It feels especially important to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. this year. To stop and consider, reacquaint or learn anew, admire and give thanks for his incredible courage and conviction and impact. Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and Ferguson, repeated and outrageous police conduct, overt racism within our criminal justice system... The list goes on, and while I'm certain Dr. King would be chagrined by how tenacious the tentacles of systemic racism continue to be, I also think that the intensity of interracial dialogue about and responses to the recent tragic events might sustain his hope. In many ways, they have mine.
King said, in "The Birth of a New Nation," a sermon he delivered in 1957 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, "Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil." I see, in the conversations I've been privileged to have and witness, in the actions of communities across the country, in the push-back against untrained, biased members of the police corps, such agitation, such rising up. In it, I feel optimism for a more just future.
Even a cursory read through King's speeches, writings, sermons and history of activism astounds me, each and every time: he was so forward-thinking and so incredibly able to distill societal problems into elemental arguments of right and wrong.
Just a year before he died (in 1968), he said to a crowd at Riverside Church, "So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor." Then, he was talking about unequal treatment of black and white Americans despite their having served and sacrificed equally in Vietnam. Change the context only slightly, and these words could ring equally true today.
As Tom and I drove south from DC toward Richmond last Friday, we passed, just before Fredericksburg, a giant Confederate flag waving proudly alongside I95. Both of us were shocked, rendered almost speechless. I believe Tom mustered, "Wow. Classy." while I stuttered repeatedly, "WTF?!" before taking to Facebook to express my disgust. It was brought to my attention that in addition to it being Dr. King, Jr's birthday, it was also Lee-Jackson Day.
Erm, how about a 'Happy Birthday Robert and Thomas' sign instead of the flag which symbolizes infinitely more than -and perhaps not at all?!- their birthdays?
That said, I believe in free speech as well as the words of Maajid Nawaz* who, and I'm paraphrasing here, avers that while we all have the right to be offended, we cannot insist that others not offend us. The bigot flying that flag can do so but I have every right to be pretty grossed out. There is a difference between systemic oppression and free speech, and I do believe that in a democratic society, we need to fight the former while respecting the latter. Oppression is different than offense although I admit the line between them is sometimes uncomfortably thin.
Today, and in the days and weeks and months to come, I urge us all to consider how we might better listen to opposing viewpoints with open hearts and ears; how we might tease out ugly words from ugly policy and focus our efforts on combating the latter. We are getting nowhere with overly partisan screeching. It's sometimes easier to propagate ideology and violence than to listen to the pain in each other's hearts and respect differences, in opinion and experience.
