This year has been perhaps the darkest of my lifetime. Covering political news in 2020, I have felt at times like I’m aging at a presidential pace: New gray hairs abound and the bags under my eyes seem like a bigger statement than even the boldest Telfar color.
At Teen Vogue, we knew the elections (especially the presidential) would dominate this year’s politics coverage, but we never could’ve anticipated the year’s other big stories — namely, the Black Lives Matter uprisings and the COVID-19 pandemic. Through it all, we’ve seen that a better world is possible, but not inevitable. During 2020's darkest moments, the only things that kept me going were the future and the fight happening for it right now.
We couldn’t have foreseen a year of the world burning, a year when the old saying “no news is good news” has felt more like a warning that there is no such thing as good news anymore. Stock markets are reaching record highs as people still fear an eviction crisis; the rich get richer. We are a country that has yet to repair the harm caused by treating African peoples like property, yet some believe broken store windows demean demands for justice. I’d argue that, really, they emphasize the dire urgency of addressing injustice.
Despite the crushing bleakness of it all, I have found small moments of solace this year in witnessing how an era of overlapping political catastrophes is motivating people in new ways and creating spaces to learn, even if the lessons are hard ones. A historic wave of activism and organizing, especially in the Black Lives Matter movement, has offered political education and the promise of a better world amid these overlapping crises.
Nothing is more emblematic of this moment than 2020’s discussion of police and prison abolition. Even moderate concerns about “defund the police” — a simple demand implying the possibility of a future in which we don’t need to spend money on militarized security forces — are an indication that we may be living in the dawn of a 21st-century abolitionist movement. The signs that this long-burning sun is finally rising come as the surest evidence yet that, as Ralph Chaplin wrote in his lyrics for the song “Solidarity Forever,” “We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.”
We must acknowledge that these moments haven’t spawned out of thin air. Really, we should go further than acknowledgment; we should celebrate all the groundwork that’s been laid as a foundation for building the radical responses to this year’s crises.
Sign up for our politics newsletter, the Teen Vogue Take!
In recent years, the Abolish ICE movement has centered the concept of abolition as a response to systems of detention, incarceration, and injustice. For decades before that, Black thinkers and writers have laid out how policing and prisons are systemically racist and outrightly inhumane in origin, design, and execution. As explored by the Nation in a 2018 piece, this history stretches back at least 100 years and laid the groundwork for a network of prison abolition organizations, many of which received new attention in 2020.
This year there have been many opportunities to educate ourselves about these struggles, with the 8toAbolition campaign and Mariame Kaba’s New York Times op-ed “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” which, in June, was already a response to efforts to downplay grassroots demands. For years conversations on YouTube have offered spotlights on theory and practice.
In a 2014 interview published as part of her book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Professor Angela Davis reminds us of the power of movements to shape our political conversations in broad ways. Davis, whose life and work have received new acclaim this year, offers a powerful frame for how we can relate to what we learn from activists in the streets.
“Oftentimes, we learn from movements,” she said. “That happens at the grassroots level, and we should be very careful not to assume that these insights belong to ourselves as individuals or at least as more visible figures, but we have to recognize that we have learned from those moments and we want to share those insights.”
I have learned much from movements in 2020, and it has been an honor to share some insights along the way — my own and those of the writers I’ve been lucky enough to work with. After the pandemic started, the movement for Black lives was the first reason I left the house, other than for groceries. But even before that, pandemic responses like mutual aid work, expanding tenants’ rights organizing, and more resistance to student debt offered me lessons. That same political education has been on offer this year for anyone willing to listen, and it seems set to offer even more learning as we move forward.
Truly, these efforts have been more than lessons; they've had tangible impacts. Voter registration among Democrats and Independents surged this summer at Black Lives Matter street protests. Efforts to motivate Black voters in communities like South Philadelphia and across Georgia were instrumental in defeating Trump — a very tangible win for the movements engaged in these efforts, even though the incoming administration still presents its own challenges.
What these various movements are up against is no joke. Throughout 2020, I’ve sunk into depths of depression that felt new. These shadows have, at times, felt all the darker in contrast with the brightness of new hopes I’ve allowed myself to have. Just as crises can be an opportunity to build a better world, they also present the possibility — realized again and again this year — that things can just keep getting worse. I still worry that we’ll be on a downward trajectory for the rest of my lifetime. No belief in an arc of history bending toward progress will convince me otherwise, unless I can see it for myself.
Will I ever get a chance to see that arc? There’s another quote from Professor Davis that has resonated with me regarding this year. In a 2014 interview from the same book I referenced above, she said, “Sometimes, we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.”
I hope I’m not alone in feeling that 2020 has shown glimmers on the horizon that a better world might actually be within reach. The old world is dying. A new world is being built right now. A better world is possible, but it is not inevitable. We have to fight for it like we did this year. The arc of history is bent toward justice not by nature, but by the concerted, collective efforts of people who know justice is what we need.
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: My Relationship With My Parents Changed During the COVID-19 Pandemic
