9:00am | Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. [… I]n reason [they are] much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. […] To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.
-Thomas Jefferson, from Notes on the State of Virginia (1784)
I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history. [Racism will end when we] stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m going to ask that you stop calling me a black man.
-Morgan Freeman, from a 60 Minutes interview (2005)
When speaking to a group of Long Beach Rotarians yesterday, the first day of Black History Month, Terrence Roberts, once upon a time a member of the “Little Rock Nine,” urged us to be truly honest when talking about racism.
Then later, according to the Press-Telegram, when asked “to gauge progress in civil rights since then on a scale of 1 to 10, he said he felt limited not being able to use negative numbers.”
Undoubtedly Roberts was being jocoserious in order to make a point about our not being self-satisfied with where we’re at, because in terms of institutional racism our country today bears little resemblance to the United States that existed prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Really, unless you’re a member of the GLBT community, you’re pretty well protected from overt institutional discrimination.
Covert discrimination — which often hides in plain sight — is another matter. It’s what led the California State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to give an “unconditional endorsement” to 2010’s Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana statewide. “We have empirical proof that the application of the marijuana laws has been unfairly applied to our young people of color,” said President Alice Huffman. “Justice is the quality of being just and fair[,] and these laws have been neither just nor fair.”
If “people of color” have yet to attain fairness in American society — which seems pretty clearly the case — why would someone like Morgan Freeman call Black History Month “ridiculous” and abjure it entirely?
It’s always seemed to me that he has a point, while missing another. The point he seems to miss is that black history in the United States, however much it is an inextricable narrative thread in our national story, is a separate history because the white power structure made it so. American colonialists abducted and enslaved Africans, a state of affairs that held until the close of the Civil War — which merely began a new chapter in that segregational story, a story we are still writing today in the fine print and around the margins.
But the point Freeman gets is that segregation comes in many forms, and distinguishing one “people” from another — or one struggle for fairness and equality from another — is the starting point of all oppression; it sets the stage for racism, sexism, homophobia.
In 1991 I attended an Act Up protest rally against then-Governor Pete Wilson for his veto of AB101, a proposed law that would have prevented institutional workplace discrimination against homosexuals. I was new to political activism, so, despite being outraged by Wilson’s action, I did not participate in the march, instead remaining on the sidewalk as a quiet supporter. One of the few, as seemingly every spectator had come to jeer the marchers.
I was directly behind a group of black men who were jeering more loudly than most, when one of the marchers impassionedly approached them. “Our struggle is the same,” he said. “Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in equality for all.” “Martin Luther King didn’t use no K-Y Jelly!” one of the group shot back.
Our struggle and not yours; our history and not yours. Us/them dichotomies are perfectly fine for Super Bowl combatants, but it’s worth being vigilantly circumspect when we apply them within day-to-day society. We’re probably best off avoiding them entirely where we can, because the more we think of ourselves as one people, the less room there is for inequity.
And how we think of ourselves is the whole ballgame. How do we change the way we think of ourselves? Through honest conversation and other free exchanges of ideas. There is simply no other way. Consider that at one time you were ignorant of every single word you now comprehend. The same goes for beliefs, even ones seemingly so obvious that we imagine any thinking person couldn’t help but understand.
Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts at the beginning of this essay seem to prove this point rather handily. Jefferson was neither stupid nor evil; he was simply inculcated with the concept that “blacks” and “whites” are different peoples. And one thing we know from psychology and sociology right down to prestidigitation: people tend to see what they’re looking for.
I don’t feel strongly one way or the other about Black History Month. But however much it gets us to do what Mr. Roberts hopes we’ll do, hey, I’m all for that.
There are numerous ways to frame the conversation, though, and the old ways are not always the best. But whatever form the discussion takes, whenever we look back, we should do so with an eye toward the future, utilizing our examinations of what has separated us toward the goal of bringing us ever more together. Because we are one people (if we want it), and an injury to one is an injury to all — past, present, and future.