Yesterday, as part of MLK Day events at Yale, there was a free Sweet Honey in the Rock concert. It was amazing. Everything about it was fantastic. I just finished reading a biography of Afeni Shakur (a really rad Black Panther, b/k/a Tupac’s mom) by Jasmine Guy, and the end of the book is the two of them at a Sweet Honey concert together and how magical it was.

One thing that was really great was that in between songs, the women would talk about how each song was developed, its history, what it was a response to, etc. Mini history lessons. Before one of the songs, the woman speaking said something referencing “those four little girls.” Then she choked up and paused for a long time, and there was this blunt, powerful silence for a long time in this fancy old concert hall with at least 1,000 people in it—everyone was silent and I felt really present and really distant at the same time. Then she went on when she was ready to go on, and didn’t say anything more specific about the girls.

Ten or so minutes later, an older white woman sitting near me asked (presumably) her partner, “What four little girls?” He said he didn’t know, and they both shrugged and that was that. I was really distracted for a good chunk of the concert after that.

I don’t want to condemn anyone’s ignorance (and people use the word “ignorance” out of its definition but I mean very purely just not knowing something), because that really doesn’t interest me. Instead, what I was distracted by was imagining living a life in which that had never been a threat. The people next to me were old enough that they were alive when the Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed; I wasn’t. And yet, I always knew it as a threat, even though I wasn’t born for another two decades and didn’t live in the South.

Before I go on, some background:

On a quiet Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, four little black girls prepared their Sunday School lessons in the basement of the church. In the same basement sat a bomb placed by segregationists, designed to kill and maim in protest of the forced integration of Birmingham’s public schools. Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins were killed in the explosion. Angry blacks rioted and the civil authorities responded with great violence. During the rest of the day, other black youths were murdered by police and civilians alike, compounding the desperation.


Moderate whites condemned the bombing and the FBI took over the investigation from local authorities that had shown no real concern for solving the crime, though they held strong evidence pointing to the bombers. Because of this local interference, the FBI took over the investigation. With foot dragging of their own, they failed to convict anyone for the crime by 1968. It was not until 1977 that the state convicted but one of the bombers.


The tragedy came as a result of a month of tension following the desegregation of Birmingham’s schools. Black leaders and moderate whites alike had tried to prepare their communities for the inevitable mixing of the races in an effort to forestall any event like the riots that had taken place in the previous Spring, where police and firemen used dogs and fire hoses on demonstrating blacks.

The neighborhood I grew up in in Chicago is incredibly segregated. My family lives on the “bad” side of 95th Street and the “bad” side of the train tracks, meaning the black sides of each. The grade school I went to is in the next neighborhood over, which is even more overtly unwelcoming (Confederate flags in Chicago don’t even make sense historically). The school building and doors had racial slurs, “White power”, and swastikas carved all over them. What was loaded about my school is that it was a gifted school that students were bused in for, and it was almost all black & latino kids. The jealousy of white students and their parents that we would show them up academically turned into threats of racial violence.

I think I’ve still never walked past the cemetery near the school because of all the stories my mom told me when I was young about drunk white kids beating up any black kid who walked by.

My grandfather’s family was chased out of Mississippi when he was a kid by the KKK. They never went south again. They came to Chicago thinking there was no Jim Crow, but it really just wasn’t on paper.

These were the stories I had when I was a little kid. I heard about my granddad leaving Mississippi in the middle of the night over and over, then went to school and saw the same messages carved everywhere (and once, drawn out 50 feet wide in woodchips on the blacktop). These were reminders of what I was up against, from birth, and a heads up. I can’t imagine growing up without those reminders and threats.

So being at a Sweet Honey in the Rock concert, sitting next to a couple who had taken the time out of their day to spend in this theater and who lived through the 60s but didn’t, apparently, receive those threats, was all really jarring and baffling to me. I couldn’t stop thinking, “What are they teaching white people?”  Not just in schools, but at home, the media, anywhere. What are they teaching you about, if not that that could be you getting bombed tomorrow? Again, my point isn’t to condemn anyone’s ignorance but the systems that create and perpetuate that ignorance.

I know I have used threats of violence before as part of defining a system of oppression. But I think often when we talk about privilege vs. oppression, we get caught up in more digestible manifestations. Yes, white privilege means you can easily find makeup to match your skin color or see a lot of actors that look like you—but it goes so much deeper than that.

This is part of why I have been moving away from talking about privilege; there’s too much space to just go easy. Oppression of black women is way deeper than just makeup and actors and band-aid colors and other fluffier (though still insidious, but it doesn’t end there) things that generally show up in privilege discourse. I want to talk about oppression meaning that your very existence, let alone your success, is so abhorrent that you deserve threats of violence and death, that you don’t deserve proper health and happiness and education.

I want to talk about oppression meaning that little girls are killed for existing, but it isn’t part of history and 49 years later on a holiday to commemorate people who fought and died in that very movement for justice, white people still don’t know what happened or why all the black people in the room have fallen silent. The word for that isn’t privilege, because it needs to go so much deeper, and in the face of that, I am not patient and do not let people off the hook easily.

lebanesepoppyseed:

MLK Jr. didn’t ask for rights, he wasn’t pandering or sweet to the forces that oppressed him. He was a threat to whiteness through and through.

MLK Jr. wasn’t violent not because he wanted to gain some brownie points from whitedom but because he KNEW, FIRSTHAND, what…

(via calzanatl-deactivated20120330)

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

Only MLK quote I’m entertaining for the day. If you can’t get down with this MLK, the forgotten, less cheery-hand-holding MLK, then don’t come at me about what my relationship to his legacy should be and why I should be a pacifist.

I came across this just now while trying to find something related. I’m trying to find something about the privilege of nonviolence in a violent society—or I guess, rather, thinking of oneself as nonviolent in such a context. And I’m thinking about all this in relation to Occupy Wall Street and how much I want to limit my involvement with Occupy New Haven. I want it to not be such an alienating space. I want it to be relevant to my students. I want there to be space for a diversity of tactics, because I have lived a life with enough instances of systemic violence that I really cannot fall back on nonviolence. There were too many times when that option misunderstood and failed me. And yet, I am being told again that we have to be nonviolent, and I’m wondering who “we” means.

readnfight:

adailyriot:

Serious Delirium.: Let’s talk about Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

attackshipsonfire:

Now, before I say anything, I want to say that I do think he was a great man, and very important to the civil rights movement (obviously).

BUT (there’s always a but), the fetishization of Dr. King by activists and liberal-minded politically active people is misinformed, disturbing, and unhelpful.

Martin Luther King Jr. is, in America, the prime example of “why non-violence works”. He is the figurehead of silent protest and peaceful resistance, and many people honestly think this is because the culture he was trying to change respected these tactics and found it in their hearts to change and become less racist, or at least more tolerant. This is completely a constructed image- one of the main reasons the civil rights movement succeeded (I use that term loosely, because obviously institutionalized racism still exists heavily) is due to the fear generated by the more extreme sections of the civil rights movement, and white people’s default to the less-intimidating pacifist movement.

History has been heavily white-washed to remove violent protest as effective (or even necessary). This is why it’s “Martin Luther King Jr. Day”, not “Malcom X” day or even “Civil Rights Day”. The dominant culture wants us to associate revolution and freedom with pacifism, even though it explicitly betrays those principles. The reason why is obvious. Any group that is in power develops the sole goal of staying in power at all costs. Making the oppressed believe that non-violence is the only ethical, moral, and effective means of protest and change is to negate them, and force them to play by rules that those in power are free to break. It is purposeful constraint of ideas and methods forced upon the oppressed by the very people oppressing them. To marginalize violent protest is to tell those who are being hurt that it doesn’t work, and to force your oppression not just upon them, but to let the oppressed group oppress themselves. Martin Luther King Jr Day is, sadly, not about celebrating a great man- it is about constructing the false image that those who are getting hurt and even dying by the hand of those in power have no violent recourse against those who are hurting them. It is a holiday about removing the option of self-defense from the oppressed.

Realest talk.

I think I’m down with this. At the very least, it has always bothered me that people can spend one afternoon a year talking about nonviolence and then going back, unquestioningly, to lives supported by violence.

I also am just not a fan at all of hero worship. Because heroes are just people—people who you happen to admire for some set of reasons, but they are still people who make mistakes, have bad habits, and are not going to have perfect politics all the time. In fact, I am right now wearing a hoodie with Stokely Carmichael stenciled on the front. And people have asked me don’t I know about the sexist shit he used to say; I didn’t know for a long time, and when I finally found out about it a few years ago I was crushed, because Stokely was kinda my hero when I was in middle school & high school (yes srsly). But, he was also human, and that’s not an excuse for problematic behavior, not at all, but it is an example of how you can admire someone for one way they’re really rad, and then they totally drop the ball in another instance. Fetishization requires turning someone into a two-dimensional cutout and not a real, full person.

And to take MLK so far out of context as is done with the holiday only increases the damage of hero worship. Like I want to know what music he liked, I want to know his opinion on old folk blues. I want to know what women of color authors he saw his work dialoguing with. I want to know his feelings, like deeply, of his friendship and work with Bayard Rustin who was gay. I want all of this stuff, or none of it. But I don’t want the shit that’s going on now—posters about nonviolence in racist public schools with cops in them, or white people telling me I should be patient and ask politely for what I need by quoting garbled versions of MLK’s words back at me, or people telling me to put my work on hold to instead organize voters for Obama so we can have a post-race society like MLK wanted (I mean, did he say that?).

I guess MLK Day has always seemed to me like the holiday version of tolerance or diversity—it’s like a full day of buzzwords that white liberals can use to tell themselves they’re treating me well, or at least well enough, just so long as I don’t get too pushy or talk too much.

(As an aside, in 1991 when I was in kindergarten we were singing a song about Martin Luther King, I guess before the holiday, and I interrupted it to tell everyone about how the president started a war (Gulf War) and wasn’t that messed up. I got a phone call home over it.)

adailyriot:

Serious Delirium.: Let’s talk about Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

attackshipsonfire:

Now, before I say anything, I want to say that I do think he was a great man, and very important to the civil rights movement (obviously).

BUT (there’s always a but), the fetishization of Dr. King by activists and liberal-minded politically active people is misinformed, disturbing, and unhelpful.

Martin Luther King Jr. is, in America, the prime example of “why non-violence works”. He is the figurehead of silent protest and peaceful resistance, and many people honestly think this is because the culture he was trying to change respected these tactics and found it in their hearts to change and become less racist, or at least more tolerant. This is completely a constructed image- one of the main reasons the civil rights movement succeeded (I use that term loosely, because obviously institutionalized racism still exists heavily) is due to the fear generated by the more extreme sections of the civil rights movement, and white people’s default to the less-intimidating pacifist movement.

History has been heavily white-washed to remove violent protest as effective (or even necessary). This is why it’s “Martin Luther King Jr. Day”, not “Malcom X” day or even “Civil Rights Day”. The dominant culture wants us to associate revolution and freedom with pacifism, even though it explicitly betrays those principles. The reason why is obvious. Any group that is in power develops the sole goal of staying in power at all costs. Making the oppressed believe that non-violence is the only ethical, moral, and effective means of protest and change is to negate them, and force them to play by rules that those in power are free to break. It is purposeful constraint of ideas and methods forced upon the oppressed by the very people oppressing them. To marginalize violent protest is to tell those who are being hurt that it doesn’t work, and to force your oppression not just upon them, but to let the oppressed group oppress themselves. Martin Luther King Jr Day is, sadly, not about celebrating a great man- it is about constructing the false image that those who are getting hurt and even dying by the hand of those in power have no violent recourse against those who are hurting them. It is a holiday about removing the option of self-defense from the oppressed.

Realest talk.

I think I’m down with this. At the very least, it has always bothered me that people can spend one afternoon a year talking about nonviolence and then going back, unquestioningly, to lives supported by violence.

I also am just not a fan at all of hero worship. Because heroes are just people—people who you happen to admire for some set of reasons, but they are still people who make mistakes, have bad habits, and are not going to have perfect politics all the time. In fact, I am right now wearing a hoodie with Stokely Carmichael stenciled on the front. And people have asked me don’t I know about the sexist shit he used to say; I didn’t know for a long time, and when I finally found out about it a few years ago I was crushed, because Stokely was kinda my hero when I was in middle school & high school (yes srsly). But, he was also human, and that’s not an excuse for problematic behavior, not at all, but it is an example of how you can admire someone for one way they’re really rad, and then they totally drop the ball in another instance. Fetishization requires turning someone into a two-dimensional cutout and not a real, full person.

And to take MLK so far out of context as is done with the holiday only increases the damage of hero worship. Like I want to know what music he liked, I want to know his opinion on old folk blues. I want to know what women of color authors he saw his work dialoguing with. I want to know his feelings, like deeply, of his friendship and work with Bayard Rustin who was gay. I want all of this stuff, or none of it. But I don’t want the shit that’s going on now—posters about nonviolence in racist public schools with cops in them, or white people telling me I should be patient and ask politely for what I need by quoting garbled versions of MLK’s words back at me, or people telling me to put my work on hold to instead organize voters for Obama so we can have a post-race society like MLK wanted (I mean, did he say that?).

I guess MLK Day has always seemed to me like the holiday version of tolerance or diversity—it’s like a full day of buzzwords that white liberals can use to tell themselves they’re treating me well, or at least well enough, just so long as I don’t get too pushy or talk too much.

(As an aside, in 1991 when I was in kindergarten we were singing a song about Martin Luther King, I guess before the holiday, and I interrupted it to tell everyone about how the president started a war (Gulf War) and wasn’t that messed up. I got a phone call home over it.)