"All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world"
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Walker’s line refuses the museum-glass comfort we like to place over atrocity. “All History is current” isn’t a poetic flourish; it’s an accusation against the tidy timeline that lets readers treat slavery, colonialism, genocide, and misogyny as “then,” safely quarantined from “now.” The phrasing is blunt, almost legalistic: history, she implies, is not a closed case but an active file. In Walker’s work, the past doesn’t merely echo; it structures who gets protected, who gets punished, who gets believed.
The second clause tightens the screw: “all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.” The hedge words - “on some level,” “somewhere” - are doing strategic work. They anticipate the reader’s evasions: Yes, but things are better here; yes, but that’s over there; yes, but not like before. Walker concedes variation while denying absolution. You don’t get to claim progress as innocence. The point isn’t that every era is identical; it’s that power rarely disappears, it relocates, rebrands, and finds new bodies.
Context matters: Walker emerged from the post-Civil Rights moment when celebration threatened to harden into amnesia, and when feminist gains often excluded Black women’s lived reality. The line carries her signature insistence that empathy must be political, not ornamental. If history is current, then reading becomes a form of witnessing, and witnessing becomes a demand: what are you doing with what you know?
The second clause tightens the screw: “all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.” The hedge words - “on some level,” “somewhere” - are doing strategic work. They anticipate the reader’s evasions: Yes, but things are better here; yes, but that’s over there; yes, but not like before. Walker concedes variation while denying absolution. You don’t get to claim progress as innocence. The point isn’t that every era is identical; it’s that power rarely disappears, it relocates, rebrands, and finds new bodies.
Context matters: Walker emerged from the post-Civil Rights moment when celebration threatened to harden into amnesia, and when feminist gains often excluded Black women’s lived reality. The line carries her signature insistence that empathy must be political, not ornamental. If history is current, then reading becomes a form of witnessing, and witnessing becomes a demand: what are you doing with what you know?
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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