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?
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| 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?
