The author is an Afghan refugee who made Lexington her first home in America. She asked to remain anonymous due to the current climate for immigrants.
If I say: “In the 21st century, injustice survives not by hiding, but by being seen without structure, remembered without history, resisted without risk, and imagined without alternatives”
Would you agree?
Yes, no, maybe, or I don’t know? What do you mean?
Let me tell you in the shape of a story.
We wake up and scroll.
A video appears: a man killed by police, a child crying in a factory, a woman assaulted on a street. The images are sharp, immediate, undeniable. We watch, feel outrage, and share. Injustice is no longer hidden.
But the story ends there.
The video does not show the policies that militarize police forces, the supply chains that profit from cheap labor, or the legal systems that normalize gendered violence. The event is severed from the structure that produced it. What we see is tragedy, not design.
In this way, injustice is seen without structure.
Tomorrow, another post reminds us that slavery ended long ago, that women can vote now, that progress has been made. History appears as a sequence of moral victories rather than an unfinished system. Racial capitalism, colonial extraction, and patriarchal labor are sealed safely in the past instead of traced into the present.
In this way, injustice is remembered without history.
We respond. We post statements, declare allyship, attend workshops. Discomfort is framed as harm, and risk is avoided. Resistance becomes something that can be performed without losing a job, a platform, or social belonging. Action is measured by visibility rather than consequence.
In this way, injustice is resisted without risk.
When deeper change is proposed, it is dismissed as unrealistic. We are told there is no alternative, only better management of the same system. Gender equality becomes a corporate slogan. Justice becomes branding. Imagination is confined to what the market can absorb.
In this way, injustice is imagined without alternatives.
The problem, then, is not ignorance. It is a form of visibility that neutralizes action. Awareness circulates endlessly, producing outrage without accountability and critique without transformation.
Now imagine standing on the Lexington Green, where on April 19, 1775, the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. Here, injustice was once understood structurally. British taxation, imperial control, and military occupation were not seen as isolated abuses but as parts of an organized system that required resistance. Power was named, not merely witnessed.
Today, Lexington is often preserved as a photograph of moral clarity. Liberty is remembered as something once won rather than something that must be defended. Yet Lexington teaches us that liberty was never passive or complete. It was a rupture, a refusal grounded in the recognition that injustice is not an accident, but an arrangement.
To honor that history now means recognizing injustice in its contemporary forms and understanding that neutrality is not preservation, but participation.
This is how injustice thrives in the 21st century: not by hiding, but by becoming visible in ways that protect the structures that sustain it.
The question today is whether that recognition remains alive or merely remembered.