Every time she speaks at an event, LaTosha Brown starts by asking the audience this question:
“What would America look like without racism?”
Brown is an award-winning cultural activist and expert on Black voting rights and Black female empowerment. She posed this question to begin her keynote address at the 41st annual Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture and Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, a UNC event that is one of the longest-running celebrations of King in the nation.
She then asked if anyone had ever heard that question before. No one raised their hand.
“At the end of the day, there is nothing that comes into being in the physical world that is not first envisioned,” Brown said. “And so the reason why I asked this question is ‘how will we ever live in America that is free of racism when we've not even asked ourselves the question?’”
Selected by the MLK Celebration Committee, the theme of this year’s lecture revolved around the question “What are we striving for?” It was inspired by a quote from King himself.
“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself,” King said during his “How Long? Not Long” speech delivered in Montgomery, Ala., after the march from Selma. “A society that can live with its conscience.”
In her keynote, Brown said we should be striving to go to higher ground and to accept, affirm and respect each other’s humanity. She said this love and view of humanity has not been centered — and often not even seen.
“The question in this nation around who has access to democracy is still a question, can you believe that?” she said “I can. The reason why I believe that is because we never dealt with the real issue. You can call it voter suppression. You can call it mass incarceration. You can call economic inequity. But all of it, the root of that tree, is structural racism.”
