What I've realized since is that it's a very painful process but it is not destructive. It's the road to liberation. And what really happened in the 60's was that this country took just the first step toward admitting that it had been wrong on race.
And creativity burst out in all directions
This song changed my life. It woke me up, let me know that there was something deeper to an issue that for the longest time I had believed had been resolved. It changed my outlook, and in a lot of ways made me a better person if for no other reason because it introduced me to one of the most awe-inspiring women in history -- Anne Braden. She organized a delegation of white women to protest the execution of Willie McGee, a black man accused of raping a white woman named Willette Hawkins.
Her entire life, she was dedicated to the advancement of civil rights. She bought a home for the Wade family and became a pariah in her community. She bravely faced accusations of sedition, saw her husband jailed, and yet through it all never once waivered in her stance that black people were simply people who deserved to live their lives just as white people do -- happy and free.
This song came into my life in at a weird time. I had been going through a political awakening for quite some time, but was still blind on racial issues. This song, dailykos, and the inspiration that is Anne Braden led me down a path where I became more aware of not only interpersonal racism, but systematic racism as well. I was introduced to the concept of white privilege, and after a long time of sorting it out in my own head, I finally realized what everyone was talking about.
It took tons of time, a concerted effort to counter all of the hegemonic bullshit in my head, a college education, and constant reminders of my own privilege to bring me to this point in my life. Don't get me wrong, I am by far not perfect, and in a lot of ways I still live in my lily-white Oregonian world, but I have come a long way since I first heard this song.
In the introduction to the song by Flobots, Mrs. Braden sums the situation that black people have lived with since the end of slavery -- the concept of the two Americas.
If one really listens to the way the United States defines itself, you would be lead to think that this is one of the most fair and equitable countries on earth. All of us are free to roam, free to think and assemble and enact political change without picking up rocks or Molotov cocktails or even guns. If we are unhappy, there are numerous routes through which we can express our displeasure. This is the United States taught in school. We are the freest, nicest place to live in the world. Our police forces are swift, our justice system is deliberate and fair, our laws are equitable. In theory, everyone is protected, everyone plays by the rules, and everyone wins. Some win a little more than others, but in the end, everyone wins.
But there is a United States that goes beneath the glowing praise we shower on ourselves every time we talk about this country. The shinning city on the hill looks good from the outside, but once one traverses into the darkest places of the brightest city of the world one sees the truth. That everything that we were told about the history of this great nation, everything that we knew, everything that we learned out of those dreadful "social studies" classes was whitewashed to the point of being meaningless.
Some of us grew up with an innate understanding of the two Americas. I would argue that as a person of color that you HAVE to be aware of the second, darker America to survive this country. Mothers telling their children that they have to watch out for the cops, the ones that are supposed to protect and serve. An individual who is locked up for years for a non-violent drug offense. A man convicted of a trumped up charge he didn't commit locked away for years. An unarmed black teenager lies dead and bleeding on a street, uncovered for hours, while their families stand by in horror as the cops do absolutely nothing to investigate themselves for the shooting. This is only one taste, one look into the real America.
One can quantify it with statistics, one can look at charts and graphs showing income slowly going down for millions of Americans, one can look at a graph of incarceration rates. But to know it, one must live it.
Perhaps that is why the image of the two America's really resonated with me. I will never know what it is like to be black in America, but I do know what its like to be poor and discriminated against in America. I can link parts of my past to what I see happening around me. I have a mooring, a grounding in this type of sociological analysis because I have lived it.
It is obvious to me that many of my white peers have not lived through anything like what they are seeing in Ferguson. That is why what is happening is so important. Because, for the second time in our history, we are realizing that we are wrong about race. And creativity is beginning to spill forth in all directions. White people who have no frame of reference for what its like to be a person of color, or poor, gets to see the other america right there in front of their face. We are on the verge of another awakening, another civil rights movement. A continuation of the work of MLK, Malcolm X, Anne Braden, John Lewis. Ferguson is an important moment in our history, because for the first time in 40 years, police violence is once again getting out of hand against groups of unarmed, innocent people who happen to be black. They are being battered mercilessly by an over armed, over bloated police force for simply wanting accountability.
The wave is rising. The air is rife with the feeling of change. All we have to do is wake up. Activate. Understand our surroundings, and act. We can change things. We can make this world great just like our intellectual forebears wrote about (and even some of them were completely hypocritical, their actions rarely mirrored the flowery prose about freedom and liberty with which they wrote). We just have to realize that there is power in our numbers, strength in our solidarity with the people of Ferguson, and hope that we can reverse this trend once and for all. We just have to remember people like Anne Braden, whose ultimate act of humanity showed the world that white southern women weren't helpless, they were powerful.
Mike Brown may have been killed senselessly and needlessly, but we can transform that senseless death into a rallying cry to finally change this racial system we inherited from the racists who unfortunately built the 20th century. That is the best way to always remember the person Mike Brown was. To change things. My fellow white people, you have the capacity to change this. We just need to wake up.