The Time Is Now:
Abolishing Myths By Learning From The Ancestors

By Jennifer M. Gómez
Associate Professor of the School of Social Work
Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health
Boston University
&
Board Member & Chair of the Research Advisory Committee
Center for Institutional Courage

I am often told we are living in unprecedented times.

I do believe this time will find its way into future history books, with our descendants analyzing how we succeeded in promoting equality and peace. Or how we failed and why.

However, I can’t help but disagree that this time is one that humanity has never before experienced. It makes me wonder about the costs of ignoring historical similarities.

In our pursuit of freedom, what other myths should be abolished?

Myth #1: Discrimination and violence come from a few bad apples

As a child of the 90’s, I grew up being told explicitly and implicitly that most people are good, with discrimination and sexual violence coming from just a few individuals.

As we are witnessing in the Epstein case, the rates of discrimination and sexual violence are high, making the claim of a ‘few bad apples’ painfully false.  

Fundamentally, however, is another truth. These harms don’t need a bunch of bad actors to flourish. As work on racialized organizations shows us, policies, procedures, and structures promote discrimination. And bystanders allow the violence to thrive.

Myth #2: Time will fix everything

Many of us have been told that we just need to be more patient. After all, equality and peace will fall from the sky if we just give it enough time.

But as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., shared in his 1963 letter from Birmingham jail:

“It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively… We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through…tireless efforts and persistent work…and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”

Myth #3: There’s Nothing We Can Do

The horrors of our world can lead us to forgetting that human beings have changed the world for the better so many times before. Dreamstorming is a concept of mine that encourages us to imagine a perfectly peaceful and equal world as a starting point for strategizing societal transformation.

The fight isn’t over. We haven’t lost yet.

The Legacy of My Ancestors

As told to me by my grandmother, Mrs. Anna Cook Gómez, my legacy is one of quiet rebellion.

My grandmother’s grandmother was enslaved before being granted freedom. My grandmother’s mother was denied the right to a formal education, so she spent her nights teaching herself reading, math, and science, so she could help her daughter—my future grandmother—with her studies. My grandmother, then Anna Cook, earned valedictorian in her high school, but being a Black girl, was denied the honor in favor of her White classmate.

My ancestors—along with so many who have come before us—had cause time and again to succumb to the longstanding myths of the world. To believe slavery, racist policies, and intersectionally sexist violence and discrimination would be a neverending stronghold in their lives.

Though the world has never been free of these ills, there has been progress we can return to and advance, as we settle into the historically predictable times we are in, taking dreamstormed actions to change the world. Once again.