Racism is not just slavery and Jim Crow. It is the daily violence

Hear the voice of Cori Bush, a witness of her people’s suffering and a herald of truth: “Racism is not just slavery and Jim Crow. It is the daily violence that is enacted on our communities each and every day we live in this White supremacist society.” This is no cry bound to the past, nor a tale that ended with the breaking of chains or the signing of laws. It is the testimony of the present, a reminder that oppression changes its mask but not its hunger, that the beast of racism devours not only in the pages of history, but in the very streets where we walk today.

For many are deceived by the thought that slavery and Jim Crow were the whole of the struggle. They look at chains struck from wrists and laws repealed, and they say, “Behold, the battle is won.” Yet Cori Bush speaks what is plain to see: though the plantation and the segregated school may be gone, the spirit of violence remains. It has entered the fabric of daily life—in the schools that starve Black children of resources, in the workplaces where their labor is undervalued, in the prisons that swell with their bodies, in the hospitals where their pain is dismissed. The old chains were made of iron; the new chains are woven of policy, neglect, and contempt.

Consider the story of Emmett Till, a boy of fourteen, slain in 1955, his body mutilated by hatred. His death is remembered as a spark that ignited the Civil Rights Movement. Yet decades later, how many more sons and daughters have been cut down by the same fury, though the laws of Jim Crow have long since fallen? From Rodney King beaten in the streets of Los Angeles, to George Floyd suffocated under the knee of power, the same daily violence has endured, changing form but not ceasing. The names of the fallen are etched upon the heart of every Black community, proof that racism is not history—it is a fire still burning.

This is why Bush speaks of a White supremacist society, not as an accusation hurled into the air, but as a sober truth: for a society that is built on hierarchy, that privileges one race above another, cannot shed that foundation with a mere proclamation. Its habits, its institutions, its unspoken assumptions continue to wound, to humiliate, to exclude. Thus, every individual in such a world must confront whether they are sustaining the lie of supremacy, or laboring to unmake it.

The meaning of her words is both a warning and a summons. A warning, that if we rest content in the victories of the past—abolition, civil rights, representation—we will miss the enemy that lurks in the ordinary, in the “every day.” A summons, that we must learn to see racism not only in its monstrous forms, but in its subtle ones: in the raised eyebrow, the locked door, the denied loan, the poisoned water, the school without books. It is in these small violences, repeated endlessly, that the great injustice continues to live.

The lesson is clear: do not measure freedom only by the absence of chains or the passing of laws. Measure it by the presence of justice in daily life, by the safety of children, by the dignity of workers, by the fairness of courts, by the healing hand of medicine extended equally to all. Until these things are true, racism is not past but present, not history but destiny—unless we resist.

What, then, must we do? First, we must see with open eyes, refusing the comfort of denial. Second, we must speak truth, naming the daily violence for what it is, even when others grow weary of hearing it. Third, we must act: defend the vulnerable, reform the unjust, create communities of care where society has abandoned them. And finally, we must never forget that to live in a White supremacist society and yet fight against it is itself an act of courage, one that binds us to the long line of heroes who refused to accept the lie of inferiority as truth.

Thus remember: the struggle is not over, and the words of Cori Bush are a torch to light the path. The beast of racism is cunning, but it can be slain—not by silence, not by complacency, but by daily acts of justice to answer daily acts of violence. And in that struggle lies the true work of liberation, not only for the oppressed, but for all who would call themselves human.