Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,
tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly
- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963)
I am a child of the riots: no, not the ones now erupting in
major cities across our country, but of the ones that erupted more than a half-century
ago, and, sadly, for much the same reasons. In my case, it was the Detroit riot
of 1967 and my experience of it has gifted me (or saddled me, depending on your
perspective) with some of the most vivid and poignant memories of my childhood.
I remember my father having to sit up all night in the library
at the front of our house with a baseball bat in hand to protect us should the
chaos spread to our own neighborhood from its genesis not too far away. I
remember him taking me and my mother on a cautious drive up Linwood Avenue past
Central High School to see the US Army tanks with live ammunition at the ready that
were positioned on the lawn in a show of force to encourage the attenuation of
the civil unrest of the time. And I remember my parents’ struggles as they
tried to explain to a four-year-old just what the hell was going on and why.…
Should any child have these memories? No. And now a whole
new generation of American children do, so it’s up to us to address this … and by
“this” I mean not just the riots themselves but their entrenched, largely unconsidered
and undiscussed (social-structural) causes.…
In Detroit in 1967 the spark was police brutality resulting
from the raid of a “blind pig,” or unlicensed after hours joint. It was a
difficult time in the city and potentially transformative economic opportunity
was hard to come by. Abuse at the hands of the storm troopers of an unfeeling (white)
power structure lit the match.…
In Minneapolis in 2020 the spark was police brutality
resulting from the arrest of a man accused of passing a phony $20 bill. It was
a difficult time in the city and potentially transformative economic opportunity
was hard to come by, especially because of the disparate impacts of a global
pandemic. Videotaped abuse at the hands of the storm troopers of an unfeeling (white)
power structure lit the match.…
As MLK observed a half-century ago, a riot is the language
of the unheard.
In 1967, we were unheard about a lack of economic
opportunity, police brutality in Communities of Color and the perception that
our government was actively involved in oppressing us as it clearly was with
others halfway around the world in Vietnam.
In 2020, we are unheard about a lack of economic
opportunity, police brutality in Communities of Color, especially in the form
of the all too frequent killings of unarmed Black people, and the perception
that our government is actively oppressing us, including because of our own
president’s clear and consistent racism (and misogyny and xenophobia and
religiocentrism and…).
See the pattern?
As a high school friend of mine observed via query on social
media yesterday, what American riot hasn’t been sparked by police brutality? At
first blush, this question may seem a tad snarky, but upon closer evaluation
its truth emerges: at some point, typically for largely symbolic reasons,
people who perceive themselves to be oppressed and marginalized decide that
they’ve had enough and begin to revolt. Is rioting and its unfortunate cousin looting
an appropriate response? Depends on who you ask, right?
(No, morally, it’s never right … but it is effective: even
if for unfortunate reasons, we are paying attention now, aren’t we? Maybe if we
didn’t ignore our fellow citizens and their problems, they wouldn’t have to
resort to antisocial behavior to get us to notice them….)
Right now, we’re beginning to hear from the silent majority
lamenting the civil unrest in our cities, but where were they when People of Color
and others of goodwill rose up to protest the disproportionate murder of
unarmed African-Americans by members of law enforcement, giving rise to the Black
Lives Matter movement? Too many of them were offering the contrasting and demeaning
observation that All Lives Matter as well as that of Blue Lives Matter, while
the majority said nothing at all.
As MLK observed a half-century ago, what we will remember is
not the hateful words of our enemies but the appalling silence of our supposed friends
(that is, the self-considered ‘good people’ who remain unconcerned and disengaged
unless something affects them personally).
America has always had a race problem.
It was founded on slavery, a major driver of its increasing though
narrowly distributed affluence in its first two centuries, and had to fight a
war to sustain itself because the proponents of human enslavement had decided
that this “Lost Cause” was worth treasonous succession. In an impressive
atonement after the Civil War, the Union-dominated federal government ushered
in a Reconstruction period that provided meaningful support and far greater
opportunity to the formally enslaved … but, true to form, this progressive and
restorative period lasted less than two decades and was replaced by a de
facto system of legal disenfranchisement that we came to call Jim Crow and
lasted for the better part of a century. The fight for its eradication is what
gave our nation the Civil Rights Movement and the great Rev. Dr. King (and others)
to lead it.
The fruits of the Civil Rights Movement included both
restorative and remediative support to the formerly disenfranchised, from the
Civil Rights Act to the Voting Rights Act to the social programs of the Great Society
and the War on Poverty. Again, this time for an even briefer period of about a
half-decade, America did the right thing … and then, true to form, distracted
by a costly and ill-considered Vietnam War, it moved on, leaving most of the
root causes of the structural oppression of People of Color and the poor
largely unaddressed.
And America has always had a class problem.
Oh, it’s been much better disguised than the race problem,
but this country was founded by and for wealthy and powerful white men and has
largely been ruled by them ever since. Don’t get me wrong, it is impressive
that for one brief, shining moment less than a decade in duration, America
elected an exceptional African-American to lead it … but then, true to form,
his successor has been his antithesis and an abomination upon our nation. As Ta-Nehisi
Coates has observed, as virtually perfect as President Obama had to be, his
successor has proven to be, in complete contrast, as incompetent, immoral and
unworthy, more so, in fact, than any of us could have imagined just a few years
ago.
“Very fine people on both sides” of a neo-Nazi march after
which a protester was murdered. Kids in cages because of an immoral war on
brown people under the guise of an immigration effort. Travel bans against
countries with largely Muslim populations because of an immoral war on brown
people under the guise of a national security effort. (Also, I must note that
the exemption of several countries that harbored and/or supported the
perpetrators of the 9/11 attack and/or other terrorists but also happen to
contain properties that license the president’s name for commercial purposes is
purely coincidental, or so that b.s. party line continues to go.…) Tens of
billions of dollars in federal bailouts given to the nation’s farmers as a
result of the harm from a baseless trade war with the country with the world’s
second-largest economy. (Also, I must note that mostly corporate farmers being
given government money because of the harm they’ve been caused by its chief
executive is appropriate and completely different than the welfare distributed
to the undeserving poor, or so that b.s. party line continues to go.…) Etc.
I could go on – does any of us really want to think about
the profound and profoundly negative consequences of his treasonous predication
of international aid on support for his personal political purposes or of having
a narcissistic sociopath for an executive leader executive leader who’s also a
compulsive liar with a tally approaching 20,000 such fabrications in less than
three and a half years or…? – but I’ll end with this one: 100,000 dead and
climbing because of a complete failure and immoral and inhumane abdication of
leadership resulting in a lethally mishandled response to a global pandemic
complemented by a series of “press conferences” featuring guidance like the inappropriate
recommendation of unproven medication as a cure as well as the suggestion of
the bodily injection of disinfectants.
(OK, I’m sorry, but as I write this I just can’t hold my
discipline: what the f@#k has happened to us that we would let this immoral,
inhumane moron continue in the most consequential office on our planet?!?)
But, of course, the preceding is simply the context for the
conflagration in which we find ourselves today: much of it can be traced back
to two things, America’s history of race and class oppression that’s still very
much alive and, in fact, thriving, and its president’s consistent and vehement
inhumanity.
This is how we end up with Amy Cooper, a Privileged white
woman, threatening Christian Cooper, an African-American male who had the
unfortunate luck of #BirdingWhileBlack in a public space – Central Park in New
York City, no less – and the timidity to ask her to leash her dog as local
regulations require, with potentially lethal censure by the police. And then a
day or two later, our horror is extended and our worst fears come to life again
as we watch four Minneapolis officers of the law either kneel on an unarmed
African-American man’s neck choking the life out of him over the course of
almost nine minutes or stand idly by while this murder is being perpetrated.
How can you not see this as representing open season on
African-Americans?
And lest you protest too much, I ask you to factor in that
our president’s response to this tragedy and the ensuing civil unrest that it
engendered was to quote the racist police chief of 1960s Miami to remind us
that when the looting starts, the shooting starts (but, of course, as sociopathic
pathological liars are wont to do, he claimed ignorance of the phrase’s racist
provenance…).
Tell me again why African-Americans and others of good
conscience shouldn’t be enraged?
Now, again, don’t get me wrong: rioting is not the answer.
As the Rev. Dr. King showed us so long ago, nonviolent direct action is: we
must organize, we must march peacefully on our statehouses and our Congress,
not to take them over with guns but to confront them with the truth of our
experience. And the most important way that we can speak our truth to power is
to march en masse to the polls on November 3rd.
It is only then that we will be heard.
But this, too, is just the beginning of a new/the next
chapter: because after we vote out this inhuman stain of a president and his
partisan sycophant enablers comes the real challenge, that of dismantling the
structures of oppression in our society and its true reconstruction into one
that is far more equitable and inclusive than has ever been. This is the long
hard road ahead of us….
In other words, our goal is not to make America great again,
because it never has been for far too many of its citizens. Our goal is to make
America great for all for the first time, to live into our professed creeds in
a way that makes them real and attainable for all of our fellow citizens.
The good news for those focused on the wrong thing is that
this will put an end to riots because, successfully pursued and realized, it
will put an end to their causes. The good news for those of us courageous
enough to commit to doing the work of re-creating the American Dream – the one
that Rev. Dr. King elucidated so indelibly in 1963 – is that this will be the true
realization of our foundational ideals as well as the end to what one incisive
observer termed the American Dilemma (which is a nice way of noting that our
country’s allocation of opportunity was and has been inequitable and, in the
truest sense of the term, un-American).
It is sadly ironic that despite so much progress in the past
half-century, having enabled an unworthy chief executive whose claimed aim has
been to make America great again, we find ourselves experientially back in the
1960s with our society being torn apart by the glaring inequality and
inhumanity at its core. But just as his unfortunate election was a negative
reaction to or the blowback from the positive breakthrough of a worthy and able
African-American president, we could choose a positive reaction to this
negativity in ways that create a far more humane, equitable and inclusive
future, a veritable American Dream brought to life.
What this will require is that we channel and convert our
righteous anger into disciplined righteous action, especially on November 3rd.
Let’s make this the day of a huge riot across the entire country, but one that’s
an expression of hope and commitment to supported humanity, as signified by our
vote for a fundamental change in direction in this country.
Let’s all march in the streets to our polling places in a
few months and, in so doing, bring into being that “radical revolution of
values” about which the Rev. Dr. King spoke in such an elevating way so long
ago. And let’s not forget that his last effort of uplift, the very one that he
was organizing when he was assassinated, was that of a multi-racial coalition
of the dispossessed called the Poor People’s Campaign. Do you think that had he
been successful then, we may have eradicated many of the structural causes of
our current malaise?
And so the aftermath of violence is bitterness;
the aftermath of non-violence is the creation of the beloved community;
the aftermath of non-violence is redemption and reconciliation.
This is a method that seeks to transform and to redeem
... and make it possible for men
to live together as brothers in a community,
and not continually live with bitterness and friction.
- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Justice Without Violence" (1957)
P.S. If you prefer, consider the prophetic words of the Rev. Dr. King directly: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/mlk-a-riot-is-the-language-of-the-unheard/#x
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