As a Black woman in this country, I often feel unmoored — adrift in the ocean that is America. Connected to nothing. Supported by no piling, rooted, with its foundation in the earth. We are subject to the wind and the rain, the waves and the elements, alone and unseen. We are struggling not to topple over, not to be consumed by the sea.

This is how it feels to watch the civil rights that my people fought for, that my mother fought for, bleed into the earth and wash away.

When my ancestors first arrived in this place, they came across those waters, bound and unknowing of their destination.

Stripped of their humanity. Convinced they were something ugly and small and unworthy.

And when it was convenient, when there was trouble on the horizon, when there was not enough food to feed those who mattered, my people were

tossed to that sea, thrown away, drifting, then sinking to rise no more.

But my ancestors fought. We fought. To be seen. To be heard. To be recognized. To be counted as human and not chattel. We fought to rise above the water. To be acknowledged by our country. We fought to be counted as people, for our humanity to be empowered through our vote, and for that vote to count for something.

We fought through enslavement. Through Jim Crow. Through the lynchings, the burnings and the deliberate destruction of our thriving communities. We fought for equal pay, equal capacity, equal rights, equal humanity. We fought, and we fought, and we fought. And there were moments when we believed that we had won.

Yet, even when those rights appeared on paper, systems remained, drenched in the sea of oppression, of racism, of fear, of a willful refusal to recognize our humanity. So, we fought those systems too. That was a different kind of fight. In that fight, what we were saying to America was: This idea of freedom, of equity, of justice, we have not yet arrived. We are still unmoored. Still disconnected from the shore, with no anchor, distant from the country that is ours as much as anyone’s.

I feel like America has always been divided, between those who recognize the necessity of this fight, and those who wish to remain steeped in the power that the belittling of others provides. They hoard their power. To protect it at any cost, even at the cost of freedom, democracy, America. But unmoored or not, our ships, our boats, the hull of who we are is foundational to this nation. We built it. We bled for it. We are as American as the soil beneath it. We who float adrift, still searching for the port. Still looking to be called home.

And now, with this assault on civil rights, the rights that gave us legal authority, the rights that said you exist, you count, even that sail that once caught the wind and drove us toward shore has been tattered, shredded, stripped away. Our votes may no longer face the overt violence of another era, but they face something equally insidious: the Racism of Erasure, of being Unrepresented, Discounted, Unseen and Unheard. Laundered through the quiet rulings of a Supreme Court and its shadow docket, that calls injustice justice, while working cloaked in the darkness and the quiet of a new oppression.

Our civil rights were a rope thrown across the water to help us pull ourselves to shore. That rope is being shredded. The threads all but gone.

But I trust with my whole humanity, there are still people who know. Who see. Who understand that a nation where its people are discounted is not Just — it is broken. A Just nation is one where every citizen is free to exist, to thrive, to be heard. Where voices are not washed away by the waters of indifference, but amplified in the spirit of a community that belongs to us all.

It is my hope, my prayer, that we, the people of America, who know what justice should look like, we who see the unmooring, we who feel with those unmoored — gather. Come together. And build something stronger. A way for our belonging to root itself into the pillars along the shores of this nation.

Fighting for the foundation of what America was called to be.

Together.So that wealth and power cannot purchase our voices or our freedom. So that this country is not bound like chattel.

So that America — our America — is not for sale.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

— Alice Walker

Theresa Wilson Esq. is president of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association.