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| Officer Eugene Goodman. Still from Igor Bobic (Huffington Post) video of Capitol Hill riot (swiped from Yahoo News) |
There is nothing blacker than uncertainty--JULIAN RANDALL
This year's observance of Martin Luther King Day took place less than two weeks after a white supremacist riot at the U.S. Capitol, less than a year after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis set off weeks of protests, and during a coronavirus pandemic that has killed over 400,000 Americans, disproportionately people of color. The commemorations mixed anger, sadness, and hope.
The mix of feelings came across strongly during "Not Just Another Day Off," a video medley of poetry and oratory produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. and available through their website until Thursday. Julian Randall, Camonghne Felix, and Joe Ross read original poetry, while actors read excerpts from speeches by Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, and, of course, Martin Luther King. Felix's poetry in particular ran the gamut of emotions, containing physical pain, anger, hunger, and renewal in one short text. From "Yes, It Is Possible":
But this time, my system nosed down, bringing me down to my knees to purge....
And it was like this for days, I couldn't stomach a morsel, my receptors stunted with the shock of an imminent shift.
...until, at once, it stopped, and I woke to find myself at the kitchen table, perfectly unbothered... as if life itself were some benign victory I'd won....
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| Poet and activist Camonghne Felix |
"The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro," Baldwin stated during a 1965 debate with William F. Buckley. It was this statement that was read for this event, and which created a fascinating juxtaposition on King Day, given that King's most famous oratory is his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963. King's formulation assumed a well-made society from which blacks were unjustly excluded; it remained only to undo that exclusion, and blacks too could fully benefit from the American experience. Baldwin suggested two ways in which that American experience could only happen with exclusion and suppression of blacks: black slave labor created the wealth (including the construction of the White House, by the way) that whites enjoyed, and that un-wealthy whites still had the psychic benefit of having blacks between them and the bottom of the social hierarchy. Without the oppression of blacks, whites would lose wealth and social position.
These two takes on the American Dream speak directly to whether the current system is fixable, and why race persistently matters. King describes a world where race loses its relevance when segregation is lifted and barriers to opportunity are removed. He was not so naive to believe that the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were all it would take, and later argued for direct remedial action. But given civil rights laws, enforcement of civil rights laws, evolving social attitudes, and some degree of reparation, blacks as well as whites can partake of the American bounty. [You could find evidence in professional sports, where racial integration has been followed by spectacular incomes enjoyed by top athletes.]
Baldwin's darker vision suggests that the bounty itself is illusory, that the appearance of wealth only exists because powerful (white) people have taken more than their share. Eliminate oppression, and you eliminate the wealth as well. This is frankly terrifying to contemplate, as we work for inclusive communities with opportunities for all. Can we not have a crowded table with all manner of good things and no one excluded or exploited? But this take on Baldwin helps to explain systemic racism, widening income and wealth gaps, and ten-plus years of white anxiety bordering on paranoia.
Monday morning at 10:30 the DC Library presented Paula Wayne Shelton reading and talking about her book Child of the Civil Rights Movement (Dragonfly, 2013). Shelton is the daughter of Andrew Young, and she talked about knowing Martin Luther King when she was a child, and participating in the 1965 march at Selma. It's an upbeat, celebratory book that ends with the presidential signing of the Voting Rights Act. She was interviewed after the reading by two members of the library's teen council. She told them she wanted to show the "loving, warm and caring person" King was to children who know him only as a statue. There was some reference to current events, but mostly the questions from the children in the audience were of the "What was it like?" and "How did you write it?" varieties. Shelton is currently a 1st grade teacher at Georgetown Day School, and lives near Capitol Hill.
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| Lovar Davis Kidd, filmed at CSPS Hall |
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| Ann Harris Carter |
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