In her blog, The Notion, Melissa
Harris-Lacewell commented on post-health care reform bill hate speech
that hit a crescendo in the past week.
I really
appreciated Harris-Lacewell's
view in this piece, and her very "civil" questioning of views expressed
by two commentators that I have be-fanned -- Keith Olbermann and Rachel
Maddow -- as they "drew parallels between the health care battle and the
civil rights movement." She notes that crafting such a metaphor is
seductive, especially since Representative John Lewis played a key role
in both.
In March of 1965, as a young civil rights
worker hoping to secure voting rights for black Americans, Lewis was
brutally beaten when he led a peaceful protest march across a bridge in Alabama.
Last weekend, in another act of
nonviolent resistance, Lewis walked through a storm
of hate speech and spittle on his way to work for national health care
reform.
In the interviews of Lewis that followed this
scene at the Capitol, he kept to the high road of civility. I never
heard him say anything hateful back to those who had disrespected him.
In her article,
Harris-Lacewell notes that despite the hateful behavior directed toward
him, Representative Lewis said that he harbored no ill will against
those people and insisted that we must learn to live peacefully and
respectfully together. "It was the kind of response," says
Harris-Lacewell, "that makes Lewis a hero to many."
She goes on
then to make this point:
But there is a
very important difference between Bloody Sunday of 1965 and Health Care Reform Sunday of 2010. In 1965
Lewis was a disenfranchised protester fighting to be recognized as a
full citizen. When he was beaten by the police, he was being attacked by
the state. In 2010 Lewis is a long time, elected representative. When
he is attacked by protesters, he is himself an agent of the state. This
difference is critically important; not because it changes the fact that
racism is present in both moments, but because it radically alters the
way we should understand the meaning of power, protest and race.
The power of this and other
Harris-Lacewell articles for me is her weaving of history with current
politics and culture in a way that I was too young and too white to
"get" back in the fifties and sixties. I am beginning to see how this
piece of my own history has left me with a foundation that, despite
being privileged, is nonetheless an impoverished space from which to
launch engaged citizenship in the 21st century.
On the same day I found this article, I
happened to see an ad -- I think it was for Frosted Mini-Wheats -- in
which a black child is being quizzed by a little mini-wheat character on
points of history. What is the first question to the little boy about?
Christopher Columbus. The ad proceeds to make use of a familiar
grade-school doggerel, "In fourteen-hundred-ninety-two, Columbus sailed
the ocean blue."
This triggered an association not only
to grade school, but to an anti-racism workshop I attended. Using the
power of educational systems as an example, a facilitator offered up a
portion of the 1492 chant to introduce a discussion of structural
racism, i.e. that systemic power of the "state" that protects white
privilege and maintains a legitimized state of oppression against people
of color. And this association brought me back to the question posed by
Harris-Lacewell with her article.
Harris-Lacewell continues from the
paragraph excerpted above with a discussion on the notion of "the
state:"
The
state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of
violence,
force and coercion. If an individual travels to another country and
kills its
citizens, we call it terrorism. If the state does it, we call it war. If
a man
kills his neighbor it is murder; if the state does it is the death
penalty. If
an individual takes his neighbor's money, it is theft; if the state does
it, it
is taxation.
When we challenge the state as the only legitimate
owner of violent, forceful and coercive tactics, says Harris-Lacewell,
we confront it "at its core." This was the situation that led southern
states to challenge the legitimacy of a central state's government, and
to secede on the basis of a "state's rights" claim. When these states
lost the Civil War, the authority of a central state was again
legitimized.
What followed historically was an era of attempted
reconstruction. I don't remember hearing much about this period in
school, other than its being named, dated and quickly passed by. Which
is kind of what happened. Harris-Lacewell writes that, for ten years
after the war, black Americans had a chance to experiment with full
citizenship and a share of political power:
During this decade black
men voted, held office and organized as laborers and farmers. It was a
fragile political equality made possible only by the determined and
powerful presence of the federal government. Then in 1877 the federal
government abdicated its responsibilities to new black citizens and
withdrew from the South. When it did so it allowed local governments and
racial terrorist organizations like the KKK to have the monopoly on
violence, force and coercion in the South for nearly 100 years.
As Harris-Lacewell points
out, this general challenge-restore scenario was
re-played when the Civil Rights Movement organized against abuse of
state power enacted through violent police tactics in the South, and the
federal government intervened in support of civil rights. She suggests
we're seeing it again -- a kind of act three or four, maybe? -- in the
emergence of the Tea Party, which essentially challenges a central
United States government as a legitimate state.
We're at another
crossroads, it seems. "We must now guard against the end of our new
Reconstruction," says Harris-Lacewell, "and the descent of a vicious
new Jim Crow terrorism."
Harris-Lacewell's discussion adds meaning to my
long-held suspicion that the Civil War never ended. My belief is
informed from an intuitive level, a level of psycho-spiritual history
that is ubiquitously re-enacted but not often symbolized and brought to
conscious awareness.
The human psyche is structured to record and retain
both individual and collective history. What each of us brings into
this life and what we experience in our earliest relationships is what
wires us for dealing with those histories -- what wires us to recreate
karmic lessons, so to speak.
The patterns that played out in the Civil War --
patterns of exploitation and oppression that have ancient roots -- will
repeat themselves until we, individually and collectively, discover the
real lessons at the core and learn them well. Only then can we fully
decommission those patterns, and change the structure of psyches and
systems.
This
process is underway. I see the positive response to Obama's
presidential campaign and election as a mirror, in part, of a shared
(but for most, unconscious) soul-level commitment to implant a more
spiritually sound government of united, equitable states. It may look
pretty ugly and doubtful at the moment, but "yes, we can" takes us a
long way toward "yes, we will."
By the way, just to tie up a loose end with
the Frosted Mini-Wheats -- in this one-minute or less gift from Madison
Avenue (yep, that's kind of near Wall Street, I think) there is much to
be questioned.
Lots of folks seem to be obsessed lately with a perceived
failure of the American education system to prepare our kids to be
competitive with other nations' kids in math and science, i.e. a
technological future. But isn't it humanity's access to technology
that disrupts Earth's ecosystems faster than nature can repair itself?
Harris-Lacewell and many
others continue to remind us that much human suffering remains because
we have failed to learn from history. So I hope kids continue to study
history. But not the Frosted Mini-Wheat's kind. I mean a complete and
transparent presentation of history that fairly represents the
experience of people of color -- no matter how ugly and painful for
white people -- and teaching kids to think critically about who we all
are and how social systems are structured.
But maybe we should start
with this question: who the hell says that starting the day with Frosted
Mini-Wheats is the best way to feed a kid's brain for learning
anything?
[This is a cross-post from my Citizen, Inc blog.]
