Dallas—and the country—is experiencing the most widespread movement of direct action we have seen in more than 60 years. People are taking to the streets to demand that this city wakes up, listens, and sees the systemic and endemic racism that has defined the lives of people of color in America for what it is. If real progress is going to be made, however, that direct action must advance an agenda of change.

Based on the many conversations going on right now, there is a hunger for change. When Love Field swiftly moves to take down a statue of a racist cop, when the hosts of sports talk station The Ticket spend a week soul searching, you know we have entered a new kind of moment. Reforms that weren’t imaginable a month ago now seem possible.

Change is already happening. Los Angeles may redeploy public funds from its police budget to fund community development. The Minneapolis City Council voted to disband its police department. Even during the disastrous Dallas City Council meeting Friday, the city manager presented a list of possible reforms, and promising ideas were put forth by council members, like reimagining the police academy and banning elected officials from taking campaign donations from police unions.

This next step, however, concerns me. A knee-jerk response to the crisis will likely miss the monumental scale of the problem. Racism runs through every aspect and every institution of American society. It is baked into the structures of power that hold our city, state, and country together. Racism is so much a part of American life that we are blind to most of the insidious ways it defines our culture. Confronting that is going to take courage, not only from our neighbors who have taken to the streets but from all of us.

Over the past week, I have seen a lot of well-meaning efforts to confront the problem. There have been the numerous corporate statements backing Black Lives Matter; public symbols of support, like the blackout of Reunion Tower; and the sharing of articles and ideas on social media about how to support businesses owned by people of color, contribute to organizations that work in disadvantaged communities, and raise money to help repair the damage to properties that took the punch of the anger that manifested in Dallas’ streets. These are not meaningless gestures. They represent people in positions of power and privilege saying, “We hear you.”

But ultimately these are only gestures. They are the kinds of gestures that have been made before, and they are gestures that have proven hollow when it comes to making meaningful change. Real change is going to need to strike more deeply, and it is going to require more than giving our attention, time, and money. But to understand what real change looks like, we must first confront assumptions about how our society works.

After the killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, I was struck by the Rev. Al Sharpton’s interview with Floyd’s brother, Philonese Floyd, in Houston. Philonese described a brief condolence phone call from President Trump.

“It was so fast,” Floyd said. “He didn’t give me an opportunity to even speak. It was hard. I was trying to talk to him, but he just kept, like, pushing me off, like ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re talking about.’… I said that I couldn’t believe they committed a modern-day lynching in broad daylight.”

George Floyd grew up in Houston. I am a native. Perhaps we danced down some of the same streets and enjoyed some of the same delights of that city. Hanging at Hermann Park, celebrating the Houston Rockets’ NBA championship, or just chilling to the No. 1 radio station, KMJQ, Majik 102 FM, a broadcast outlet I was privileged to work for.

Right now, though, the bond that connects my sadness to the Floyd family’s most is something Philonese Floyd said. Ahmaud Arbery’s father used the same phrase — a modern-day lynching — to describe what happened when white men chased his son in their trucks as Ahmaud jogged down a Georgia street. It’s an honest phrase. Most folks, it seems, would rather not confront it or how lynching has evolved. Before June 7, 1998, I was in no great hurry to dive into the topic either.

A new book about the Texas Rangers tells the truth about that famous bronze at Love Field and a 1930 lynch mob in Sherman. An excerpt from Cult of Glory.

In 1855, Victor Considérant, a renowned disciple of the French socialist philosopher Charles Fourier, led French, Swiss, and Belgian settlers into North Texas to establish a socialist utopian colony on the banks of the Trinity River. Before coming to Texas, Considérant had been driven into exile in Belgium after a failed insurrection against Napoleon III in 1849. While in exile, he wrote a book called Au Texas, which laid out a vision for an egalitarian society in an untouched corner of the state that Considérant depicted as a new Eden. He raised about $16 million (accounting for inflation) and arranged for the Atlantic passage of hundreds of followers. We know how the story ends. Considérant’s utopian experiment, called La Réunion, failed after 18 months.

La Réunion’s crash is often attributed to the intellectual French settlers’ inability to farm, their ill-preparedness for North Texas’ harsh climate, and financial insolvency. But James Pratt’s new book, Sabotaged: Dreams of Utopia in Texas, challenges these assumptions. Pratt describes a settlement that, despite internal divisions and difficult conditions, managed to establish a beachhead on the west bank of the Trinity that supported about 150 settlers. He also paints a portrait of Considérant as impetuous and underhanded, determined to undermine the success of La Réunion before he even arrived. Pratt’s book raises an intriguing historical “What if?” But for poor leadership, La Réunion could have survived.

This past weekend Dallas lost a giant. Virginia Savage McAlester passed away from myelofibrosis on April 9. She was 76.

There are many ways to describe McAlester. She was an author, a preservationist, an architectural historian, an activist, the founder and leader of multiple non-profits, and a loyal and dedicated daughter, sister, and mother. McAlester is perhaps best known for her monumental A Field Guide to American Houses, which, after it first appeared in 1984, did nothing less than anoint McAlester as the “Queen of Historic Preservation.” The book has topped architectural best seller lists for so long that, in 2019, Curbed called her the “most popular architecture writer in America.”

But the impact of McAlester’s life extends far beyond her very influential book. In Dallas, she roused the city’s understanding and appreciation of its own architectural history, transforming the city’s conception of itself in the process.

McAlester’s book appeared at a time when, as architectural historian William Seale told the New York Times, developers charged like “wild bulls” over the city’s old neighborhoods.

“When she started broadening her preservation efforts,” Seale said, “few, if any, in Dallas had the slightest interest in historic preservation, thinking their history too new to be worthwhile.”

McAlester’s appreciation of that overlooked history stemmed from the fact that her own life and family were so deeply rooted in it.

At midnight, Bob Dylan dropped the longest song he has ever recorded — a 17-minute, stream-of-conscious ballad about the JFK Assassination called Murder Most Foul. As Variety reports, it is the first new release of original material from Dylan since 2012, and why it comes now, we can only guess. Dylan released a cryptic statement with the midnight release that thanks his fans, says he hopes they find the song “interesting,” and tells them to “stay safe, stay observant.”

He leaves it to us to make what we can from the timing of the release. We are all living through a historic pandemic, nearly the entire country is in the midst of a lockdown, and many artists are releasing material or staging online concerts to help boost spirits. Listening to the new song, however, it feels like Dylan is doing more than gifting us with some new entertainment to get us through the lockdown.

The new track is a meandering, “Desolation Row”-style waterfall of free association; cryptic imagery; historical observations; and pop cultural, folkloric, and musical references. Drenched with Dylan’s characteristically wry mix of barbed critique and whimsical irony, the song is an elegy on the JFK Assassination and a meditation on the decline of the American empire. Murder Most Foul is also one of the best songs about Dallas ever written.