Wednesday, April 4, 2018

50 Years After Martin


Plain and simple, the work isn’t done.

Not even close.

Whose fault is it that we haven’t collectively realized the Dream or made standing up for the truth and justice for all people instead of looking out for only ourselves?

Ours.

Look in the mirror and as we truthfully examine ourselves, we have become the beneficiaries of token progress such as celebrating the first to do this or the first to do that at the expenses of our associates who have sacrificed careers, friendships, reputations, wealth, and even lives to see the mountaintop. For many of us, we are but a generation or two removed from debilitating poverty and ingrained anti-black laws designated to maintain a specific caste system; 1968 wasn’t that long ago. I was born ten years after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and where I write these words, I am cognizant that he was 39 years old when he stepped into eternity thanks to that bullet at 6:01 pm.

Imagine me leaving this world with my three-year-old daughter to fend for herself due to someone’s sheer hatred of my black skin, clear thoughts, and booming voice in our subdivision as well as the nighttime grind. In addition to that, I’m honestly not quite ready to tell my wife goodbye for the last time yet. At 39 years of age, I am still a young man despite what the grey hairs in my beard and the patch on my head and my sometimes-creaking back from playing too much basketball and bad weightlifting practices may otherwise dictate.

We flout the great soundbites on all sides but aren’t doing much to advance the actual doctrine. Yes, I’m talking about all of us; conservatives conveniently invoke a few words from the “I Have a Dream” speech when they are accused of being racists as if that absolves them; black people yoke King’s image to further their own ambitions; and liberals use him to authenticate their politics. Even FCA had the gall of exploiting the man’s memory to sell a bunch of Ram trucks during the Super Bowl! Guess what, guys? We’re all doing it wrong. As Americans, our greatest sin aside from racism itself blatant, covert, and systemic is expecting a fairy-tale ending to some of the ugliest chapters of this country’s history without putting in the work to change the narrative. Many readers will attempt to assuage this by flowery language of a colorblind utopian society that begins within our hearts as they simultaneously miss the point when they rush to reflexively defend school choice or law enforcement or any of the multifaceted layers of bigotry unaddressed; where were they to denounce the current President and his dog whistles, or were they defending his words as “speaking his mind” as it implies their own desired words?
No matter your political slant, it's gonna take a lot more than a roll of paper towels to fix this mess

I’m telling you, it wasn’t that long ago. Keep in mind our parents attended largely segregated schools years after the Supreme Court struck down separate but equal – as evidenced in a tweet from last week, Gould (Ark.) Schools would not integrate because none of the white students would come over to Fields to learn with their black counterparts as someone in Raney v. Board of Education tried to cite state’s rights which the school choice debate presently has become. For each wall they’ve had to kick down, the powers-that-be have placed unseen barriers to maintain division through such dastardly policies as the War on Drugs and the use of code words to perpetuate a caste system without explicitly announcing intent – and the media is equally complicit in its failures of accountability. For example, what if I told you the original fight and rise of the Religious Right was not abortion rights but school desegregation? Notice how the establishment of private academies rocketed in the 1960s throughout the South was conservative citizens’ Eff You response to the government killing Jim Crow in his obvious status.


Don’t get me started on the coded language of lower taxes and great schools with small class sizes.

Fifty years after James Earl Ray murdered the greatest American, our moderate and liberal friends have implicitly reduced his life’s work toward racial justice to a charitable enterprise for a bunch of affluent do-gooders to pat themselves on the back regardless of how long they volunteer in community centers or pimp the less fortunate for the ‘gram, among other social media mediums. What this does is provide them a necessary illusion that preserves an innocence and insulates their conscience or soul from guilt or blame; does it allow them to see their own wrongs of saying some effed-up stuff or reciting the lyrics to Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” without any sense of policing their own language? This distorts the very idea of a democracy for all and minimizes the moral character of those who truly believe the lie.

Within our own churches and neighborhoods, a select group of black people find a reason to yoke themselves to King’s legacy to further their own personal ambitions. Instead of continuing the battles, we have become complacent with entry into schools, restaurants, and other businesses in the name of being able to gladly hand over all of our hard-earned paychecks to those who only see us as cash cows as they decline to hire and promote us; at church, we bicker over a few dollars that should be better served in Kingdom-building instead of salaries, extravagant buildings and Cadillacs, anniversary programs, and otherwise having a stranglehold on an overly reliable voting bloc that asks for nothing every four years except a benevolent appearance on the Sunday before Election Day. I honestly don’t recall seeing prosperity gospel anywhere in my Bible, but feel free to show me. Fifty years later, how many of us can admit that the black church has been the taillight rather than a headlight while her members struggle with bone-crushing poverty as we live in a check-to-check cycle that keeps us stagnant on the hamster wheel? Turning the other cheek to our oppressors places us in a position of weakness that my generation would gladly knock the taste out of someone’s mouth, and on the outside, we have become more encapsulated within our four walls missing out on the revolutionary edge Christianity has always possessed contrary to the softened cream cheese the American version has seemingly become. 

Considering the Black Lives Matter movement today and what the Black Panthers stood for (read the Ten Points), our moderate and liberal friends tend to miss the point with their largely monolithic roundtables and summits which may have a minority face to headline the event when they do not heed the cries from us. As for our conservative friends who have fingers plugged in their ears as they scream All Lives Matter, we get it:  All lives do matter. While you guys sound like broken record deflecting the man and the movement with “what about black-on-black crime?” queries and “pulling yourselves up by your own bootstraps” quotes of rugged independence and self-reliance when the government has been compliant with your own collective wealth as evidenced in the Homestead Act and the GI Bill, what would really be helpful is entering the conversation with an open mind and nixing your BS talking points as they really don’t help expand critical thinking to solve multifaceted adult problems. Even if the self-reliance part was true, then why was Black Wall Street in Tulsa burned down nearly a century ago? Where is the valid explanation for nightly terrorizing our communities as they became independently sufficient to not rely on racist store owners for basic sustenance? I’ll wait.

Equality is the endgame target although it hasn’t always been a shared goal for everyone:  We need to change that.

How?

I don’t have all the answers, yet I am willing to continue the conversation over my own Dub Shack BBQ and a couple of beers.

What we must become are spiritual troublemakers. Just as Jesus required us to walk by faith, King saw faith as a tool of change that makes the most hardened of us malleable enough to leave this rock better than we found it. Furthermore, God is not playing with the United States of America anymore; read Ezekiel 3:17-19 sometime this week to understand the consequences of destructive deeds. We see ourselves as God’s chosen people even more so than the Israelites from the Old Testament – my feelings of today’s Israelis are a completely different matter – however, we are traveling down the same road of self-flagellation they did from the forty years in the wilderness to being conquered by enemy nations to the inevitable silence in response to our national sins.

Fifty years ago, King paid the ultimate price with his life for bearing the burdens of the less fortunate and rising above to serve humanity. Since 1968, following up on that radical work has been miniscule at best as we have been more than happy with token outward progress and in some quarters, stilted interfaith services that on the outside show us all coming together while we remain just as divided as we were beforehand. We were called to do more but it takes breaking out of our own comfort zones and houses of privilege to make a real difference.

How would you like to be remembered, a drum major for change or a shepherd for complacency?
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