Becoming the Change We Have Been Awaiting
We are the ones we have been waiting for. — Grace Lee Boggs
From Savior Myths to Collective Agency
At the outset, Boggs’ line punctures the comforting myth that rescue arrives from above. Instead, it locates power in neighbors, co-workers, and youth who decide to act. Echoing Ella Baker’s maxim that ‘strong people don’t need strong leaders’ (SNCC, 1960), the quote reframes politics as a practice of collective agency rather than charismatic authority. By shifting attention from waiting to doing, it invites us to measure hope by what we build together.
Detroit as a Laboratory of Democracy
From there, Detroit becomes a vivid case study. After deindustrialization, Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs helped seed projects like Detroit Summer (1992), where teenagers cleaned lots, painted murals, and planted gardens. The work was small in scale yet transformative: participants learned they could be producers of community, not just consumers of services. As Boggs argued in The Next American Revolution (2011), rebuilding a city required ‘visionary organizing’—creating alternatives that prefigure a new normal. These experiments suggested that democracy deepens when people remake the places they live, one block at a time.
A Line with Many Ancestors
Meanwhile, the sentence itself carries a lineage. Poet June Jordan’s Poem for South African Women (1978) proclaims, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for,’ turning spectators into protagonists. Decades later, flyers attributed to ‘Hopi Elders’ (c. 2001) echoed the idea, and Barack Obama popularized the phrasing in 2008. Boggs employed it within a lifetime of movement work, emphasizing that authorship matters less than the practice the line demands. Seen this way, the quote functions like a folk refrain—traveling across struggles, renewing the same invitation to act.
Prefigurative Politics: Living the Future Now
Moreover, the phrase points to prefigurative politics: we begin living the future we desire now. Boggs urged ‘growing our souls,’ a phrase she used to describe the inner work required to sustain outer change. Plato’s Republic (c. 375 BC) shows a similar intuition when it insists that just cities require just citizens; Boggs updates that insight for a deindustrialized, multiracial democracy. When people run community land trusts, cooperative businesses, or local media, they practice the relationships a humane society needs—turning ideals into habits.
Turning Crisis into a Proving Ground
In this spirit, crisis becomes a proving ground rather than an endpoint. During the 2020 pandemic, mutual aid networks delivered food, medicine, and rent support when institutions faltered, demonstrating how ordinary people can coordinate at scale. Such efforts mirrored Boggs’ belief that solutions emerge where people already are. The shift from petitioning to provisioning does not abandon policy; instead, it generates leverage and learning, so that demands arise from working prototypes rather than abstract wishes.
Education as the Practice of Freedom
Finally, education ties the arc together. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) argues that people become subjects of history through dialogic learning; Boggs extended this idea into neighborhood classrooms, garden beds, and maker spaces. When youth document oral histories or rebuild a corner store as a cooperative, they encounter knowledge as something made, not given. Thus the quote becomes a pedagogy: by practicing responsibility together, we discover that the leaders we awaited were the selves we are still becoming.