Fifteen Years + 1 Million Men Equals?

16 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

Tags

African American Men, Authenticity, Black Leadership, Black Males, Black Masculinity, Black Men, Exclusion, Inspiration, Louis Farrakhan, Million Man March, Nation of Islam, National Mall, October 16 1995, Race, Symbolism, Symbols, Washington DC

Million Man March, Washington, DC, October 16, 1995. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yoke_mc/12469525/flick.com This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

I wrote this five years ago, but the same questions can be asked, for better and worse, with an addendum. That in the light of what Black men should do and shouldn’t, should expect and shouldn’t expect — of themselves and of the world — this is a very narrow-minded way of thinking. Concentrating on some limited definition of Black masculinity neglects the need to address inequality, systemic racism, the theft of hopes and dreams, not to mention, relationships and the intersection of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and everything else (though Black women and women of color have to deal with intersectionality every day, the issue goes mostly neglected and — if ever thought about — misunderstood by Black men).

If the past five years have shown anything, the issues addressing Black men have never existed in a vacuum. Police brutality and regular killings, White vigilantism, joblessness, debt, a dismantling of already under-resourced public schools, mass incarceration. These cannot ever be divorced from the issues facing Black women, women of color, the Black LGBT community, Latinos and Latinas, Native Americans, the poor and low-wage workers of color. Nor should they have been twenty years ago.

=====================================================

Today’s date has meaning for millions of people. Forty-one years ago, the New York Mets won their first World Series, beating the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles in five games. Crush #2 was also born forty-one years ago on this date (Happy Birthday!). But for a select group of African Americans — especially for over a million on the National Mall — today’s date marks fifteen years since the Million Man March.

I was there, though not among the million or so on the Mall that cold, windy and sunny day. I was in DC, on the Mall two hours before the gathering. I watched the highlights on CNN on the University of Maryland’s campus, all but completely clear of Black men under the age of thirty that afternoon. I met up with many a Black guy before and after the march, on the Metro as young men had taken the day off from work, school or college classes to go. On my bus back to Pittsburgh as older men talked of their broken lives, their remaining hopes and dreams. Most of all, I heard many speak of how inspired they were to go, as if God was calling them down to the Mall to find their true selves.

I didn’t go because I’d come down to the area that weekend for my dissertation research (including interviews) and to spend time with my long-distance girlfriend, who was a grad student at University of Maryland at the time. While I had some regrets about not attending, it’d been a while since I’d been involved with anyone on more than a passing occasion. Plus, I figured that my doctoral thesis on Black Washington and multiculturalism provided a significant intellectual exception to attending.

Louis Farrakhan, Million Man March, Washington, DC, October 16, 1995. Source: http://www.africawithin.com

Maybe I wasn’t being truly and authentically Black because I didn’t attend the march live, because I refused to stand in a sea of bodies to hear Louis Farrakhan’s voice encouraging Black men to take charge over themselves, their lives, their families. Maybe I did see myself as being above the fray because I saw all of this as a whole bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing but symbols. Maybe, in the end, being around so many Black men doing the same thing at the same time made me uncomfortable, just because I wasn’t sure what they expected to get out of the march after it was over.

Of course, symbols and inspiration are important, because without them, there is no action, no activism, no movement toward a goal that will ultimately change our lives, individually or collectively. But in listening to dozens of men who did attend the Million Man March that day and in the weeks that followed (as I traveled back to Pittsburgh, then to Minneapolis, then back to Pittsburgh, then DC, then New York in the month after the march), I realized that symbols and inspiration was all they expected out of the march.

Fifteen years later, the realization that nothing has really changed in the lives of many, if not most, of the million-plus men that attended the march on this date is disheartening. Those in poverty on that date may well still be in poverty. Those with years of addiction, or lives of crime, or without the compassion and skills necessary for fatherhood, all still struggling with these issues. That the cultural gap between Black men and Black women has widened since ’95 is obvious.

Yet there’s always hope, inspiration, and symbols that show that not all was for naught on Monday, October 16, ’95. It brought major issues facing African American males front and center to America and African America, and inspired many to work for social change and social justice for Blacks and for Black males in particular. Even if the messages of Farrakhan and company were mixed, contradictory, hypocritical, even sexist and bigoted. The march at least provided the realization that many Blacks cared deeply about finding themselves and finding solutions to issues that haunted them then, and haunt us still. Symbols are a powerful thing, even if it means we need many more of them before change can truly take hold.

Million Man March (Wide Above Shot), October 16, 1995. Source: Smithsonian Institution-http://photo2.si.edu/mmm/mmm08.gif

A Weak Legacy: The Acts of the Civil Rights Apostles at 50

24 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"The Way It Is" (1986), AERA, American Educational Research Association, Brown Lecture, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Bruce Hornsby and The Range, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Class Inequality, Color Bar, Derrick Bell, Inequality, Jesse B. Semple, Legacy, Mother-Son Relationship, Poverty, Racial Inequality, Racism, Symbols, The Acts of the Apostles, Voter Disenfranchisement, Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Acts of the Apostles (book cover), 1999. (http://books.google.com).

Yesterday evening, I attended the eleventh annual Brown lecture hosted by the American Educational Research Association at the Ronald Reagan Building here in DC. The great scholar James Anderson talked for about an hour about the connections between voter disenfranchisement and state policies that created systems of educational inequality for Blacks as part of the Jim Crow era. Anderson wondered aloud that with the recent efforts to restrict voting and with the Supreme striking down Section 4(b) (and essentially Section 5) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 if this meant a return of gross educational inequality on the basis of race and class in 2014. As if the trends of inequality only rise and fall with well protected or unprotected voting rights. Voting rights enforcement is a good barometer, but hardly the only one. The last twenty years of high-stakes testing and corporate education reform provide evidence of a trend of educational inequality that has occurred despite and (in many cases) precisely because of voter participation across all racial lines.

The following, though, is my full response, to Anderson, AERA and all of those in legacy-celebration mode with the Brown decision and the Acts in 2014 and 2015. What was true in 1964 and 1965 remains true fifty years later. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts have been much more lightbulbs on a symbol of real progress — the Civil Rights Movement — than it has been an actual marker of progress. At least for those poor, Black and of color. For Whites, though, the Acts have been the sign of a post-racial America without having to work at it or talk about it. But for the adults I grew up around in Mount Vernon, New York in the 1970’s, there was a lingering hopefulness about race relations and racial equality in America that is absent these days. I don’t know if I felt it because of Archie Bunker and All In The Family or because of all those reproductions I saw of the late Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy together in the same painting over so many living-room mantles when I was six years old. Yet no matter how down or how out, so many poorer Blacks I knew back then had hope for a brighter present and future.

Jesse Jackson, an Obama election sign, and the American flag — three symbols in one picture, July 2008. (http://plus.google.com).

It wasn’t as if they contemplated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act at the disco house parties my mother would take me and my older brother to, playing with other kids while the adults danced away their troubles. No, it was the idea that finally, Blacks who looked like us could pry open a door and get an opportunity to succeed in America. Or, to quote The Jeffersons‘ theme song, to “gettin’ our turn at bat.” It didn’t matter to them that the Civil Rights Act, even with all its enforcement teeth, would benefit White women and those lucky enough to be part of Black middle class more than us poor Black folk. Or if the Voting Rights Act could be thwarted by gerrymandering and state decisions to make voting harder for us. The Acts crystallized hope, symbolized a chance, however small, for a better education, a better job, and a better life, for themselves and their families.

The adults in my life were putting on a good face, though, as I came to realize when I was a preteen. My mother had once held the hope that me and my older brother would “make it” by going to college and finding “good-paying jobs.” But by the start of the Reagan Revolution, she no longer spoke in such lofty terms. My mother was hardly alone. By 1979, Blacks like Florence Grier in Bob Blauner’s oral history book Black Lives, White Lives (1989) were saying, to “tell you the truth, I’m not hopeful that we’re going to progress in the eighties as fast as we progressed from the sixties to the seventies.”

Polling back then also reflected this sense of frustration about race and over racial discrimination among Blacks, in contrast to the White sentiment that America had move beyond its racist past. In March 1981, ABC News and The Washington Post conducted their first combined poll on the state of race relations in the US. While 73 percent of Blacks in the poll saw “deep rooted continuing racial problems and blame them on discrimination…only 46 percent of the Whites agreed.”

First page of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (bent and warped), July 8, 1964. (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/document_data/pdf/doc_097.pdf). In public domain.

The hopes and aspirations that the Civil Rights Act symbolized have eroded with the Act itself, and are all but absent for younger generations of Americans. An MTV and David Binder Research poll from early 2014 found that 48 percent of White millennials believe anti-White discrimination is as significant as discrimination against people of color, while 65 percent of the people of color they polled believe that Whites have more opportunities for success. Even my own eleven-year-old son reflects this trend. “People were more stupid back then,” my son said to me recently while we talked about the Civil Rights Movement and White resistance to integration, as if racial inequality ended with the movement.Thanks in no small part to the success of the neoconservative movement in declaring the death of racism in the 1980s and 1990s, the generation born after 1981 does not see the federal government as the catalyst for a better life or as a leveler of any playing field.

Bruce Hornsby and The Range’s lyrics from their hit “The Way It Is” summed up the weaknesses of the Civil Rights Act and its legacy well, for us in 1986 as well as today:

Well, they passed a law in ’64

To give those who ain’t got a little more

But it only goes so far

Cause the law don’t change another’s mind…

Nor, apparently, does it create a lasting legacy of racial equality and social mobility.

Whiteness, Symbols and Racial Context

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Affirmative Action, Class Privilege, Colorblind Racism, Colorblindness, Entitlement, Individual Racism, Individualism, Institutional Racism, Privilege, Racial Assumptions, Racial Context, Racial Stereotypes, Racism, Structural Racism, Symbolism, Symbols, Whiteness

The Matrix (1999) meme (only, the “What if I told you” part is incorrect) featuring Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, May 21, 2014. (http://imgflip.com).

For most Whites, racism’s an individual thing. For most Whites, Racism must be obvious. For most Whites, racial bias can only be a deliberate choice. For most Whites, racism’s not infused in the fabric of American culture, or baked into America’s institutions, or infused in its very political and economic structure. Of course, these “most Whites” are just plain wrong. What scares them on this issue — maybe even more than actually using the words “race” or “racism” — is the possibility that though racism is learned, that it also isn’t a decision. It’s an assumption, or really, many layers of assumptions. Of “rights.” Of entitlement. Of privilege. Of being special. Of being colorblind. Of folks knowing their place, and they as Whites knowing where to place these folks.

As I wrote in another social media context last week, part of the insidious nature of Whiteness — aside from its ability to morph over time — are the issues of symbolism and context. Racism for most is obvious and relies heavily on the most obvious of symbols, like in the case of hooded KKK members burning crosses, or in Donald Sterling‘s case, an elderly rich White guy whose Archie Bunker paternalism can be seen from space.

These incidents are the tip of the proverbial iceberg of race and racism in the US because most people of color exist outside the context that comes with Whiteness. For walking in Whiteness without any acknowledgement of one’s privilege — but with tons of assumptions of privilege — is the psychological and social equivalent of breathing and walking at the same time — one only thinks about it when forced to. If those Black and Brown are on TV in orange jump suits, it fits the narrative and context of Whiteness. If someone like me is a college professor in a predominantly White classroom, however, the context doesn’t fit the Whiteness playbook, and with that systems error, many of my White students manifest so many racial assumptions.

Writer, educator and NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on ABC’s This Week discussing NBA’s response to Donald Sterling’s racist statements, May 4, 2014. (http://www.politifact.com).

These out-of-context scenarios occur on individual and institutional scales. Like having White co-workers only recognize me in the context of being at work and at a desk, but being scared upon seeing me board an elevator with them five minutes after the end of a work day. Or in spotting me searching for something at a store, only to ask me to help them find something for them, assuming that I work there. Or in assuming that in the context of sports and entertainment, anyone Black or Brown with an IQ higher than 100 with verbal skills is “angry,” or is “too cerebral” to be successful, or has “an attitude problem.”

Then there’s the assumption that no matter one’s grades, test scores or degrees, that wee folk of color achieved all we have because of affirmative action, the symbol of so-called reverse racism in the US (talk about the narcissism and master-race assumptions of intelligence embedded in this line of reasoning!). For most of the history of Whiteness and racism in American history, this was an infrequent prospect. These days, these microaggressions and racist behaviors occur almost every moment of every day. Precisely because there are so many successful Black and Brown folks, at least in the semi-conscious mind of Whites in the midst of their own Whiteness. This despite the reality that these successful Black and Brown folks are only symbols of the very success that has eluded a broad majority of those of color.

Agent Mr. Smith (played by Hugo Weaving) about to explode, The Matrix (1999), May 21, 2014. (http://www.oocities.org/)

But the context here will rarely be obvious to those awash in Whiteness. Structural inequality and racism, institutional racism, even internalized racism — all confirm the world that most operating in Whiteness can see, precisely because this world is the one in which they are comfortable and virtually unchallenged. Challenging the very structures and institutions upon which Whiteness has been built is like trying to metaphorically deconstruct The Matrix. Most living in Whiteness don’t want to wake up, For waking up would obliterate their world, their very understanding of their existence. And that’s too high a price for recognizing racism and inequality, and their own inadvertent hand in both.

Not Praying At The Civil Rights Altar

27 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

"I Have A Dream" speech, 50th Anniversary, Altars, Civil Right Legacy, Civil Rights Generation, Civil Rights Movement, Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992), False Idols, Hero Worship, Jesse B. Semple, Langston Hughes, March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., Symbols

A facsimile of the JFK, MLK & RFK painting that used to hang over many a Black home's mantle, August 27, 2013. (http://robertktanenbaumbooks.com).

A facsimile of the JFK, MLK & RFK paintings that used to hang over many a Black home’s mantle, August 27, 2013. (http://robertktanenbaumbooks.com).

The legacy of the Civil Rights Movement a half-century removed from the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech remains a mixed bag, especially for poor Blacks and other persons of color. This, of course, isn’t to say that the Civil Rights Movement and those who fought, bled, and died for civil rights and Black equality aren’t to be honored by us. After all, White supremacists assassinated, bombed, jailed, beat up, hosed down and sicked dogs on scores of civil rights activists and innocents, especially in 1963. But the fact that I needed to add this disclaimer is a significant part of the problem of the movement’s legacy. The knee-jerk kneeling and crossing of ourselves on behalf of the Civil Rights generation has all but obscured the fact that what mostly remains of the movement’s successes are mere symbols.

It remains beyond strange that we bow to the recently dead and the still living instead of to the long-dead who did the backbreaking work in paving the road for the Civil Rights Movement in the first place. From escaped slaves to lynched Blacks, from Nat Turner and Martin Delany to Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, their sacrifices were so much greater, and for so little in their own lives. Yet the Civil Rights generation enjoys honors as if they somehow generated the milestones of integration, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 out of thin air. As if the movement’s victories were the equivalent of a modern-day Jesus walking on water.

For those who may well have witnessed these miracles, this is tantamount to civil rights sacrilege. But for millions of us – especially those who remain in poverty – the civil rights legacy is a mirage of symbols. More than twenty years ago, the late civil rights law professor Derrick Bell wrote about a character named Jesse B. Semple (a character originally invented by Langston Hughes) in his best-seller Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992). Semple, in response to Bell’s claims of significant strides made during the movement, said, “most whites and lots of black folks rely on symbols to support their belief that people have come a long way since slavery and segregation to the present time.”

Two decades later, and Bell’s words through Semple ring even truer today. With Black unemployment at 14 percent and one in four African Americans living below the poverty line (including two in five Black children), it seems that the reach of the Civil Rights Movement has long exceeded its grasp. The MLK Holiday and President Barack Obama’s election and re-election, while hard-won battles, are mere symbols out of efforts to address the racism and poverty that ordinary Blacks and other people of color face every day, as both are on the rise. Even the two single biggest achievements of the movement — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – have been weakened over the past three decades by all three branches of our increasingly anti-civil rights government. They stand as symbols now. They are hardly pieces of landmark legislation that would provide a path out of poverty and discrimination.

The real beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Movement have been Blacks on the cusp of the American middle class in the 1960s and 1970s, the ones with the education and social pedigree necessary to become part of the American elite over the past forty years. The same folks who’ve said repeatedly in the past couple of decades that those Blacks who remain undereducated, in poverty and likely to go to jail are in this predicament due to hip-hop and rap or because they wear saggy-baggy jeans. More symbols, but this time, to persecute rather than to uplift. It’s their fault they’re in poverty, say the Bill Cosbys and Don Lemons of this group. This despite the fact that the ladder to the Black elite has been pulled up by both the eroding of the civil rights victories from a half-century ago and the huge wealth gap between rich and poor, Black and White that has become a gulf in recent years.

To turn around and then say that folks who have benefited little to zero from the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement should then take on this mantle now is a bit disingenuous. No, I don’t think that I or anyone who was born far too late to march with Dr. King in August 1963 owe the altar of civil rights any prayers, libations or tithes. If we need to be activists in this age, we need to move beyond relics, symbols and elitist notions of civil rights triumphs.