How Much More Can One Bear
Notes on the American dream
I chose to title this essay How Much More Can One Bear because I was feeling, like many of us might be feeling, the weight of the world and its ugliness on full display. I’ve watched far too many videos, seen too many images of the horrid environment happening across the country and in Minneapolis specifically. People suffering. People in pain. I’ve watched, and joined, protests against what is happening, defying violence, particularly ICE. We are in separate places, but the weight of what is happening—I feel as if I were there myself, bearing witness to the cruelty unfolding in real time.
I have always wondered how Dr. King mustered the courage to continue to fight despite it all—despite what can only be called a lie we tell ourselves over and over again. Americans declare they will finally address the contradiction at the heart of this country—the one that has poisoned us since before the ink dried on the Constitution—and then turn their backs on it. Again. They—we—always do.
This is the contradiction that left hundreds of thousands of bodies dead on Civil War battlefields. The same one that decorated poplar trees with Black bodies, or strange fruit as Billie Holiday would sing it, that turned cities to ash, that met freedom marchers with dogs and fire hoses. And each time after the blood has been shed and the cameras have turned away, this nation has chosen to double down on the foundational premise that white lives matter more than others. Not as much more as before, perhaps. Just enough to keep the machinery running. It’s a kind of freedom snatching, as novelist Jamila Minnicks would put it.
I recently returned to James Baldwin’s 1965 debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge, where Baldwin argued that the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro. But it’s not just at the expense of Black people, is it? If I may attest, I would argue that the American dream—America progress—has always been at the expense of ____. I implore you to fill in the blank. It is a dream that has always been built on someone’s back and purchased with someone else’s suffering. Indigenous people, forced from their lands and erased from the national story. Immigrants, used and discarded when convenient, now hunted by ICE across Minnesota and beyond. Poor people of all colors, ground down by a system that requires their poverty to sustain someone else’s wealth.
The American dream, its progress, has historically meant that someone gets left behind. The dream requires the nightmare. We see it with ICE raids tearing families apart. We see it in the homelessness crisis, in food deserts, in schools that fail children because they were meant to fail. The same pattern, repeating across generations and populations, each time justified by a different set of excuses but always serving the same purpose: to maintain a hierarchy where some lives are valued and others are expendable.
And so, I wonder, what went through Dr. King’s mind as he witnessed these atrocities during his time. What went through his mind as he witnessed, for example, grown men and women attack elementary school children with fists and tree limbs in Grenada, Mississippi in September of 1966, simply because they wanted to go to an integrated school? These were children—small bodies absorbing hatred meant to break their spirits and send a message to anyone who dared challenge the order of things.
Dr. King would retreat to his bed because of what he saw that day. Andrew Young said he had never seen him in such a state. Here he was, Dr. King, a man who had faced dogs and fire hoses, who had been arrested and beaten, brought to his knees by the sight of children being brutalized. And it was only when Joan Baez sang A Pilgrim’s Sorrow to him while he lay there in his bed that he began to be moved. I wonder what crossed his mind in those hours of darkness. What did he feel in his heart watching people defend white supremacy with their fists against small bodies? It was, I could imagine, a kind of exhaustion that settles into your bones when you realize the depth of human capacity for hatred.
I think about this often now in moments today when the world feels too heavy. When I watch footage from Minnesota and feel the familiar ache of history repeating itself. When I join protests and wonder if we are shouting into the same void that swallowed the cries of those who came before us. I think about retreating to my bed just as Dr. King did. How do we continue? How did we continue? I had often wondered how Dr. King found the strength to rise from that bed and return to the streets. But perhaps it’s because he understood something essential to this live we are to live—that the weight we carry is not ours alone. It belongs to all those who came before us and all those who will come after. It is the weight of memory and the weight of hope, inseparable and equally necessary.
The ugliness is on full display, yes. But so, too, must be our resistance to it. Not because we are certain of victory, but because the alternative—to absolve ourselves of responsibility, to turn away, to accept, to let the weight crush us into silence—is unbearable in a different way. It is the unbearable weight of complicity, of having lived through these moments and chosen to do nothing.
So we watch. We witness. We protest. We carry the weight together, as Dr. King did, as those children in Grenada did, as countless others have done throughout this nation’s tortured history. And when the weight becomes too much, when we need to retreat to our beds in exhaustion and grief, we trust that there will be someone there to sing us back to ourselves, to remind us why we must rise and return to the streets.
Because the question is not really How much more can one bear? The question is How can we not bear it? How can we look away when others are suffering? How can we rest when the work remains unfinished?
We bear it because we must. And we bear it in the hope that one day, the weight will finally lift, not because we grew numb to it, but because we carried it long enough and far enough to finally set it down for good.
Mustafa Ali-Smith is a social justice advocate who has worked around criminal justice issues for several years. His work examines race, justice, and the politics of reform and power in America.
Really thoughtful. How much more can one bear?
That kind of question is the striking of a match usually.