Time to pray
Pray with your feet, with your body, with your privilege.
Yesterday, on the fifth day of Black History Month, the current president of the United States posted a video to social media that portrayed former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes.
If you are not familiar with the racist trope of comparing Black people to monkeys or apes, allow me to provide a brief explanation.
The comparison of Black people to apes and monkeys has deep roots in pseudoscientific racism dating back centuries. As far back as the 16th century, white European “scientists” falsely claimed that African people existed closer to animals on a fabricated racial hierarchy. Enslavers and colonizers weaponized these dehumanizing comparisons to justify enslavement, segregation, and violence.
Though both the science and morality of this claim have been thoroughly debunked, the trope has persisted.
Let’s be very clear. More than insulting, this imagery was and continues to be a deliberate tool of oppression. In depicting Black people as less than human, past enslavers could more easily rationalize brutal treatment and the denial of basic rights and dignity.
This current administration is not only saying the quiet part out loud. They are screaming it from the rooftops, broadcasting it to anyone who is willing and able to see it. They want the United States to be more white. The project is explicit, and they are demonstrating their willingness to use every method of violence and intimidation at their disposal.
So what does that mean for us today?
For me, a white, cis woman, it leaves me with a clarified obligation. When the violent oppressors seek to dehumanize, our response must be to re-humanize, through the daily work of building a world where we recognize and respond to our fundamental interdependence.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously said that “marching is praying with your feet.” So first, we must be ready to pray, with our feet, with our bodies, with our privilege.
Our prayers cannot end when the march does. They must be offered in how we show up for our neighbors and how we use whatever privilege we have to absorb blows meant for others.
The prayers must continue in group chats and school board meetings, in choosing solidarity over comfort, in the small and large refusals that say “not in my name, not on my watch.” The prayers continue through calls to elected officials, mutual aid dinners, and stepping into the voting booth.
Dehumanization lives on the lie that we are separate, that another person’s suffering is not our concern. The antidote is the opposite: a deliberate cultivation of connection and mutual obligation. It means asking not “how does this affect me?” but “who is most at risk right now, and how can I be useful?”
Whatever else it means, we must be doing the work of re-imagining what it means to be “we, the people.” Not as a nation unified by sameness, but as a community bound to one another, dependent on each other for our collective dignity and survival.
This is the work. Not someday, but today. Not somewhere else, but right where we stand.