Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. But we know that progress is not guaranteed. When the arc in America bends from slavery in the 1860s and returns to convict leasing in the 1880s; when it bends from Jim Crow in the 1960s and returns to mass incarceration in the 1970s; when it bends from Indigenous genocide to an epidemic of Indigenous suicides; when it bends, but as a tree does in the wind, only to sway back, we have to admit that we have not touched the root.
