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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

justice

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Drop Respectability. Assert Dignity.

GodOnTrial_Amazon
God On Trial  first screened in the U.S. on PBS’ Masterpiece Contemporary in November 2008.

Inspired by Frank Cottrell Boyce’s play God On Trial, religious explanations for genocide, and a vision of abundant life.

Does it say [in your covenant] ‘Every once in a while, all bets are off, and I’ll—I’ll flood the place?’ —Moche, God On Trial

God on Trial puts flesh and faces on the old story that Auschwitz prisoners charged God with breaching the Hebrew covenant and conducted a trial to determine God’s innocence or guilt.

Every time I watch it, it resonates with my ancestral history and questions theologians have asked about anti-Black racism and a non-intervening God. Every character is powerfully drawn, every scene is haunting, and the meanings each speaker infers from the atrocity they face are so familiar. Horrific, and familiar.

People under siege facing systematic category-based violence and abuse often find comfort in rites, routine, and respectability. Respectability is an attempt to make some predictable space between a relentless injury and the human soul.

You began the trial. You should complete it. You should follow procedure and quote precedent and be men… Th—They think we are not men, but we are men. They will not take that from us. —An old prisoner, God On Trial

In the face of abuses one can’t control or dodge, it’s easy to find some peace in Robert’s Rules of Order and the Church’s rules of relationship. These rules create an inch of discernible and teachable logic in a chasm of malevolence. They reassure us that, as the old man says, “we are men.” We’re happy to teach our children this. I grew up in it and understand.

It’s a thin comfort, though, our fragile order, our clean consistency. It doesn’t keep the wind out. It doesn’t stop the system. It doesn’t matter who we are: theologians, craftsmen, activists, scientists: when the system comes for People Like Us, it comes for us all.

“Men make their societies in the images of their gods,” Jacques says mid-trial. And Baumgarten, trial judge, realizes how finely designed the dehumanization is: “Nothing here is accidental. The filth is a part of a system… It serves a function. It’s here to take away your dignity.”

It’s the order, the work of making a life and a world regardless of the system, that saves us from the filth. If not for the discipline, wonder, and exhilaration of resisting and asserting and creating new worlds, what would we have?

Respectability claims that our dignity resides in our ability to make and live by order we impose on the chaos of life. It’s a claim that the most sacred aspect of humanity, attacked by a manufactured system, can also be saved by order we’ve manufactured.

The rules of respectability are many, many things, but natural they are not. They are manufactured, and we honor them by consensus. We agree to wear clothes. We agree to wear certain kinds of clothes. We agree to wear certain styles for certain occasions. All these rules are sustained through consensus.

The power of respectability is consensus, not nature or inherent merit. And that’s why we must police its borders: without consensus and policing, respectability falls, and we’re left, as before, with that malevolent system waiting for us at the gate. From functional beginnings comes an idolatrous end: an abandonment of the inherent naked reality for the fig leaves of the made thing.

But there are always rebels—the Get Free Crew. In rebellion against policed consensus, we insist that our humanity isn’t rooted in our performances or our compliance. It’s rooted in inherent dignity. Dignity cannot be taken by a system that did not give it. It isn’t more worthy or more true because we dressed it up and groomed it. We are who we are.

"Ain't I a woman?" —Sojourner Truth, 19th C | "I AM A MAN" —Memphis sanitation workers, 20th C | #BlackLivesMatter, 21st C (@mackenzian)
There is a continuous history of US mass dignity movements from the 19th Century to the present day: the 19th Century’s abolition and voting rights movements, the mid-20th Century labor rights movements, and the early 21st Century Black liberation and anti-police brutality movements.

In the 19th Century, Sojourner Truth said “Ain’t I a Woman?” In the 20th Century, sanitation workers said “I AM A MAN.” In the 21st Century, we say #BlackLivesMatter. The contexts of each statement are different, but the core claim is the same: our dignity is not determined by majoritarian politics or consensual whims.

Our dignity is inherent to us, the only thing we truly possess, and the seed of every other fruit we yield in the world. “Life is short,” Toni Morrison told us 40 years ago. “Freedom is in my mind. That’s where one is free.” That’s where our freedom begins.

It’s a masterful turn that closes the God on Trial narrative not with the verdict, but with prayers of those who have judged God. Sometimes that prayer slips out of our mouths like blues. Sometimes we walk it out, chanting “It is our duty to win.” And every day, however the world judges us, we honor our own dignity and build out worlds in which our very being is not a question but a truth.

"You have destruction; we have reconstruction. You have separated us; we are uniting. You have stones and weapons; we have books, words, pride, and the will to change. You have bitterness; we have pride. You have hatred; we have love. And because we choose love, we are already winners. Because never before, in the history of the world, has love failed to win."
From Yasmin Thayná’s article, “Racists have the abyss. We must have love.”

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The Movement Moment: Change, Denial, and the Fall of Empire

A director at one of the organizations I support recently asked me what I thought “the movement moment” was.
What’s the spirit of this time? What’s rising up?

The movement, I said, is life.

The system demands we assimilate, and teaches us resistance is futile.
The movement is not about the right to assimilate.

The system calls us to worship the lone star. “Pull yourself up,” the system says. “Pull your pants up too.”
But the movement is not about rugged, respectable, individual survival.

The movement is far more expansive than the American Dream.
The movement is about justice.

It’s about quality of life in a diverse society.
Thriving as oneself in community.
The beauty of who you are. The richness of who we are.
Life beyond survival.

The movement is about race.
Poverty and wealth acquisition.
Freedom from violence and a criminal legal system.
Incarceration and voting access.

The movement is about housing.
Black lesbians with children in the South. Will not migrate. Shouldn’t have to.

The movement is about freedom.
Freedom of worship. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of conscience in houses of worship.
It’s freedom from abuse. And it’s freedom to find love and belonging in a place called home.

The movement is about meaningful work and meaningful wages.
Gender expression, access to education, and professional mobility.
Food justice. Humane business.
Innovation. Climate action.

The movement is about the diversity of family.
The healing of faith. The focus of reason.
It’s fidelity to the human nation. Integrity. Hope.

The movement is about life dimensions beyond subsistence.
It’s opening to the full spectrum of life and full presence in life.
The movement is thriving. The movement is whole.

This is the movement and energy that inspires me, that I’m aligned with, and that I co-build with my clients and colleagues. This is the world that I want to live in: space for all people to be and create and progress and transform.

I’d like faith communities to be part of this movement, engaged as co-laborers and not as bystanders, and certainly not as obstacles that laborers have to work around. I’d especially like the faith community I grew up in to be part of the team I’m yoked with: can we really not just pull together?

What social change takes: change.

“Hope” and “change” and “movement” all easily lose their gloss with time. It’s not because leadership teams necessarily adopt reserved or centrist approaches to their work. It’s not even because movements hatching into institutions naturally become cautious. Ultimately, it’s because “hope” requires little disturbance in the Force, but “change” destabilizes everything. And more want change than want to change.

Who wants change? Who wants to change? via ChangeActivation.com
Who wants change? Who wants to change? via ChangeActivation.com

Every deep change in the last 10,000 years has inspired a counter-campaign of folks sure that the change they resisted would usher in the end of the world. The mass adoption of writing prompted philosophers to fret that children would lose intelligence, memory, and oral delivery skills. In Phaedrus (275), a Socratic dialogue, Plato has Socrates insist that writing is “an elixir not of memory, but of reminding”: it’s an inferior tool that encourages writers to ape wisdom rather than practice it through dialogue, discussion, and feedback.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, UK slaveholders warned the country that abolition would irreparably harm the nation’s standing in global trade. “Our West-Indian and African Trades,” slave-holders wrote in 1749, “are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on… the extensive Employment of our other Shipping in, to and from America, the great Brood of Seamen consequent thereupon, and the daily bread of the most considerable of our British Manufactures [sic], are owing primarily to the Labour of Negroes.”

And in the US, critics of the suffragettes accused the women’s movement of wrecking homes and undermining marriage. Campaign posters framed lobbyists as too ugly to be married, or man-eaters who dominated their husbands, or the kind of mothers who would abandon their toddlers to wash, clean, and fend for themselves.

The doomsday prophecies are valid in a way: the old worlds did fall. But that’s the whole point. We don’t promote change for Colossus to stay on his pedestal. We promote change to bring him and Rhodes down. So much labeled “innovation” is just dusting the pedestal of the status quo. If an initiative is genuinely innovative, it will summon the World’s Last Chance crowd and all the hand-wringing that humanity can drum up. And if it doesn’t, we’re doing it wrong.

Deep change means the end of the known world—and for the segment of mankind not nurtured by the present order, the end of the known world is way overdue! If we’re wise about what my colleague Peterson Toscano calls The Great Transition, we’ll survive it ready to rebuild. If we’re foolish about the opportunities we have, we’ll stop short, crying about the good old days and writing them into our revisions.

I may snark about this, but there’s a reasonable root under much fear around social change. Just this week, would-be presidential nominee Jeb Bush verbalized it when he told his base, “Thousands of years of culture and history is just being changed at warp speed.” Speaking specifically about civil marriage, Bush said he found it “hard to imagine” what society might look like when people’s civil standing no longer rests on their maintaining “traditional” lifestyles. Change changes things, and our imaginations don’t always keep pace.

It’s also true that the rational reluctance to change can express irrationally. If we’re no longer trading in superiority complexes, it’s irrational to trade humane inclusion for familiar exclusion, and it’s irrational to fret about the pace of change when the status quo harms. The impulse to encourage slow tweaks has showed up in every justice movement I can name. It’s incurred stony glares from change-makers for just as long.

Even from those as sanitized as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Line caricature of Cecil John Rhodes, in a victorious wide-stance on a tilted African continent. Rhodes has one foot near Egypt and the other near South Africa. The cartoon mocks the traditional myth that the ancient Colossus of Rhodes was so large it had a foot on either side of the Rhodes port.
Cecil John Rhodes, colonialist. Artist: Edward Linley Sambourne (1892) in Punch, a British satirical weekly magazine. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

To his White Christian and Jewish colleagues, King once wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.'”

Some of us feel called to walk alongside people as they press through their discomfort. We can’t do that work effectively by encouraging people to live in denial about what yielding to that discomfort would mean for others. Earlier this year, I and my co-panelists at Creating Change reframed denial as a sign that someone has accurately judged how much is at stake. As such, denial’s a completely appropriate stage to start a journey in. It’s just no foundation for a life.

As change-makers, we know the stakes are high. And that’s why we press for substantive change in this world. We have no assurances that results will come in our lifetimes and we acknowledge there’s no inevitability in play. Yet we still work for good.

We know this world pets some lives and consumes others. We know it will do so as long as we permit it. And we’re saying enough: the end is nigh. Mourn the old parasitic order if you must: it will pass. It must pass.

Then, when you have mourned, help to topple Colossus.

Topple Colossus in your home.
Topple Colossus in your labor.
Topple Colossus in your faith community.
Topple Colossus in the town square.
Topple Colossus in city hall.
Topple Colossus in the chamber of commerce.
Topple Colossus in every sphere of life.
And from the rubble, build.

The first line in my Twitter bio is “for public good, social change.” It’s a simple, intentional phrase that represents my contributions to social justice, communal good, and the third sector—the voluntary, not-for-profit realm of action that’s neither primarily governmental nor primarily commercial. Even limited work in this sphere and small, consistent action in our interpersonal relationships can contribute to the emergence of a more whole and more just world.

If you’d like to add my professional energy to the work you’re doing in this area, please email me and let’s talk.

By

VIDEO: Reading With Different Ears: Amy-Jill Levine and Ethnocentrism

“While the New Testament may be seen as anti-Jewish, it need not be taken that way, because words inevitably mean different things to different readers. More problematic are those verses that on the surface appear quite benign, but when heard with different ears can be quite difficult.

“[For example,] Galatians 3:28, which proclaims that in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, is grand if you’re a Galatian Gentile who’s feeling somewhat marginalized, y’know, because Jesus was a Jew and Paul was a Jew, and the one ‘Bible’ they have happens to be the Tanakh, which tells them amongst other things that in order to be part of the covenant community they have to be circumcised in the flesh of their foreskin if they’re men. To be told that in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek is great if you’re a Galatian Gentile.

“But to proclaim that verse today, after Auschwitz, is a little difficult because it suggests that the ideal world is a world in which there is no Jew. Different time period causes a different reading.” —Amy-Jill Levine, University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt University Divinity School

—

I’ve been reading that Galatians text for more than 20 years, mostly in regard to gender and class rather than ethnicity.

Listening to Dr. Levine today was the first time that the text reminded me of Ellen White’s supposition that “In heaven there will be no color line; for all will be as white as Christ himself.”

White made this claim to a congregation of Black Adventists in 1901 (whether in Vicksburg, MI, Vicksburg, IN, or Vicksburg, MS, I’ve not been able to determine). I wish someone had thought to poll attendees’ for feedback during pot luck afterwards.

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The Change We Want Is Not Inevitable

Today, several US states have observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The annual commemoration usually means anodyne reflections on love driving out hate, a corporate-friendly and mostly un-challenging King, and wholesale disregard of the fact that he died only because his countrymen and government considered him a threat.

But hashtags like #MLKAlsoSaid and #ReclaimMLK are providing a counter-narrative, with contributions from the speeches and writings that haven’t made the soundbite cut on TV or radio this week. This time last year, I wrote about being driven to act by internal conviction and hope, not by anticipated results or outcomes.

Today, I came across a transcript of one of King’s last speeches, given at Ohio Northern University in January 1968. King is absolutely clear on how “racism” breaks down into tangible and resolvable obstacles to the ability of Black Americans to inhabit the freedom that’s their birthright: police brutality, bias violence and vandalism, justice miscarriages, disproportionate poverty, substandard housing, and both un- and under-employment.

“There are all too many people who say that only time can solve the problem. They feel that there is something miraculous in the very flow of time that will cure all evils, and I’ve heard it a great deal. There are always those who will sincerely say to me and our allies in the white community and those of us who work in civil rights that we are pushing things too fast. They have a way of saying this: ‘Be patient, and just be nice and continue to pray and in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out because only time can solve the problem.’

“I think that there is an answer to that myth, and it is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. I’m sad to say that I’m absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation, the reactionaries of our nation have often used time much more effectively than the forces of good will. It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So it is necessary to help time and to realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., at Ohio Northern University, January 11, 1968 (emphasis added)

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.

This morning I chatted with Peterson Toscano, the actor and principal writer behind the hopeful climate change podcast Climate Stew. Thanks to our reading of Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes/Conway) and Don’t Even Think About It (Marshall), we have an ongoing discussion about whether the climate movement benefits from debating economic doctrines like market regulation, subsidies, and which fuel sources to reduce or jettison. Must all of these debates be settled before we can take action? Can we afford “to wait?”

A green and white hand-lettered sign reads "We all need a healthy climate." The word "People" and the names of non-human species surround this text.
“We all need a healthy climate.” At Columbus Circle, NYC.
In their own way and for their own reasons, market advocates like The Economist are now proposing an end to fossil fuel subsidies—an outcome long proposed by traditional environmentalists who’ve worried that governments around the world have propped up an unsustainable fuel source and thus undercut the development of new and cleaner technologies and distribution infrastructure.

If these newer proposals find good soil among decision-makers who’ve been resistant to other arguments, then as infuriating as that turn might be, we’ll still benefit from it. We’ll benefit because this crisis isn’t a partisan one. Climate change affects us all of us in different ways, and so will the process of mitigating the worst impacts and adjusting to a new, more sustainable normal. Most of us aren’t just entangled with fossil fuel production by direct use; we’re also enmeshed with it because whole swathes of our lives are dependent on them too. Fossil fuels run the internet companies’ giant data and server complexes, and fuel the trucks that our food companies use to move our fresh vegetables from farmland to grocery stores every day. We can’t radically reshape our relationship to these products without radically reshaping our lives.

So disrupting the prime place of fossil fuels means whole-life disruption. But most of us find whole-life disruption frightening and repulsive. Denial can mitigate our discomfort with change, at least for a time, and yet when it comes to the Earth staying habitable and hospitable for our kind of life, time is the very thing we don’t have.

During our workshop at the Creating Change conference in Colorado next month, Peterson, Nancy Wilson, J Mase III, and I will guide a room of people into reflection on how we can face up to the ecological challenge in front of us without detouring into denial and without losing either hope or humor.

I’ll share more about our session in a few weeks!

By

Confronting the First Colony and Our Acceptable Trades

I’m driving down North Carolina Highway 158 late at night, the peninsula woods flanking the road. It’s so dark here.

The moon is about half full. Clusters of trees stand bare and stiff in the black.

I can see the stars through the windshield. Orion’s south of me, lying on his side like the prophet who dramatized the fall of the two kingdoms, not moving for hundreds of days at a time. I wonder if Orion will watch this kingdom fall.

At barely 8 p.m., but for the pig barbecue restaurants and gas stations, the area seems deserted. This is a universe away from Ferguson “Ground Zero” Missouri, or #NMOS14 in Baltimore or Die-Ins in Boston or #BoycottBlackFriday in New York or #FloodWallStreet or the People’s Climate March or the lobbying networks of Washington, D.C. There’s nothing so banal as international politics and nothing so earnest as dead human bodies on a dark highway in North Carolina.

Google map of the North Carolina Peninsula. The strip of land cuts south-east across the right half of the map
North Carolina’s Peninsula from Currituck to Roanoke. | (c) Google, 2014

I first crossed the bridge into the Outer Banks a year ago, two short months after the U.S. government granted me residency status. The form letter I was afraid to open transformed me in an instant from “non-immigrant” with uncertain options to “permanent resident” with all the mythology of progress and opportunity in my lap, staring me down, asking me, “Why aren’t you already succeeding? This is the Dream!”

And then I drove out to North Carolina, and crossed the Currituck Sound toward Nags Head. Eventually I came to Roanoke Island and walked around a mound now enclosed by a small, manicured government museum.

The exhibition marker said the mound marked the site of the village where one hundred and eighteen 16th Century English settlers encountered the Croatan people and their leaders Manteo and Wanchese. There the English saw how the indigenous people thrived, what they fished, what they traded, which crops they grew—crops like tobacco, and what else the English would be able to take back east.

What they could take for the glory of the Crown: Gold and goods for the glory of God.

A lithograph of the baptism of Virginia Dare
“Baptism of Virginia Dare” by Henry Howe, 1880 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Wanchese and Manteo joined Walter Raleigh on a fundraising and PR trip back to England. Both helped Raleigh’s linguist to interpret the Algonquian language, and their presence—proof of the new people over the horizon—supported Raleigh’s campaign to raise more money for more settlements across the ocean. Both Wanchese’s and Manteo’s names survive today on their own land. But only Wanchese nursed doubts about the settling English.

Within three years of the English settlers’ arrival, Manteo had submitted to baptism into the Church of England—and hence positioned himself under the authority of the Queen. I find no record of Wanchese’s conversion. Today, the town named after Manteo is a quaint, self-consciously historical place that hugs the waterfront and hopes strangers will stop by. I wonder if Manteo’s spirit has ever left his land.

A few days before Thanksgiving this year, I searched for some of the native peoples indigenous to the area of Maryland I live in. The internet told me that the majority of those who’d received the English in the 1600s had fallen to genocide, disease, colonialism, or displacement by the 1700s: the Tutelo and Suponi languages are extinct, the English pushed the Suponi from Central Maryland into what is now Ohio, smallpox and lynching destroyed the Susquehannocks who once lived to the north, and the Accohannocks lost their land up and down the Eastern Shore.

I learned for the first time about the headrights land distribution system concocted out of thin air in New England and exported south to Maryland. The English settlers told each other that the Crown authorized them to grant and gift this land to other English newcomers. Settlers who brought more servants and more slaves would get more land in proportion to the number of humans that trailed them.

More servants and slaves? More land granted. As the colonial religion taught, “For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him.”

I learned about how quickly tobacco enmeshed itself with the colonial economy and the emerging racial hierarchy: Scharf’s History of Maryland from the earliest period to the present (1765-1812) traces the connection back to the mid 1600s and the nascent “negro code.” The crop became a currency used to trade for Black freedom or compensate society for Black “crimes” or White “permissiveness.”

“In addition to being employed for purchasing goods, the tobacco currency was also used to pay fines and taxes. For example, persons encouraging Negro meetings were to be fined 1000 pounds of tobacco; owners letting Negroes keep horses were fined 500 pounds tobacco; if a person wanted to become married, he had to go to the rector of his parish and pay the man so many pounds of tobacco; a man’s wealth was estimated in annual pounds of tobacco.

“Tobacco also affected the government as all laws were made more or less with reference to it: to protect it, and to maintain its value in price, so that many of the civil and some of the criminal processes, were affected by it.” (Emphasis added. Read “Economic Aspects of Tobacco during the Colonial Period 1612-1776” for more.)

If a 3-minute video is more your speed, check out the History Channel’s beatification of the colonial cash crop: “Tobacco is the leading edge of colonial commerce,” Wesleyan University’s Richard Slotkin tells us.

Two days before I left for North Carolina this year, a New York grand jury reviewed the death of Eric Garner and chose not to indict the officer in whose hands he died. I heard the news on Twitter. I didn’t have the energy to be angry and I couldn’t even muster up surprise. After the non-indictment in Missouri, I saw no reason to expect an indictment in New York.

But puzzle pieces were rearranging themselves in my subconscious mind, and it wasn’t until I walked around the Peninsula that they finally clicked in place.

Jon Stewart recently excoriated Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) for suggesting that Garner’s death was due to overzealous taxing. The segment was amusing, and the senator’s attempt to derail clumsy, but there is a story under the story. Both Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s last days included the sale and policing of tobacco as a legal drug. Today, as in the colonial 1600s, the trade of legal and illegal drugs “affects the government as all laws are made more or less with reference to it.”

The Western Hemisphere drug trade almost permanently undermines the stability of our southern neighbor Mexico: to simplify, demand and selective prosecution thrive on this side of the border, and supply and selective prosecution thrive on that side. The trade is entangled with other resources we desire, deem national interests, and generate criminalization and foreign policies to secure. The national desire for fuel is another major entanglement that not only interacts with military policy but also circles back to the production and illicit trade of drugs elsewhere around the world.

So the drug trade is a silent, deadly cast member in the modern political farce otherwise known as immigration reform: US non-immigration, immigration, and the matrix of natural and civil rights that most citizens expect but some never get—rights like due process.

(Sidebar for my US citizen readers: non-immigration involves entering a nation-state’s borders to visit, study, or do temporary work without the intent to permanently reside. Immigration involves entering a nation-state’s borders with the intent to make a long-term or permanent home [residency] or become a citizen.)

Migration has happened in this hemisphere for thousands and thousands of years without states to control it. But non-immigration and immigration are comparatively new and depend on the shifting definitions of the nation-state. The value of our lives also depends on the shifting definitions of the nation-state.

A year after becoming a resident, I’m still working out what it means to participate with my presence in the settling and displacement project that the Spanish and English began here in the 1500s and 1600s. But I’m also genetically, historically, and viscerally connected to that part of the Black diaspora that was ported against its will to the Americas to support the colonial drug trade.

After four hundred years of colonization here, certain kinds of lives lost—indigenous, Black, poor, queer—are still accounted disposable and can still be deemed acceptable trades as long as the overall logic of the system is undisturbed. As long as only authorized hands administer the manufacture, sale, and taxation of our favorite plants and resources on this continent or far, far from home, what are a few lives?

I’m not adjusted to that. One of my deepest worries: that I will adjust, that as I’ve adjusted in diet and speech over my last decade, I’ll adjust in philosophy too. A writer imagines the Pilgrims and the Borg disembarking in Massachusetts and co-intoning the futility of resistance.

And, looking into the woods of Roanoke or the dead-empty eastern Carolina horizon, I have no solid proof that they’re wrong except, perhaps, my own existence. Some of us do survive, and we call on Orion to witness us.

An egret sits on a wood pillar in the foreground, which is in shadow. In the background, a wide sky is awash in deep sunset blues and oranges. No sun is visible.
(c) Keisha McKenzie

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Transcript: Realism and Nonviolence

In May 1967, NBC reporter Sander Vanocur conducted a candid interview with Martin Luther King, Jr., about the 1963 March on Washington, the civil rights movement, and the impromptu “I have a dream” segment that became an iconic part of the 20th Century’s soundtrack. Today, King’s 1963 speech is remembered and replayed as a testament to optimism for the future. Each January, a minority of scholars reminds us that King’s legacy was much more complex than that saccharine dream.

But here is King in his own words, reflecting on the movement’s “superficial optimism” (via NBC). I’ve transcribed a short clip from the original 18-minute segment.

On Realism and Nonviolence

1967: Martin Luther King, Jr. is interviewed by Sander Vanocur.

Transcript

[clip from 1963 March on Washington “I have a dream” speech on August 28, 1963]
MLK, 1963: …Because I have a dream. [crowd applauds] That my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today! [crowd roars]

[with Sander Vanocur]
MLK, 1967: I must confess that, uh, that dream that I had that day has in many points turned into a nightmare. Now I’m not one to lose hope; I keep on hoping. I still have faith in the future. But I’ve had to analyze many things over the last few years and I would say over the last few months I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching and agonizing moments and I’ve come to see that, uh, that we have many more difficult days ahead and some of the old optimism was a little bit superficial. And now it must be tempered with a solid realism, and I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long, long way to go, and that we are involved in a war on Asian soil, which if not checked and stopped can poison the very soul of our nation.

I’m not going to say that all of our problems would be solved if the war in Vietnam was ended, but I do say that the war makes it infinitely more difficult to deal with these problems. When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, it loses its social perspective and programs of social uplift suffer. This is just a fact of history, so that we do face many more difficulties as a result of the war. It’s much more difficult to really arouse a conscience during a time of war.

There is something about a war like this that makes people insensitive. It dulls the conscience. It strengthens the forces of reaction and it brings into being bitterness, hatred, and violence.

I think that the biggest problem now is that we got our gains over the last 12 years at bargain rates, so to speak. It didn’t cost the nation anything. In fact it helped the economic side of the nation to integrate lunch counters and public accommodations. It didn’t cost the nation anything to get the vote to right established.

And now we are confronting issues that cannot be solved without costing the nation billions of dollars. Now I think this is where we are getting our greatest resistance. They may put it on many other things, but we can’t get rid of slums and poverty without it costing the nation something.

I feel that nonviolence is really the only way that we can follow because, uh, violence is just so self-defeating. A riot ends up creating many more problems for the Negro community than it solves. You can through violence burn down a building but you can’t establish justice. You can murder a murderer but you can’t murder murder through violence. You can murder a hater but you can’t murder hate. And what we’re trying to get rid of is hate and injustice and all of these other things that continue the long night of man’s inhumanity to man.

[cut back to the clip of the March on Washington “I have a dream” speech on August 28, 1963]
MLK, 1963: When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and White men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at Last [Yes!], free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” [crowd roars]

“I am a person who has never used violence himself. My present opinion is that people who have obtained the ballot should use it and solve their problems in that way. In the case of peoples who have not obtained the ballot, and who cannot control their states, I again find in my own mind a division of opinion, which is not logical, but purely a rough practical judgment. My own forefathers got their political freedom by violence; that is to say, they overthrew the British crown and made themselves a free Republic. Also by violence they put an end to the enslavement of the black race on this continent.” —Upton Sinclair, in an interview with Rene Fulop-Miller (March 24, 1923)

What do you think? Does nonviolence have limits? Who should determine when and who exercises it?