“The Lord needs to deal with me on this issue. With everything I read, I grow angrier. I feel my heart hardening. To see people willfully deny the humanity of other people. To see people in a constant state of denial about the truths of American history. To see people being dismissive about the real and felt realities of other people. It’s maddening. It really and truly is. I need some divine intervention here. I’m really losing my grip…”
A friend posted this on Facebook tonight. I’ve been feeling the same way since Saturday night’a verdict in the Zimmerman case. I decided I’d see what I might say in response, having had 72 hours to digest this. Here’s what I wrote.
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There’s a ton of toxicity in the air, for sure, my friend. Truly poisonous. And (anti)social media is not helping — giving racists and gun-nuts cover to trumpet their little victory here. I’ve had to be really selective about what I read — which still doesn’t work: I got stuck earlier this evening in a frightful mob-posting against Stevie Wonder, of all people, for canceling his Florida gigs. The original poster applauded the artist for his decision — and then everyone (apparently her “friends”) attacked!
Personally, I’ve felt leveled since Saturday night, when the stunning news came through. Everything we can muster from our spiritual traditions is essential to sustain us now, to support us in our grief, to channel our anger and address our fear.
Of what I have read, Makani Themba’s words rang truest to me. We are in the same deep struggle we’ve faced all along — generations deep, and generations to go. (Even if we have hope, and work hard — all of us: and how likely is that?) W.E.B Du Bois hoped that dealing with our racism would be “the problem of the 20th century” — and it was, but we didn’t solve it: now it’s the problem of the 21st. So there’s grieving to be done, and anger to manage — and then there’s the challenge of social change.
But look at what we’re up against! The Right — with racism at its core, and its finger on our trigger — has a tight script. “Ours” — cultural democrats’, who share commitments to diversity and social justice — isn’t so clear. This is what drove me back to grad school three years ago (over 30 years after I last left there, in the Seventies): seeing the Tea Partiers savaging Obama (“He wasn’t even born here!”) and calling the shots with that same old script. Can we build a platform and share a script (if you will) that resonates for us like theirs resonates for them? I believe we are the (incipient) majority, and the hope for the future of whatever democracy we can create in this country. But God help us, our work is cut out for us, as the reactionary politics since Obama’s election have amply demonstrated.
In practical terms, of all that I’ve read in the last three years of being back in school, it was Martin Luther King’s last book that seems most promising — and yet difficult to achieve, given the past 33 years of politics (since Reagan’s election). In Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1968), King wrote of the urgent need to move from the relatively easy, cheap, first phase of the civil rights movement — everything up to the time of his writing, and of course his assassination — into the much-more-difficult second phase. This second phase, he warned, would cost, because it was not a simple matter of desegrating lunch counters, but would require us to face the deep damage of centuries-old racism. He called upon us to commit to a national policy of economic justice that would remove the insecurity that undermines our lives, our families, our communities and our nation, and which pits poor people one against the other, along the old lines of race (mostly), region, religion, politics, or anything else that comes to hand, through manipulation by entrenched powers-that-be.
Yes, it would cost: taxes would have to be levied, and guaranteed income, housing, healthcare, education, and cultural opportunity extended to every American. But would this have cost any more than he outrageous costs of prisons and police, and a runaway national security apparatus, and bogus foreign wars — all operating as if on a blank check? Not to mention the human costs, in lives destroyed. King envisioned a national assurance of work for public service, wherever “the marketplace” didn’t want or wouldn’t pay an adequate wage for our citizens’ work. In previously poor communities, this would help us create community-service projects of every kind — including caring support for those whom King acknowledged have been too damaged by the legacy of hatred, pain, and injury from our racist, classist past to keep it together.
I’m sorry for going on so, my friend. Handling our grief and anger do come first. But mine can’t be quieted without knowing there’s some way forward. We need a program that’s stronger than our opposition’s. I’ve thought about it a lot, and this is the best I’ve been able to come up with. I welcome your comments and suggestions.
Don Adams 