Wade in the Water by Maya Pascal
Wade in the Water by Maya Pascal
A Year of the Movement for Black Lives
The movement for Black lives is in the news every other day—protesting on college campuses, demonstrating against police violence, and demanding answers to problems of racial justice from the county’s highest offices. But how do you keep fighting when the deaths and injustices seem to be stacking up higher and higher every day? How do you keep your head above water when the struggle against oppression threatens to drown you?
In this zine, a collection of 13 young Black Americans—artists, activists, musicians, writers, and scholars—share their own experiences with American anti-Blackness, their thoughts on the movement, and how they’ve coped along the way. Together they form an emotional and empowering snapshot of Black life in the midst of changing tides.
The goal of Wade in the Water is to compose an image of the impact of the movement for Black lives has since the unrest in Ferguson in the summer and fall of 2014, from snapshots provided by a range of Black interviewees. When this all began, it seemed to some that it would blow over by the next news cycle. Now, some are comparing it to the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s.
How have individual perspectives shifted? Has the movement driven previously uninterested or ambivalent people towards activism? Has it, at the very least, started to change the way individuals discuss race in the U.S.? This is not a question of How We Talk About Race, in the overarching sense it is often asked in thinkpieces in national newspapers and magazines.
Rather, it is a question of individual experiences: what did you think at the time? What do you think now? How did you cope? How have you changed? What change have you seen around you? And, most importantly, is that enough? What, after all, is the end goal of the movement–and how can we achieve it?