atlanta, took as a given that the killer was white, probably a Klan member. Then officials announced the arrest of a Black man named Wayne Williams, who was charged with two of the killings but, authorities tenuously insisted, could be tied to the rest as well. This news unleashed, as Baldwin writes, “the instinctive attempt to calculate the meaning of the new dimension suddenly given to an old dilemma.”

[Eve Fairbanks: White supremacy is a script]

Speculation swirled about whether the murders were an act of self-hatred. It’s true, Baldwin concedes, that there are self-hating Black Americans, especially among police forces. But inasmuch as race was a factor here, Baldwin observes, it was in the way Black Atlantans had been left abused and abandoned by their nation. Descendents of those enslaved in America had been forced into crowded ghettos and kept out of quality schools; degraded by a criminal legal system that sought to scapegoat them for society’s ills; denied jobs and wages, the opportunity and means for the socioeconomic advancement also known as the American dream.

Baldwin understood then what many still fail to see now: Racism can reside not just in the heart of a killer but also within the skeleton of the system that produces him. “The moral vacuum of any society,” Baldwin wrote two years before his death, “immediately creates an actual social chaos.”

My copy of Evidence lived for years on my father’s bookshelf before being clandestinely expatriated to my own. It has a fading black-and-white spine, and its cover features a close-up of Baldwin’s face cropped so tightly that all you see is his right eye. The forward to the paperback, issued in 1996, was written by Derrick Bell, who was Harvard Law’s first Black tenured professor.

“James Baldwin was not a lawyer, yet his commentary on the Atlanta trial is enlightened by his astute assumption that racism in American law cannot be understood by reading statutes and legal decisions removed from the context of the political, economic, and social concerns that gave rise to them,” Bell writes. “Deeply embedded racial beliefs and presumptions doomed the Atlanta children to an environment where all manner of predicaments and perils haunted their days and threatened their lives.”

Bell began his legal career in the 1950s as a civil-rights attorney and later worked under Thurgood Marshall, but his best-known legacy is the early inspiration for what became known as “critical race theory,” or CRT—a discipline that applies a critical lens to legal statutes and precedents, considering not just the words on the page but the context in which they were drafted.  

“From the perspective of critical race theory, some positions have historically been oppressed, distorted, ignored, silenced, destroyed, appropriated, commodified, and marginalized—and all of this, not accidentally. Conversely, the law simultaneously and systematically privileges subjects who are white,” Bell said during a 1995 speech at the University of Illinois in which he said CRT’s aim is “to empower and include traditionally excluded views and see all-inclusiveness as the ideal because of our belief in collective wisdom.”

In the decade or so since his death, Bell’s work has been subject to a steady stream of histrionics. The term critical race theory is now applied to any teaching on race that conservatives believe will upset white Americans. Critics claim that critical race theory is a form of “racial essentialism,” although it is, in fact, the opposite. CRT seeks to understand how intersecting identities factor into someone’s experience with our legal edicts and societal norms. It does not suppose that individuals can be defined solely by those identities. The aim is a country in which humans equally created are actually treated as such; that’s only achievable by understanding how the social concept of race continues to shape the American experience.

Some see an act of police violence involving Black officers and are quick to dismiss racism as a factor. A critical race theorist would argue that it is impossible to understand a killing by an institution that descends, in part, from slave patrols without considering the racist bias ingrained over time.

None of this controversy would have surprised Bell. After decades of scholarship, he developed a theory called “interest convergence,” which posits that America’s white majority takes strides toward racial equality only when white people see doing so as in their own best interest. Ultimately, Bell concluded, racism is a permanent feature of our society, unvanquished not because white Americans are inherently incapable of doing so, but because they are persistently unwilling to.

On the eve of Tyre Nichols’s funeral, his family gathered at the Mason Temple Sanctuary, in the pulpit where, 55 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his final speech. Nichols’s parents and siblings fanned out along the stage, flanked by local ministers and activists, many holding signs featuring one of the final photos of Nichols, which depicted him bruised and bloated in a hospital bed.

Sharpton introduced Amber Sherman, a 22-year-old activist among those leading the local protests. She outlined the family’s demands. They want accountability for all of the officers involved that night, she said. They want to improve police-data transparency, end the use of armed officers for traffic enforcement, abandon pretextual stops, and disband all specialty task forces.

When the floor was opened for questions, a Black activist who had been seated near the front of the sanctuary spoke up. He told Sharpton that he was a decorated Vietnam veteran and a member of the New Black Panther Party, a small militant group that has appropriated the name of the 1970s organization. Clearly, he said, all of the chanting and marching had failed to liberate Black men and women from the perils that haunt their days and threaten their lives. “My experiences teach me, if you want to stop somebody from striking you, you’ve got to strike back,” he said, before looking up at Sharpton and asking, “Do you think it’s time?”

Sharpton demurred. “I’ll let you speak for yourself,” he responded as the press corps in the pews and activists on the stage let out a chuckle. Then Nichols’s older brother, Jamal Dupree, wearing a white-and-black starter jacket and a red flat-brim, approached the microphones.

“My brother was the most peaceful person I’ve ever met in my life. He never lifted a finger to nobody, never raised his voice to nobody,” he told the man. “If my brother was here today, and he had to say something, he would tell us to do this peacefully.”

“Trust me. Me personally, sir? I would love to get busy,” Dupree continued. “But I’m stepping for my brother, not for myself.”

I locked eyes with Sharpton and raised a finger to let him know I had a question.

“What will be different this time?” I asked after he called on me. Sharpton has been an activist for more than half a century, and for as long as I’ve been alive, he has specifically championed Black families whose loved ones have been killed by police. The year I was born, in 1990, he marched for Phillip Pannell in Teaneck, New Jersey, the town to which my family moved the summer before kindergarten. During my grade-school years, he’d been across the Hudson, demanding justice for Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo. As I finished high school in suburban Cleveland, he was back east in Queens, chanting the name Sean Bell.

Since the mid-2010s, I’ve followed him and other activists as they’ve hopscotched across the country, answering questions at gatherings like this one—the only real difference between one case and another being, seemingly, the name on the cardboard signs. What if, as Derrick Bell theorized, American racism is truly intractable?

It was a layup of a question for an activist as seasoned as Sharpton. But it felt right for the venue. The probing and layered inquiries happen behind the scenes. Press conferences are theater in which we all play a part. And besides, it had been a while, and I wanted to watch him work. Sharpton typically begins small and then goes big. He starts in the contemporary then traces his way through history.

At the federal level, he said, this must prompt the passage of legislation ending qualified immunity—the provision that shields police officers from civil liability. At the state level, Nichols’s death must result in the passage of a law to make it a crime for a cop to stand by and watch another officer brutalize a civilian.

“They never even asked him for his license and registration; they grabbed him out of the car,” Sharpton riffed. “Until they understand it’s going to cost them personally, it won’t stop.”

Sharpton likes to draw a distinction between lifelong activists like himself and social-justice celebrities who vanish between the hashtags, gone just as suddenly as they came. Say what you will about Jheri curls, gold chains, and Tawana Brawley: No other person this side of King has as consistently decried the unchecked police abuse of Black Americans, and he knows it.

He is right when he says that movements take time. It was nine years from the Montgomery bus boycott to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Today’s discussions of ending armed traffic enforcement and shutting down specialty task forces would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Where might we be a decade from now? Faith, the Book of Hebrews instructs, is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.

“How long is it going to take?” Sharpton asked, looking back down at me from his perch in the pulpit. “Well, however long it takes, we gon’ be there.”