Urgency Theater and the Illusion of Progress
Break the routine of waiting; invent urgency and call it progress. — James Baldwin
The Seduction of Hurry
At the outset, Baldwin’s line sketches a ritual familiar to modern life: abandon the quiet discomfort of waiting, manufacture bustle, then baptize it as progress. The allure is clear—speed reads as virtue, motion masquerades as change, and the clock becomes a moral alibi. Yet Baldwin’s criticism implies that pace, detached from purpose, is a performance rather than a transformation. So the warning lands sharply: urgency can be a costume. In The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin exposes how national myths of innocence convert denial into activity, offering movement without moral reckoning. The danger, then, is not slowness; it is frenetic activity that spares us from facing what actually needs to change.
The Politics of Waiting
Yet the other half of the sentence—“the routine of waiting”—is itself a tool of control. Baldwin understood how delay can pacify dissent while protecting power. In A Talk to Teachers (1963), he cautions that telling children to wait for justice anesthetizes conscience and keeps the status quo intact. Moreover, postponement has real costs. Report from Occupied Territory (1966) chronicles how policing practices in Harlem inflicted immediate harms that polite deferrals could not remedy. Waiting, then, is not neutral time; it is a political strategy with winners and losers.
Urgency Theater in Modern Institutions
Meanwhile, institutions have perfected urgency theater: dashboards flash, inboxes flood, and crisis meetings multiply. The motto “move fast and break things” (popularized in Silicon Valley circa 2009) valorized velocity, yet too often produced churn—outputs without outcomes, disruption without repair. The spectacle of sprinting replaces the substance of solving. Baldwin’s insight helps decode this pattern: invented urgency crowds out reflective judgment, while branding the mere appearance of acceleration as progress. The result is heat without light—activity that inoculates organizations against accountability.
When Urgency Is Honest
By contrast, genuine urgency binds speed to responsibility. The Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56) linked time pressure to concrete leverage—revenue loss, legal challenge, and community coordination—and sustained it until structural concessions emerged. Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters (1988) shows how organizers synchronized economic pressure with courtroom strategy, translating moral claims into measurable change. Similarly, Birmingham’s Project C (1963) set clear targets—desegregation, hiring, and negotiation timetables—so that motion would register as outcomes, not optics. Here, urgency was not invented; it was earned by aligning tempo with truth.
Diagnosing False Progress
Consequently, Baldwin’s provocation becomes a diagnostic. Ask: urgency for whom, and to what end? If the rush centers optics, evades root causes, and burdens the already burdened, it is likely counterfeit. Notes of a Native Son (1955) models the opposite impulse: facing hard truths without flinching, then acting from clarity rather than panic. In practice, real progress makes beneficiaries and trade-offs explicit, ties deadlines to outcomes (not merely deliverables), and builds feedback controlled by those most affected. Anything less risks rebranding noise as achievement.
Designing Accountability Into Tempo
Therefore, the remedy is not slowness but integrity. Couple timelines with public ledgers of impact; define exit criteria before launching initiatives; sunset programs that miss outcomes; and distribute decision power to communities who bear the consequences. These mechanisms convert time pressure into ethical pressure, so that speed serves substance. When urgency is braided with transparency and consent, calling it progress is not a euphemism but an earned description.
From Waiting to Willingness
Ultimately, Baldwin urges a shift from waiting—or its counterfeit, haste—to willingness: the courage to face what must change and to move at the speed of responsibility. That path may feel less dramatic than crisis cycles, yet it is the only tempo that holds. In this light, breaking the routine of waiting is not a cue to sprint; it is an invitation to align time, truth, and accountability—so that when we name something progress, we are not merely naming our hurry.