Tag: Civil Rights

Behold the Crime of silence

In 1970, James Baldwin was interviewed by David Frost and was asked if he was a Christian or a Muslim, and he said, laughing, “I was born a Baptist.”

Baldwin laughed, hard, prompting Frost to say, “It’s not that funny.”

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Baldwin responded, “It is to me…and he proceeded to answer Frost’s next question, “And what are you now? Do you feel as black (sic) now as when you were born?”

Baldwin responded, “I think you should ask that question of our president…Richard Nixon or the Attorney General. Ask the president how black I feel.” Frost asked, “Do you think the Civil Rights movement is dead?”

Baldwin replied that the Civil Rights movement had resulted in some changes, yes, but it had always been a “self-contained” endeavor and carried within it “something self-defeating.” He added, “Martin knew this, too.”

“In the beginning, we thought that there was a way of reaching the conscience of the people in this country. We hoped there was, and I must say that we did reach several blacks and several whites. We did everything in our power to make the American people realize that the myths they were living with were not so much destroying black people as whites.”

He described who he was and how he felt as a Black person in a country that worshipped whiteness. It had taken its toll, and he said, “I am not a young man, but I am a Black American and I know something about the crime of silence. I know what happens in San Francisco and in Chicago, and in New York when one of our representatives wants to protect the morale of the police. I know what a no-knock, stop-and-frisk law means. It means search and destroy. I know something about the history black people have endured and are still enduring in this place.” He concluded this part of the interview by saying, “We’re not on the edge of a racial war. We’re on the edge of a civil war.”

Still.

Baldwin could just as easily have been sharing those thoughts today.

We are seeing what the crime of silence produces: Chaos. Complacency. Fear. Spiritual and societal blindness, caused by our refusal to challenge injustice and those who support it. The silence helps many rest in a false sense of security; “this is America,” they think. “Nothing as heinous as what happened in Germany will ever happen here.” The belief that America is truly exceptional and immune to abject suffering and destruction by any other country or from within has warped the minds and the capacity of people to understand that evil has no boundaries. It has made Americans boast of being “the greatest country in the world,” even as it descends into the abyss of tyranny. And it has made people think that if anyone suffers, ‘it won’t be them; it will be those who “deserve” to suffer.

Only some people who have a platform speak out and speak up. Unfortunately, too many others are caught in a mythic belief that even if things are bad, the great America will be able to rebound, and, many think, America will do so with the people whom they believed were never worthy of American rights and citizenship eliminated. They believe that if there is a breakdown of America, it will be for the good of a country that had for too long been sullied by the presence of people who should never have been here. (They forget that it was their ancestors who brought the “undesirables” to this country and that it was the unpaid labor of those people that resulted in the economic growth and domination of this country.)

Silence in the face of evil and injustice makes some people or groups of people think they are or will be immune to the dark days ahead, but it always results in excruciating suffering for the masses. American political and law enforcement leaders have been silent from this nation’s inception, and many have been complicit. This country has operated with the understanding that some people have the right to perpetuate injustice because of their race and wealth. They have operated with a “wink and a nod” mindset, akin to that portrayed in the movie, “Gentleman’s Agreement.” 

It was the silence (and fear of the president) by lawmakers in the halls of the United States Congress and Senate recently that resulted in the passage of a cruel budget that will hurt millions. Belief in the superiority of a rogue president has resulted in the US Supreme Court choosing to be silent at times when it should have been the leader of the “rule of law” and the pursuit of justice for everyone. Fear of so many, afraid of being punished by the powers that be, has resulted in silence about the complicity with and partnership of America with Zionists, as troops have ravaged the West Bank and specifically, Gaza using weapons that were supplied by the United States, and silence is the accepted way of ignoring the suffering that is going on in the Sudan.

The prayer is that none of us remain silent but take the risk of speaking out and acting to stop the march to the shores of 18th century injustice, echoing the voice of the God of the Christian Bible who desires mercy and not sacrifice and justice for all human beings, the God whose teachings clearly illustrate that He/She cannot be named as the commander-in-chief of those who are running over and destroying the lives of too many of the human beings She created.

If any of us are being silent, we need to think about why and decide if we are going to serve God or serve human beings and honor our desire to flourish in a capitalistic society. There indeed may not be a way to reach the consciences of those who practice injustice against others, but injustice will surely flourish if those who are writhing as they watch the destruction of liberty and justice for all God’s people remain silent.

That silence is perhaps the greatest crime that we are facing today.

A candid observation…

Why The Negro Cries

Forgive me for using a long-outdated term to refer to African-Americans, but for some reason, I feel today that it is necessary to say something to make people, black and white, understand the deep pain and damage white supremacy has caused in this country.

When I was a child, I, my siblings and my friends played “pretend.” We’d play “house,” and “school” and “church,” perfectly imitating, it seemed, those whom we had so regularly observed in each of those settings. We knew how to play a strict mother or an energetic preacher. We were children and children “play” and imitate what they see. Undoubtedly, what they see, and how they internalize what they see, helps shape them for the rest of their lives.

Play is what children do, but I never thought about the kind of playing African-American children might have done in years past, during slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. So, I was taken aback when a man, describing slave life in Richmond, Virginia in 1853, reported that he observed slave children playing “auction.” That’s right. They had seen so many people auctioned off to owners that they had gotten the procedure down pat. They knew how to imitate the voice of the auctioneer. They knew how to do the public examination of a slave up for sale, to make sure he or she was worth the money that was being asked for. That meant touching their arms and ankles, looking into their mouths to check the state of their teeth, and probably worse. They practiced dragging a screaming mother away from her child or children as either she or they were sold. They had the process down. There were slave children eager to act as auctioneers, and others who were wiling to be the unfortunate ones sold away.

They replayed the ongoing activity that was breaking the hearts and spirits of human beings, that was ,in fact, breaking their hearts and spirits.

The man doing the reporting was one William Chambers. He was a Scotsman, a publisher in his land,  and he .was in Richmond, Virginia in 1853. While there decided to observe a slave auction. He had heard they were events full of misery and despair and he wanted to see for himself. He noted that there was not much misery, that those being sold were calm and showed little emotion. He surmised that, since “the Negro” was not fully human and was certainly inferior to white people, that they could not feel pain, not even as their children were wrested from their arms and they cried – both the parents and their children.

I listened to the story on National Public Radio’s This American Life, and got stuck. It never occurred to me that slave children practiced through playing their own oppression. They played auction.

It has always been painful to be black-skinned, not only in America but all over the world, but to listen to this story and to realize how deeply embedded in the very souls of black people is the notion of our being unworthy of respect did something to me. When we played “house” or “church” or “school” when I was little, we were aspiring to be good mothers or teachers. We respected the preacher whom we might imitate. We never “played” games that said we were inherently worth nothing.

Langston Hughes wrote, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and one of the lines of that poem reads, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” Surely. How can one’s spirit, housed in one’s soul, not descend to depths of despair when one is being treated like an object, with no emotions, no feelings, and no rights? That is a question over which I have pondered for a long time.

But when I hear this story about the slave children “playing auction,” my heart sank. There is all this hoopla today about the Confederate Flag, with lovers of the Confederacy saying that the flag is about their heritage. That is true; it is about their heritage, but it is also about a culture, a society, a land and its policies, which created a situation where little black children would play a game which would contribute to their own demise and further dehumanization.

I am crushed, yet again. This racism knows no bounds…

I think every politician running for public office ought to be required to take some American history. I think they ought to be fed, force-fed if necessary, the history of what racism and white supremacy has done to a huge swath of American citizens. Whomever becomes president of this nation ought to be well-schooled to the reasons this nation is in such a mess when it comes to race. I think every person running for office, federal, state or local, ought to be made to read and understand the reason …the Negro cries.

Racism and white supremacy were like daggers, dug into the hearts, souls and wills of black people, without regret. The belief was that black people were not human, could not feel…and so it did not matter.

But it did matter, and it does matter. There are children of those slain in Charleston, South Carolina almost two weeks ago who are crying; there are widows and husbands who are mourning and trying to find a way to carry on. It’s not just these most recent atrocious killings which makes their journey difficult; it is the fact that for years, they, as members of the African-American community, have been fighting the forces which would kill their spirits, and carrying on, moving forward, in a land which clearly still has little regard for them as human beings.

Whenever a person is traumatized, it takes time to heal. African-Americans have been continually traumatized and hae put their shattered souls and spirits to the side because they had to, we had to, in order to keep going. We have pushed against the system which has no regard for us, and we have for the most part prevailed.

But the Negro cries. We cry as we move forward. We have to move forward, but we cannot stop the tears, and so we do both.

Any politician who cannot or will not acknowledge that this country is a mess because of white supremacy, any politician who is more concerned with the Southern base, or the white base, but is not concerned with the programs and policies which may have our children playing games that are in place to ensure their own demise …is a coward. I don’t want any more cowards in office. We have had too many.

The children played auction.

I am sick …

A candid observation …

 

Story about Chambers was heard on National Public Radio (NPR)’s This American Life

 

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