I love these sorts of articles, where a writer uses a book you haven’t read in a few years to explain the world.
Melville feverishly scribbled a diagnosis, prognosis and prescription for the human condition. We are all Ishmael the ingénue and Starbuck the pragmatist and Ahab the maniac, stuck on a ship driven by winds we cannot predict, helmed by a mind not fully comprehensible, whose compulsions we don’t control. The world is an elusive whale; we might choose coexistence or destruction. And though we do not decide the outcome, the hands on those oars are ours; each stroke invites consequences. And lest we overlook the obvious: The men went equipped to do harm in their quest for — oil. If we are all Ishmael and Starbuck and Ahab, caught in our collective addiction, the whales exemplify a counterculture, a way of living weightlessly, of not draining the world that floats them.
“But for all of that life-shaping power, race is a mirage, which doesn’t lessen its force. We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion. Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.”
“The activism of K-pop fans this week reminded me how important it is to highlight avenues of protest that don’t exclude the immunocompromised or otherwise high-risk people (for whom exposure to the coronavirus during a march or rally might be deadly), or anyone in a financially precarious situation (for whom cash donations to bail funds and other causes might feel impossible). Fan groups—especially when their members are young or female—are often ignored or scorned, which means that there’s also a spiritual kinship to K-pop stans’ support of Black Lives Matter. Their action was a moving and effective gesture of solidarity in a moment that demands exactly that.”
“…Rami said to the audience that all walls were destined to fall, no matter what. He was not so naive, though, to believe that more would not be built. It was a world of walls. Still, it was his job to insert a crack in the one most visible to him.”
I went out for a walk this morning and it was clear that late last night there was a giant storm.
Branches are down, leaves are everywhere, and some of the big trees on the university campus fell.
This happened. It won’t be there tomorrow. But it happened.
This reminds me of the situation we’re in right now as white Americans. You can go to bed, with your windows closed or maybe your air conditioner on, and you can sleep right through it.
Then you wake up in the morning. And maybe you see the branches down. Maybe you see the leaves. Maybe you see the evidence of what’s occurred.
But you can also walk past it and say to yourself, something happened, but it had nothing to do with me. Nothing to worry about.
What white America needs to wake up to is the way in which we have built a world where we can do that, where we can go back inside, maybe shaking our heads, or thinking that might be tough to deal with. We can say, hey, let me go back to my normal life. Let me close my eyes to the changes that are happening out there.
I don’t even have to work that hard to pretend they have nothing to do with me.
I think this is some of my work as a teacher. To open eyes, to gently bring awareness, to make sure that the students see those who are living through that storm. To see their peers who can’t escape from that storm, the black students, the students of color, whose parents, grandparents, great grandparents, who have been living this storm every day.
Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder, Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never Remember to have heard: man’s nature cannot carry The affliction nor the fear. (King Lear, Act 3, Scene 2)
And I need to make it possible for the kids who are living the storm to say this f—-g sucks. Period. And I need to make it so that no child can ignore it, or pretend it’s not happening, or think that it’s just a minor inconvenience. Or claim that words or deeds or social media posts don’t matter.
“This country manufactures only one product powerful enough to interrupt the greatest health and economic crisis it’s probably ever faced. We make racism, the American virus and the underlying condition of black woe. And the rage against it is strong enough to compel people to risk catching one disease in order to combat the other — in scores and scores of American cities, in cities around the world. They’re a tandem now, the pandemic bold-underlining-italicizing what’s endemic to us. The underfunded hospitals, appalling factory conditions and unequal education were readily evident last year, before Covid-19. Now, the inadequacies and inequalities expedite death and compound estrangement. The low-wage workers have been deemed essential yet remain paid inessentially. The numbers of black, Latino and Indigenous people infected, deceased and unemployed are out of whack with their share of the population. And the president has yet to offer his condolences, in earnest.”
The Kerner Commission (1968)
Here’s a .pdf of the report. From the introduction, which I would like to read blind with my students in the fall and have them guess at the origins of the document and try and locate it in time.
“This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white–separate and unequal.”
“This alternative will require a commitment to national action–compassionate, massive and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will.”
“What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget–is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
“It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens-urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.”
So the question that these two men, who are circling each other in the parking lot, are really arguing about, ultimately, is how do you get enough white Americans to care? What strikes me to the core in this video is that both of these men are right, and both of them are wrong. The truth is that we know Americans pay attention to violence. Had there been no fires, had there been no looting, no physical confrontations with the police, these stories of police protests right now would have garnered maybe a few minutes on the local news cycle, but we wouldn’t see the wall-to-wall coverage that we’re seeing every day.
The other truth is that, the truth that the 31-year-old is grappling with. It’s that that quote-unquote violence is going to be used as an excuse not to sympathize with black struggle. That the communities who are already suffering in the end are going to suffer more when this is all over with.
I was also thinking about David Remnick’s piece in the New Yorker, particularly the way he ends the piece by citing a Victor Hugo quote that Dr. King referenced in 1967:
“If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
