The ‘Race to Justice’ Is On in Santa Barbara

Midway through a recent phone conversation with Professor Jeffrey Stewart, winner of both the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for biography for his book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, he says something that’s at once so obvious and yet so remarkable that it stops me cold. We’d been discussing the agenda set forth by Race to Justice, the new season-length programming initiative from UCSB Arts & Lectures designed to promote and center conversations around social justice throughout this academic year, and Stewart observed that, generally speaking, “Americans don’t want to be made uncomfortable.”

Right. No doubt that’s how things have been for a long time, and it certainly remains as true as it ever was, but it’s 2020, and aggressively uncomfortable things happen every damn day. There’s the COVID-19 pandemic; we all know that’s been uncomfortable. And then there’s 2020’s other viral sensation, all eight minutes, 46 seconds of it — a video of a Black man in Minneapolis, George Floyd, dying beneath the weight of a police officer’s knee on his neck.

Distressed by the former and compelled by the latter, many Americans have acted on their discomfort. Protesters have taken to the streets in numbers not seen since the 1960s, another era in which this country felt the stern pinch of reality. Fanned by the warmth of two dangerous climates, one of opinion and the other of catastrophic meteorological fact, authoritarian violence has only escalated. Many Americans may want to look away, but comfort keeps getting harder to maintain. A frightening new heat is on.