The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Released in 1970, it is a song by the late Gill-Scott Heron. He sent out a call for action during what he saw as a racialized, imperialistic, and divided nation. He takes to task consumerism and the status quo mentality. In essence, you can’t just sit this one out on your couch; it is a call to those who want change rather than going back.

A couple of quotes from a 1990s interview with Heron found in Media Burn Archive, he talked about the song’s meaning at length. Two quotes pulled from that interview crystalized this poetic pre-rap-era soliloquy. “The first change that takes place is in your mind.”” The thing that is going to change people is something that no one will ever be able to capture on film. It’ll just be something that you see, and all of a sudden, you realize I’m on the wrong page, or I’m on the right page but on the wrong note, and I’ve got to get in sync with everyone else to understand what’s happening in this country.” 

We can all remember during the so-called 2020 racial reckoning, from McDonald’s to the NFL, corporations across America were touting Black Lives Matter.

Once the momentum dried up, so did the money, amid backlash, culture wars, and great replacement theory paranoia. Introduce January 6th, anti-woke, CRT, book banning, etc.

We have seen this movie before. That is why Three-Fifths Magazine remains focused on dismantling systemic racism, which has been industrialized through the middle passage, indigenous genocide, segregation, forced assimilation, and the clandestine racialized practices of the current day, just to name a few. Therefore, it has metastasized many times over for hundreds of years. 

One fact that now stands irreversible, like a runaway 18-wheeler rolling down the hills of an Appalachian highway, is that Demographic change is coming to America. In the next 20 years, America will be a Majority Minority Nation. Quoting Heron, “It’ll just be something that you see, and all of a sudden you realize.” What kind of America will we find ourselves in when that time arrives? Where will you be, on the right page or the wrong? Will you be on the right page but the wrong note? More importantly, what should we all be doing along the way until then?

“For I know the plans and thoughts that I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans for peace and well-being and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”

Jeremiah 29:11 Amplified Bible