The Struggle Continues But Victory is Certain

The Struggle Is Ending

“A Luta Continua.” The struggle continues.

We hear the phrase all the time. Among our community of Black activists, it’s a rallying call, a way to close protests, speeches, emails, and social media posts.

We rarely hear what used to be the second part of that call though: “A vitória é certa,” victory is certain. Over the years, we have come to focus more on the continuation of the struggle, and less on our ultimate victory. It’s like the refrain "we've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go."

Think about these slogans for a minute. By de-emphasizing our eventual victory, we are suggesting that our struggle will be perpetual. As a Black mother, I refuse to believe that this battle should just keep going on and on. I hope you’ll refuse to believe it too.

At Community Healing Network, we believe that we owe it to our children to do something both simple and audacious: set deadlines for achieving our goals. We as people of African ancestry are in a struggle for fundamental human rights. Why should we talk as though we’ll never win?

From the moment we launched CHN in 2006, we set 2019 as the year by which we would engage a critical mass of Black people in the journey toward emotional emancipation so that by 2020 we as a people will begin to see ourselves in a whole new light.

Why 2019? Because in August of that year, the nation will observe the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans in Virginia.By that date, we intend to significantly raise public awareness about the movement for emotional emancipation-- for freedom from the lies of White superiority and Black inferiority: the root causes of anti-Black racism. And we are gearing up now to meet that deadline.

Stay tuned for more on that.

For now, we invite you to join us in rejecting the “struggle continues” mantra. We think it’s vital that we keep our victory firmly in view. So we prefer “the struggle is ending.” That’s the spirit behind CHN's call to the global Black community to move“beyond the pain of the blues to the sky blue of unlimited possibilities” and “beyond surviving to flourishing.”

When we do our activism in the spirit of “the struggle is ending” we are bringing a different attitude. We are anticipating an end to our struggle. We are signaling to our children that we believe it is in our power as a great people to effect the changes that will free us completely. By envisioning an end, we make it much more likely that we will bring that vision into reality.

If that sounds too bold, remember the words of Zora Neale Hurston: “Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."

At CHN, our commitment is not just to the fight but to victory.

--Enola G. Aird, CHN Founder and President

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