What is intolerance fatigue, and how is it fueling Black Lives Matter protests?
Protesters remain on the streets demanding equality and justice for Black Americans. What they’re feeling, I believe, is something I call “intolerance fatigue.”
As a race scholar, examining the history of social justice movements, the phrase is new, but the concept isn’t.
In 1962, during the civil rights movement, activist Fannie Lou Hamer sought to register to vote in her home state of Mississippi. When she was allowed to address the Democratic National Convention in 1964, Hamer told how she and her fellow activists were shot at, fined, arrested and brutally beaten in jail simply for trying “to register to become first-class citizens.”
Fannie Lou Hamer’s powerful testimony at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.
She spoke for millions in another speech that year, in which she declar...