'Planting time'
The harvests we have reaped were planted by the generations that came before us. Now, it’s our turn to do the planting.
“This is ‘planting time.’ Planting is work. That work must be aimed at building ideas, theories, paradigms, institutions, skills, practices, and alliances that we can seed now for a future harvest – a fulsome and lush democracy that will reflect the very best of us.”1
Sherrilyn Ifill
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, America has been gripped by a powerful minority of ideological revanchists working to roll back human rights and social progress, and to replace the very essence and being that is the United States of America with an authoritarian theocracy. If you are feeling discouraged, you are not alone.
Americans have entered what Sherrilyn Ifill, a civil rights activist and the Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor in Civil Rights at Howard Law School, calls “planting time.” For decades, many Americans became used to living in a time of harvest. “I wish the we could be in the harvest period, but i fear that that is not for us at this moment,” Ifill said in a recent interview on Amicus. The harvest has come and gone. Now, it’s planting time.
Ifill’s message to Americans in this new season of planting gives us a renewed sense of purpose and hope (slightly edited for clarity):
[I]t’s important for people to remember that, in this country, we do have experience with authoritarian regimes. Because that is what existed in the American South for the first half of the 20th century. And we weren’t [sitting around] doing nothing [during this time]. It wasn’t as though there was Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 and then there was Brown in 1954 [without any work being done in between]. That’s not what happened.
What happened is that people were planting in that period and that’s why I refer to this as planting time.
We want to live in the harvest. We all do. Because, for many of us, our lives were made possible by the harvest that we received from those who planted before us who opened the doors for women; who opened doors for Black people; who opened doors for disabled people; who created conditions that allowed us to attend universities we attend, marry who we married, live where we live. Those things might not have been possible for many of us due to race, gender, socioeconomic status prior to the second half of the 20th century.
And because we grew up in that period, we only know that. We think it’s always supposed to be harvest. We think it’s only supposed to be great stuff happening and we keep moving forward. And maybe we’re the first generation who believes that life is supposed to be the harvest.
But those who came before, who lived in planting times, know that it’s different. And so I spent a lot of time looking at what people were doing in the first half of the 20th century, when people were doing the things that produced the conditions that allowed for the incredibly dynamic, powerful democracy push of the civil rights movement and the women’s movement, and so forth, that made our lives possible. And what they were doing is they were showing up. And they were litigating. And they were fighting. They were creating organized local groups to put together challenges. They were creating conditions for the protection of people and to help the material condition of people who needed it. And they were sowing all of that into a system that was unfair, that was often brutal, that was violent, in which there were consequences for what they did. But… [the progress] we experienced would not have been possible without the planting of those people. And so I refer people to that period… The seeds were planted by those who were doing the work in that period…[…]…
We have a job to do because it's not just all about us. It’s about the future that we want to create in this country.
The harvests we have reaped were planted by the generations that came before us. Now, it’s our turn to do the planting.
Ifill, S. (2024, November 16). The truth. The Truth - by Sherrilyn Ifill. https://sherrilyn.substack.com/p/the-truth
Sherrilyn Ifill had an outstanding interview this morning with Jennifer Rubin on The Contrarian. She talked about Trump’s heavy handed use of the Executive orders and his intentions of using white supremacy as an underhanded way to get his way as president. She also expressed how the Republican party has demonized the intended meanings of things like CRT and DEI and how the Supreme Court has has ran amok in terms of giving Trump carte blanch permission to commit crimes while in office. We just saw him pardon at least 600 plus criminals for J6 crimes committed at the Capitol. We also saw him pardon the violent antiabortion extremists that violated the FACE act at a D.C. abortion clinic. We’re witnessing a psychopath in the Oval Office. Ifill’s planting time analogy could not be more spot on than it is today. She’s an icon as much as MLK Jr on civil rights and civil liberties issues.