[Diary reposted from Oct. 21, 2008, because it is even more germane now that Proposition 8 has passed, and because of some misapprehension that this essay was purely about the civil rights movement of the 60’s. For "aboutness" please read the three concluding paragraphs, at least. For the photos, scroll down.]
It is no radical gesture for a Black person to order lunch, or to drink from a fountain, or to walk to school, or to travel to the capital city. This has been true for many years, perhaps for all of your life, dear reader (as it has been for most of mine).
This was not always so. However aware we might be of that past reality, of those circumstances and their changing, we are well past the flashpoints of two generations ago. Now our racial dialogue, when we as a nation are willing to have it, can be much more nuanced, sometimes even civil. When it is not, the historical echoes make themselves heard, and the memories rise up like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In this, my little conceit, some of us are Hamlet, some of us are spectators, and some of us (regardless of what role we play or played) are completely off-stage, forgotten, at least for the moment.
I begin this way, as you might suspect, because of what we saw in the course of this presidential contest. We witnessed attacks coded in the familiar subtext of racial prejudice, veiled as "legitimate" concerns about celebrity-hood, terrorism, religion, socialism, and what we were told, quite earnestly, were "real American" or "traditional small town" values. When these attacks registered with Senator Obama’s supporters, as they were meant to register with Senator McCain’s, protests by the Democrat and his surrogates and vocal partisans were countered by accusations of "playing the race card."
In one late incarnation of this tactic , Pat Buchanan, a far right wing partisan, diminished a prominent Republican's endorsement of Mr. Obama not because that prominent Republican’s last significant use of moral authority was as a lever that helped to bring us the carnage of innocents both American and Iraqi, but because that man (a former U.S. Secretary of State) is Black, and in Mr. Buchanan's estimation, the fact that Mr. Powell and Mr. Obama share the same Black skin made Mr. Powell’s support worth less. It bears at least passing mention that the key disqualifying factor in this argument is not sharing skin color, but the color of the skin. We know this because Pat Buchanan’s argument is not one that we have seen anyone produce to diminish the endorsement of a White politician by another White person.
But this is only one salvo. We saw ACORN and Ayers, and, as the attack machine worked its way up through the alphabet, it is probable that only an incontrovertibly public pledge kept mentions of Reverend Wright in the wings, barely restrained from joining the final push in the waning days of Senator McCain's campaign.
Those of us who were on tenterhooks, nauseated, and emotionally on edge can now feel some relief that the worst is over. I would add that it has been over for a long time. This point might surprise you if you are not looking at the long arc of how it became not only possible for a Black man to run under a major Party nomination for the Presidency of the United States, but to win it. In fact, most of this fight was already been fought and won befor Mr. Obama even announced his candidacy, and this intense moment is a coda centuries in the making. Because a Barack Obama win, however historic, is merely the punctuation mark (an exclamation point, to be sure), at the end of one part of America's long racial dialogue with itself. (Not the complete end, of course; we are a continuing experiment.)
Yes, I am referring to the recent civil rights movement. And yes, "recent." This country is officially 232 years old; none now remember its founding, but many remember the 1950s and 1960s. What I want to stress, in making the perhaps obvious point that we are at the end rather than at the beginning of a struggle, is not the leaders whose names we know so well, but the courage of the people of the time, who saw that everything was at stake, and took uncommon risks, both physical and emotional, to see their struggle through.
The fight was not political in a theoretical sense it was political in a physical sense, that is, it did not primarily play out in the abstract social space inhabited by policy, but in the real social space inhabited by people; inhabited in the minds, muscles, and viscera of those who walked, marched, sat, or simply stood where the entire power structure of society--the parallel world that acknowledged them in utilitarian terms, if at all--said they should not walk, march, sit, stand, or even exist.
Those lucky few who have never feared for their physical wellbeing, or for that of a parent, sibling, lover, child, friend, will find it exceedingly difficult to understand the magnitude of this risk, or to appreciate the courage with which it was undertaken. An entire nation seemed to be against a few—violently against these few. This bare fact (and not race, class, or religion) is what it truly means to be a minority. Those who have experienced deliberate exclusion by and from a group—any group--have felt some of what it means to be a minority. Some have felt this exclusion over centuries, marked (by skin, gender, religion, etc.) and separated, along with their loved ones and everyone like them, from the majority.
I began by mentioning historical echoes. One such occurred a few days ago, when the Democratic nominee for president received a mixed reaction in a diner in North Carolina. Younger people might not recognize the historical parallel here, but for those of us who are aware, the incident is troubling, if not all that surprising. Few of us are naïve enough to believe that racism has been eradicated, and perhaps racism was not the major reason for the way that some diners reacted to Mr. Obama. However, it is clear that to many Americans, Senator Obama is a Black man first. It is disturbing to consider what they might think that he is second. And yet, one thing is clear: the implications of being Black in our time are not the same as the implications of being Black were fifty years ago.
This understatement might be remarkably obvious, but it is also remarkable progress. Remarkable because the change came about not by trying to evade the Black identity, but by embracing and celebrating it. Those who chose this route had to create a tunnel through the mountainous bramble of racial prejudice with their bare skin. Rather than try to circumvent the barrier they pushed their bodies against it, time and again, day after day, as one might scrub a piece of produce through a grater. Phrases familiar to us today, from "Black Power" to "Black is Beautiful," to "It's a Black Thang," must be appreciated in the (still developing) context of how these expressions were earned. This, of course, is not a complete explanation (if there can be any) of how we got here from there. Still, it is consequential to be aware that this was a choice, a strategic choice, and not the safe one. It was a choice reflected throughout Black society, but especially in the political and artistic ethos of what was becoming a contribution from the Black sub-culture into the "normative" (read: mostly White) society.
Thankfully, the art has survived. One such document from one such artist is the poem "Coal" by Audre Lorde, a Black (Caribbean-American) lesbian poet, who died of breast cancer on November 17, 1992. The poem that I mention begins:
"I
is the total Black being spoken..."
Let us consider this poem in the context of my preceding remarks:
Because of the immense potential for harm (potential that all too often became realized), the valor of the simple gestures of ordinary people illuminates our national history, and will do so for as long as we are interested in considering it, and in ruminating on what constitutes our national character. And when we do, it would be well to understand that this fight, which began as Black people fighting for their rights, becomes magnified by the perspective of history, whose results permit us to see it as an even larger struggle.
It was America fighting to be America, fighting to become America. It was a fight for human rights, fought (and won) battle by battle, and one that made all of us, their heirs, whatever our color, more human. This point might bear some stressing: The significance of the civil rights struggle was not, in the end, Black people getting their legal rights; it was that the ordinary citizens who engaged in it made it possible for all of us who came after to be more decent, humane, and idealistic. We do not often think in this way of what we know as the "civil rights movement," (not even when the movement is—rightfully—considered a part of similar struggles by other groups seeking equality). But we should think of it this way, and with gratitude. We might also add that it was a fight between proponents of separation and proponents of integration—more starkly stated, between division and unity. Let us take a moment to permit the latest comments of "Real America" to resonate against this point.
The victories gained over the past fifty-plus years have paradoxical implications for our freedom as individual citizens: We are now free, free to act or to do nothing. Because as significant as this moment might be, the stakes are objectively much lower, which means that it is much easier for us to choose to participate or to be spectators. Why risk, when nothing is lost by merely looking on?
But we should at least understand and remember where that freedom to not participate came from, and how it was won. Republicans will tell us that our freedom was won overseas, against evil foreign powers, with guns, war materiel, and superior American fortitude and courage. On these last two factors we can agree. Fortitude and courage, not of soldiers, but of common citizens is what it took to change history and to give us freedom. Nor was the struggle overseas, against foreign enemies; it was a domestic, internecine conflict. It was fought and won by ordinary people; when America decided to be America, according to its founding principles and stated ideals, despite a history and social structure that favored continuing the stability of discrimination and injustice.
And lest some readers be tempted to think that this diary is purely a call to strenuously celebrate and support Barack Obama’s presidency, or to help influence the national policies that he might institute, then I must clarify, if I haven’t already, that this piece is not simply about that. There were many elections and issues on our ballots this November, and it might especially be recalled that I mentioned that Lorde was a lesbian poet. This was no offhand remark. The state of California has just passed a law that will remove human rights from some people, but not from others, simply based on whom they love. For an additional perspective of what this diary has been about, one might reread this essay, and review those photos, in that light.
I mention this second vantage point not because it exhausts what I mean to communicate but because it does not. My main point is broader (and, I hope, more meaningful). Know this: We are here because others were there. We must weigh this last point carefully when considering a course of action for ourselves as individual citizens, because this notion expresses two corollaries: 1) We are not alone, neither historically, nor in our own present moment; to choose to act is to pick up the thread placed before us by others who could only hope to see its end.2) what diminishes one group diminishes us all. And now, poised at a great historical moment, what is true for every generation is true for us as well: This is our time, this is our moment, to do with as we will.
May the near future see us write diaries about similar endgames to parallel struggles of our fellow Americans. And may there be peace when they are written.
Here is the entirety of Ms. Lorde's poem, without the filter of my images. After all, the poem is not specifically about civil rights. It is about love, and, as I will repeat, Ms. Lorde was a lesbian. Here is Ms. Lorde with the last word:
Coal
I
is the total black, being spoken
from the earth's inside.
There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a word, coloured
by who pays what for speaking.
Some words are open like a diamond
on glass windows
singing out within the passing crash of sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
in a perforated book--buy and sign and tear apart--
and come whatever wills all chances
the stub remains
an ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Others know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips
like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
bedevil me.
Love is a word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am Black because I come from the earth's inside
now take my word for jewel in the open light.