[Peace-discuss] Race often is the language class speaks

[C. G. Estabrook]

[AWARE's consideration of how to be an anti-racist movement
should include the view outlined by Michael Eric Dyson in the
following address, which was boadcast on Democracy Now this
morning.  His latest book is titled "Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or
Has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind?" --CGE]


White supremacy is the conscious or unconscious belief or the
investment in the inherent superiority of some, while others
are believed to be innately inferior. And it doesn't demand
the individual participation of the singular bigot. It is a
machine operating in perpetuity, because it doesn't demand
that somebody be in place driving. That's the vicious
ingenuity of white supremacy. It has become institutional.

      And when white supremacy becomes institutional, it
begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of
it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look
like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King,
Jr. understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin
really understood this. And so, so much of my life has been
trying to lay bear the presuppositions of white supremacy,
because they have damaged the very people who would allegedly
and ostensibly benefit from some of that madness.

      Martin Luther King, Jr., once in the jail said to his
jailer, “You are white and poor. You will never benefit from
Jim Crow. You will never be able, except psychologically, to
derive benefit from your white skin.” What we now know as
white skin privilege, what Dubois in 1935 in his magisterial
tome, Black Reconstruction, called the psychic wages of
whiteness. King said, “You will never be able to derive
benefit as a result of that. You are more like me than you are
like them.”

      And so when we think about warring against white
supremacy in American society, it is so seductive to believe
and invest in the mythology of superiority, especially among
white ethic brothers and sisters, who having been closed out
of so much in American society, hold fast to that lie, hold
fast to that myth, hold fast to that illusion, because they
have been so disenfranchised otherwise that they have to pump
up the mythology of their inherent superiority.

      I’ve tried to fight against that, but I’ve also tried to
fight against the occupied minds of people of color who pay
uncritical deference to dominant culture, who, without
understanding, they have internalized the vicious mythologies
by which others have been made to live. James Baldwin, in
reflecting on his own father, said in that poignant phrase he
“believed the lie.” And so many of us have believed the lies.

      And I have tried to spend some of my career, some of my
vocation, some of my time as a professor and preacher and
social activist and paid pest, trying to get at some of these
I ideologies that challenge the fundamental dignity of our
common humanity. But it’s also true that I have tried, as Dean
Richards has so graciously said, I've tried to also ask the
question within the community from which I emerge, because if
we take the notion from our Quaker brothers and sisters
speaking truth to power, then it can't just be power outside
the community. It's got to be power within that community.

      So, for me when I wrote a book about Bill Cosby, it’s
not that I am trying to playa-hate on a great iconic figure,
the American patriarch, but don't forget he emerged
simultaneously with Ronald Reagan in the early '80s, when the
Reagan junta and the Reaganomics, the Reagan regime came forth
in 1980, and Cosby emerged in the shadow of Reagan, Reagan as
the great grandfather, Cosby as the great patriarchal father.
It was an achievement of sorts, because for the first time the
imagination of the seminal father figure rested in black
pigment. That was an achievement, to be sure. And yet, at the
same time the outlines of that patriarchy have been viciously
revealed to be contradictory at their heart, because this
great father of African American and, indeed, American
society, laid waste to the most vulnerable people in our culture.

      And so, I chose to speak back to him to try to leverage
whatever fame, authority, visibility, teaspoon of influence
that I might be able to muster and to say, “Those people who
will never be able to talk back to you – Shaniqua and Taliqua
and Mohammed and Shanene – those people who will never have a
voice, those people who will never be able to stand up on
their own two feet and to speak back to you, because the
global media landscape is so deep and your bully pulpit is so
wide, it stretches across the world, how can they justly speak
back to you?”

      And so, my work was just a small effort to express an
outrage and an edifying resentment of the premise by which Mr.
Cosby or upon which Mr. Crosby rested. That is to say, that
poor black folk have let down black communities and the Civil
Rights Movement, more broadly. Well, my Bible tells me to whom
much has been given, much is required. And that means you
don't start with the folk at the bottom, you got to start with
the folk at the top. And whether you agreed with him or not,
when you saw Mr. Harry Belafonte on Larry King's show, he was
picking on somebody his own size when he went after Colin
Powell, when he said that Colin Powell was a lapdog for the
empire, when he said that Colin Powell was nothing more than a
house Negro on a white plantation whose inability to tell the
truth made him in league with the master. That's picking on
somebody your own size.

      And then the difficult assignment of trying to parse in
public the shades and nuances of racial discourse even among
enlightened liberals who reproduce the pathology of elite
racism. What dat mean? I’m saying that when Ms. Goodman so
brilliantly called attention to how the Fourth Estate, as
sister [inaudible] spoke about it, holding the collective feet
of the media to the fire, what I’m saying is that often it is
not the bodies of those who are minority that cause the minds
of those who are blessed to move into action. The difficult
truth is that we live by narcissism, and when it happens to
us, we better understand it.

      But by the same token it does suggest that for so many
years, those who have been dying before our eyes, those whose
lives have been poured out measure by measure, and it never
affected us because it didn't happen to us, we never
understood until the plight became personal. And I am not
suggesting by any measure that most of us are not moved by
having personal experience catapult us into politics. That's
the beautiful story of Sister Sheehan, is that because of her
particular loss she began to understand the broader implications.

      But travel with me now to imagine that so many other
mothers have lost their sons without so much of a peep by a
dominant media that refuses to acknowledge the nature of the
loss. Come with me as we tour the inner city and the barrio
and the Native indigenous people's reservation. Come with me
through the post-industrial urban collapse of mothers who have
long since surrendered the ability to exercise and leverage
authority over the lives of their children, because the state
has been in cahoots with an underground economy, expanding the
possibility of a drug economy, while the above-ground economy
takes the jobs away from their men and their mothers and their
sisters. The state has conspired to do dastardly deeds and to
do ultimate damage to vulnerable black and brown and yellow
and red people, without so much as a peep from a media that
has been standing there agog, arms akimbo, wondering about the
penetrating madness that these people must inevitably experience.

      If you ain't a white girl and you disappear, you ain't
got much luck. If you a black mama -- a black mama might not
even had the possibility of being a martyr and a hero like Ms.
Sheehan, because they might have been disallowed to even get
near the Bush compound and ranch, because they would be
suspicious already. Thank God that Cindy Sheehan went
undercover. Thank God she looked just like a feckless,
harmless white woman who just was going to the ranch. Who knew
that she had a behemoth inside of her that was going to
challenge the dominant society? But there are so many others
who have the same impulse who will never be acknowledged,
because they can't even get that far.

      And so my own truth telling, as far as I’m able to
muster up the courage to say what needs to be said, and that
thing is on a continuum because all of us are made cowards by
the realization that ultimately we have never said everything
we’re supposed to say. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I have said
so poorly what I have seen so clearly.” And that's the truth.

      We see it when we see the vicious forms of assault upon
our women. The reason I wrote a book, Why I Love Black Women,
I was just tired of these rappers talking about women in nasty
and vicious ways. But they ain’t started it. I knew that. I
knew Snoop Dog didn't start misogyny. I knew that Tupac Shakur
didn’t start sexism, and God knows that Dr. Dre didn't start
patriarchy. Yet they extended it in vicious form within their
own communities. They made vulnerable people more vulnerable.
But at the same time, we know that traditions of misogyny and
sexism and patriarchy are deep and are profound and as
American as apple pie.

      And so we have to tell the truth, on the one hand,
balancing our attempt to hold these young people accountable,
while acknowledging the degree to which these dominant
institutions in America have done the same funky file
nefarious thing from the get-go. And so, for me, it means
telling that truth.

      That's why I’m with brother Damu in support of my man
Kanye West. I ain't saying he's a gold digger. But George Bush
don't f-- fool with no broke people. That's what Kanye was
trying to say. Kanye said that “George Bush doesn't care about
black people.” He wasn't talking about George Bush, the
individual. He wasn't speaking about George Bush, the private
citizen. He’s speaking about George Bush, the face of the
government, George Bush, the face of democracy. He's speaking
about George Bush as the symbolic head of a nation that
refuses to acknowledge the humanity of black people.

      And why is that so controversial in a nation that has
lynched and looted and rioted and castrated, looting in the
face of white riots, when lynchings were attended by families
in their Sunday best to see the sexual organs of black men
stoked by the sexual jealousy that continues to roil beneath
the collective unconscious of the American psyche? How can we
be surprised by the statement of a young person that America
doesn't care, in the form of George Bush, about black people,
when such rituals have never been consciously not only
apologized for, but engage? And then beyond that, in a society
that tells you through the poison of the media that you are
not worth as much, because your face will not be on
television, you will not be heard as much on the radio, you
will not appear in ads that celebrate the inherent beauty of
American society, is it any wonder that Kanye West is steeled
and condensed into an acceptable and understandable, saying
what so many millions of others have already felt and with
greater analytical precision got down to?

      And so now, we going to be mad, we talk about these
rappers, talk about broads and behinds and boozing and bosoms.
My God, we're sick and tired of this bling-bling culture. And
yet, when one of them steps up, we are so cowardly that we
can't even stand behind them. Our politicians start to making
excuses, and they begin to have their statements die the death
of a thousand qualifications. ‘Well, it's not so much that --
well, it's not –’ Just tell the truth! Just tell the truth!
You’re worried about whether you can get re-elected. Why don't
you stand up to begin with? Why don't you come in with an
understanding that maybe you gonna be a one-term brother or a
one-term sister, because you are put there to represent the
people. It said, “We, the people,” not “We, the Supreme
Court,” not “We, the Congress.” It said, “We, the people!”

      And those profound words that were articulated by a mass
of flawed but imaginative framers suggest to us that you and I
are part of a democratic experiment that is made sharper and
more luminous and incredibly lucid by the difficult work of
struggle by the ordinary folk who never get the credit. And as
I end and take my seat, that's why it’s so important to link
all this stuff going on. This war in Iraq has been terrible
before it started. We've lost 2,000 lives. Iraqis have lost
over 100,000.

      We speak about these babies that these poor black women
have. Where are they? They're on the front line. We talk about
a society where young people are throwaway, poor white people,
poor Latino people, poor African American people. These are
the people who bear the brunt of the responsibility of waging
war by people who will never step on that ground, people who
send them, but who will never go. And so there's a
relationship. Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about it. Paul
Robeson talked about it. Ella Baker understood it. JoAnn
Robinson imagined the day when we understood how fundamentally
they were united.

      And what I beg all of my constituencies and what I beg
as a part of a multiple kinship group, as the anthropologists
call it, I beg every community to understand we in the same
boat. You might be in the anti-war movement and speaking out
tomorrow, but don't forget the folk in Katrina. That's the
beauty of what Sister Goodman was talking about and Brother
Damu was talking about, what Sister Cindy Sheehan understands.
It ain't just there. It's not when those bodies die, and God
bless them, it’s not simply when white bodies perish and white
girls disappear, it’s also about the unheralded casualties of
people who are yet on earth, and yet the life blood has been
sucked by the vulture of American empire.

      And these people will never be spoken for, because they
are the walking wounded and the living dead. And so I beg of
you that as -- that those of us who are able to speak on
behalf of the disenfranchised understand we in the same boat.
The anti-war movement has been generated by this fearless
woman who has moved forward in the name of a sense of outrage
at the libel and the mis-telling of truth that has been put
forth by this political ventriloquist whose strings are being
pulled by corporate capitalism to make him say what he's saying.

      And at the same time, don't miss how it’s operating down
in Halliburton and down in New Orleans and Mississippi and in
Alabama. These black people, you see -- people say, ‘Well,
it’s not about race, it’s about class.’ What you talking
about? Race often is the language class speaks. Race makes
class hurt more. See, even poor white brothers and sisters are
not necessarily going to school in concentrated effects of
poverty. Even some white brothers and sisters are able to
escape their poverty, making more money than some black people
who have gone to college. But the reality is, poor white folk
got more in common with poor black folk and poor brown folk
and poor yellow folk than they got in common with the white
overseers and the black over-rulers and the Latino sellouts
who have abdicated their responsibility to represent the people.

      And so, as I end, I beg you, please gird up your loins
and tell the truth where you are. You see in Palestine, and as
the Palestinians were struggling for self-determination with
their Israeli brothers and sisters, they both came to a common
declaration. They said we want the quiet miracle of a normal
life. That's what I want for so many millions of people both
here in the country and around the globe. There's so many
people who suffer, who don't have our education. They don't
have our bank accounts. They don't have our sense of leisure
and luxury. And if you and I can't see beyond our own myopic,
narcissistic self-preoccupation to help somebody else, to open
up our minds, so we can open up our hearts, so we can open up
our lives, and God knows our pocketbooks.

      But it is more than the charity. People said in the
Katrina, ‘Well, you see,’ and some of the rightwing
conservatives said, ‘Well, the most people who were helping
there were white folks trying to lift those helicopter things
down to help those folk.’ Well, charity ain’t justice. Charity
is beautiful, but you ain't got to be charitable to me if I
already got justice. If I already got a sense of
participation, you ain't got to be charitable to me. Just
treat me right every day.

      And as I end, that's why you and I are on the same ship.
In fact, we travel in the same plane. You might be in first
class eating filet mignon; I’m eating peanuts back in row 55.
We're on the same boat. Don't cut a hole in the boat to suck
water out, to sink the Titanic. And if you're on the plane,
being in first class ain't going to stop you from going down
with the rest of us. When there is turbulence, there is
turbulence everywhere. Everybody be shaking. And if that plane
goes down, you might die first in first class. Yes, some of us
are in first class, but the plane is in trouble! What will you
do to speak to the pilot, to tell the pilot to tell the
control center that we've got to change directions unless the
turbulence leads us to our own death! That's the truth we've
got to tell. That's the courage we've got to muster, and
that's the beauty of soul we must reveal to one another in the
quietness of our own individual lives. Thank you so very much.

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