May 28 - June 3, 2021

On June 19, 2020, I made a commitment to educate myself on the lingering effects of racism, discrimination, and bias in America. Every day through June 18, 2021, I will read an article or book chapter, listen to a podcast, watch a movie or documentary, view a webinar, or do something substantive to educate myself in these areas. As part of that commitment, I will post to this blog each Friday with a list of what I've done over the past week as well as any pertinent thoughts or reflections.

Today's post covers the week of May 28 - June 3, 2021.

Long Time Coming: Reckoning With Race in America

Michael Eric Dyson, current Vanderbilt University professor and ordained Baptist minister, wrote his new book Long Time Coming after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in 2020. The book is organized as a series of seven letters from Dyson to Black men and women who were murdered or tragically lost their lives - Elijah McClain, Emmett Till, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Hadiya Pendleton, Sandra Bland, and Reverend Clementa Pinckney.

Dyson offers his take on the police, white supremacy/fragility/comfort, cultural appropriation, Christianity, and cancel culture, among other topics. He also gives historical perspective to our current environment by tracing its roots from the trans-Atlantic slave trade through Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights struggle, and today's Black Lives Matter movement. What follows are a few key passages from the book.

 

Long before your death (Emmett Till), and so many times since then, we have pledged to reckon with the racial calamity at the heart of our democracy. And too many times we have reneged on that promise and failed to embrace our best racial future. 

 

It is more difficult to reckon with race if we cannot agree on what we are seeing and what needs to be done to fix it ... My dear Emmett: to be Black in America is often to feel under siege, to feel, in the marrow of our bones, genuine terror. To feel that no matter how much education or money we have, how nice a car we drive, how well behaved we are, how disarming and articulate we prove ourselves to be, at any moment we might feel a baton crushing our skull, a Taser sending a jolting message to our nervous system, a bullet penetrating our flesh. All because, and for no other reason than, we are Black.

 

Black (families) are hard-pressed to reveal their fallen kin's redeeming features without surrendering to the pressure for Black victims to be perfect. Yet they need to show and tell how their loved ones deserved to live out their days like everyone else without having to prove that they were the next great anything or the next remarkable someone.

The pandemic forced more of us to be home at the same time to watch our screens and to be sickened and angered at the treatment of Floyd's helpless body. In that sense, the origin of our reckoning was a made-for-social-media event, a species of digital disruption that forced us to stream the truth of Black suffering and national crisis as we were left to our own devices. The pandemic made it easier to absorb his tragically prostrate form into the national conscience.

There is a great deal of righteous anger about our failure to achieve racial justice. Centuries of hurt and pain have built up, and now that the racial dam has burst there is a war of ideas about race, about how we see the past, the present, and our future, that is just as vigorous as our discussions about death in the streets. I know that it is tempting to go the way of least resistance and quickest resolution. But some forms of apparent justice seem to me little more than a perilous and fascist surrender to the sort of vengeance that can never satisfy the moral demands for positive change.

 

In brief, it is the use of the Internet and social media to bring extralegal pressure, without due process, by self-described critics or social justice advocates to effect immediate and irreversible change by attacking people or charging them with wrongdoing, often in an unprincipled manner. These attacks and charges harm reputations, offer little space for reasoned rebuttal, and sometimes end careers ... The presumption of cancel culture, as with fascism, is that there is a single source of truth and authority, a single understanding of what is right ... Instead, we must insist on thinking about right and wrong along a continuum of choices and a spectrum of possibilities.

It should not have to be said, but Black folk are not all the same. We don't all think the same thoughts about Blackness, we don't all agree about the approaches to heal racial injustice, we don't all think the same about white folk and their roles in movements for justice.

 

Some Black folk demand white folk speak up and be brave in the face of racial injustice. Many white folk want to get things right and hope to spare themselves unnecessary shame and embarrassment as they speak and act. Thus, they reach out to Black folk to ask how they can serve with the greatest care and impact - only to be met by some Black folk, tired and exhausted, who proclaim that they won't assist white folk in the fraught journey to racial reckoning. The best white allies are not easily dissuaded from the task at hand: their feelings are not easily hurt, their determination to help is not easily derailed, and their desire to make progress toward racial justice is not easily discouraged.