Every radical movement is a rebirth of sorts, because political establishments are built on doctrines, and changing doctrines requires as much unlearning as learning. Radicals reconnect with wisdom that the existing regime, in order to prevail, has had to discard or suppress. Black Lives Matter reconnected to certain realities of the 1960s civil rights movement that had been buried under official celebrations of the movement as pacifistic, harmonious, and Christian. Ta-Nehisi Coates insisted on his own atheism, and Travis Gosa stressed that Black Lives Matter was “atheist or at least
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