In her blog, The Notion, Melissa Harris-Lacewell commented on post-health care reform bill hate speech that hit a crescendo in the past week.
I really appreciated Harris-Lacewell's
view in this piece, and her very "civil" questioning of views expressed
by two commentators that I have be-fanned -- Keith Olbermann and Rachel
Maddow -- as they "drew parallels between the health care battle and the
civil rights movement." She notes that crafting such a metaphor is seductive, especially since Representative John Lewis played a key role in both.
In March of 1965, as a young civil rights worker hoping to secure voting rights for black Americans, Lewis was brutally beaten when he led a peaceful protest march across a bridge in Alabama.
Last weekend, in another act of nonviolent resistance, Lewis walked through a storm of hate speech and spittle on his way to work for national health care reform.
In the interviews of Lewis that followed this scene at the Capitol, he kept to the high road of civility. I never heard him say anything hateful back to those who had disrespected him.
In her article, Harris-Lacewell notes that despite the hateful behavior directed toward him, Representative Lewis said that he harbored no ill will against those people and insisted that we must learn to live peacefully and respectfully together. "It was the kind of response," says Harris-Lacewell, "that makes Lewis a hero to many."
She goes on then to make this point:
But there is a very important difference between Bloody Sunday of 1965 and Health Care Reform Sunday of 2010. In 1965 Lewis was a disenfranchised protester fighting to be recognized as a full citizen. When he was beaten by the police, he was being attacked by the state. In 2010 Lewis is a long time, elected representative. When he is attacked by protesters, he is himself an agent of the state. This difference is critically important; not because it changes the fact that racism is present in both moments, but because it radically alters the way we should understand the meaning of power, protest and race.
The power of this and other Harris-Lacewell articles for me is her weaving of history with current politics and culture in a way that I was too young and too white to "get" back in the fifties and sixties. I am beginning to see how this piece of my own history has left me with a foundation that, despite being privileged, is nonetheless an impoverished space from which to launch engaged citizenship in the 21st century.
On the same day I found this article, I happened to see an ad -- I think it was for Frosted Mini-Wheats -- in which a black child is being quizzed by a little mini-wheat character on points of history. What is the first question to the little boy about? Christopher Columbus. The ad proceeds to make use of a familiar grade-school doggerel, "In fourteen-hundred-ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."
This triggered an association not only to grade school, but to an anti-racism workshop I attended. Using the power of educational systems as an example, a facilitator offered up a portion of the 1492 chant to introduce a discussion of structural racism, i.e. that systemic power of the "state" that protects white privilege and maintains a legitimized state of oppression against people of color. And this association brought me back to the question posed by Harris-Lacewell with her article.
Harris-Lacewell continues from the paragraph excerpted above with a discussion on the notion of "the state:"
The
state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence,
force and coercion. If an individual travels to another country and kills its
citizens, we call it terrorism. If the state does it, we call it war. If a man
kills his neighbor it is murder; if the state does it is the death penalty. If
an individual takes his neighbor's money, it is theft; if the state does it, it
is taxation.
When we challenge the state as the only legitimate owner of violent, forceful and coercive tactics, says Harris-Lacewell, we confront it "at its core." This was the situation that led southern states to challenge the legitimacy of a central state's government, and to secede on the basis of a "state's rights" claim. When these states lost the Civil War, the authority of a central state was again legitimized.
What followed historically was an era of attempted reconstruction. I don't remember hearing much about this period in school, other than its being named, dated and quickly passed by. Which is kind of what happened. Harris-Lacewell writes that, for ten years after the war, black Americans had a chance to experiment with full citizenship and a share of political power:
During this decade black men voted, held office and organized as laborers and farmers. It was a fragile political equality made possible only by the determined and powerful presence of the federal government. Then in 1877 the federal government abdicated its responsibilities to new black citizens and withdrew from the South. When it did so it allowed local governments and racial terrorist organizations like the KKK to have the monopoly on violence, force and coercion in the South for nearly 100 years.
As Harris-Lacewell points out, this general challenge-restore scenario was re-played when the Civil Rights Movement organized against abuse of state power enacted through violent police tactics in the South, and the federal government intervened in support of civil rights. She suggests we're seeing it again -- a kind of act three or four, maybe? -- in the emergence of the Tea Party, which essentially challenges a central United States government as a legitimate state.
We're at another crossroads, it seems. "We must now guard against the end of our new Reconstruction," says Harris-Lacewell, "and the descent of a vicious new Jim Crow terrorism."
Harris-Lacewell's discussion adds meaning to my long-held suspicion that the Civil War never ended. My belief is informed from an intuitive level, a level of psycho-spiritual history that is ubiquitously re-enacted but not often symbolized and brought to conscious awareness.
The human psyche is structured to record and retain both individual and collective history. What each of us brings into this life and what we experience in our earliest relationships is what wires us for dealing with those histories -- what wires us to recreate karmic lessons, so to speak.
The patterns that played out in the Civil War -- patterns of exploitation and oppression that have ancient roots -- will repeat themselves until we, individually and collectively, discover the real lessons at the core and learn them well. Only then can we fully decommission those patterns, and change the structure of psyches and systems.
This process is underway. I see the positive response to Obama's presidential campaign and election as a mirror, in part, of a shared (but for most, unconscious) soul-level commitment to implant a more spiritually sound government of united, equitable states. It may look pretty ugly and doubtful at the moment, but "yes, we can" takes us a long way toward "yes, we will."
By the way, just to tie up a loose end with the Frosted Mini-Wheats -- in this one-minute or less gift from Madison Avenue (yep, that's kind of near Wall Street, I think) there is much to be questioned.
Lots of folks seem to be obsessed lately with a perceived failure of the American education system to prepare our kids to be competitive with other nations' kids in math and science, i.e. a technological future. But isn't it humanity's access to technology that disrupts Earth's ecosystems faster than nature can repair itself?
Harris-Lacewell and many others continue to remind us that much human suffering remains because we have failed to learn from history. So I hope kids continue to study history. But not the Frosted Mini-Wheat's kind. I mean a complete and transparent presentation of history that fairly represents the experience of people of color -- no matter how ugly and painful for white people -- and teaching kids to think critically about who we all are and how social systems are structured.
But maybe we should start with this question: who the hell says that starting the day with Frosted Mini-Wheats is the best way to feed a kid's brain for learning anything?