The Missouri students inspired protests and displays of solidarity at other campuses in the United States, including Ithaca College, Yale University, Smith College, Claremont McKenna College, Amherst and Brandeis, with the dean of students at Claremont McKenna forced to step down in November. There has been, of course, the inevitable backlash. It was touched off at Yale, according to The New York Times (Nov. 8, 2015), when university administration cautioned students from wearing Halloween costumes, such as ones featuring blackface or turbans, "that could offend minority students." What proved to be an inflammatory response was issued by a long-time professor and residence counselor who expressed her belief that students should be allowed to wear whatever costume they chose to, that kids should be allowed to be kids.
She, in turn, was attacked in an open letter signed by hundreds of students accusing her of conflating students' free-speech rights with license to express themselves however they chose, regardless of the impact of their actions on students who found themselves "marginalized" at Yale. To quote from the letter, "To be a student of color on Yale's campus is to exist in a space that was not created for you." After the president of Yale met with "students of color," whom he found to be "in great distress," he professed himself to be "deeply troubled" when "many said they did not believe the university was attuned to the needs of minority students." Subsequently, the university professor in question resigned and right-wing pundits, again, seized upon the issue, contending that white students were being blocked from speaking their minds, that their First Amendment rights were being denied them, by a politically correct Yale administration.
Right-wing academics then proceeded to resuscitate Arthur Jensen's old chestnut, first published in 1969 and later summarized in "Thirty Years of Research On Race Differences In Cognitive Ability," co-authored with J. Philippe Rushton in 2005, that advanced highly contested research purportedly confirming the irremediable cognitive deficiencies of black students in comparison to whites. It was offered as evidence that black students' complaints simply camouflaged their inabilities to succeed in highly competitive academic settings. In the Supreme Court's recent review of the University of Texas's affirmative-action plan, Justice Scalia shamelessly alluded to Jensen's research, suggesting that black students' chances to succeed might improve if they attended "slower," i.e., less demanding, black universities. After all, few if any black scientists, he added, had attended the major research universities (N.Y. Times, 12/9/15).
An opportunity to engage with black students and learn from and about them was lost. The courage they demonstrated in being vulnerable with whites and revealing their apprehensions and anxieties was misrepresented as a clear indication of wilting under pressure, of lacking the resilience necessary for success in unfriendly environments, so unlike white students. As has happened so often in the past, the burden of change was assumed to be the sole responsibility of the black students.
W.E.B. Dubois addressed this issue well over one hundred years ago, at the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, and at greater length in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), when he stated that "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line, the question of how far differences of race -- which show themselves chiefly in the color of skin and the texture of the hair --will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization." He made it clear that the responsibility for the resolution of the problem resided in the hands of those who had created it, the white peoples of the world.
William Faulkner, in an unerringly prescient 1955 article in the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News about the killing of Emmet Till in nearby Money, Mississippi, at the hands of white supremacists, began by addressing Americans' hypocrisy when boasting about American values to others:
".. after we have taught them ... that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don't even mean security and justice and even ... the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours ... Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not ... Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't." (Excerpted from Paul Theroux's Deep South [2015]).
The senseless brutality of Till's death at the age of fourteen is considered by many to be the touchstone of the modern Civil Rights Movement. It appears to me that we, particularly if we are white, owe it to the memory of Emmet Till and to all Americans who struggled and died for "equal rights under the law", embodied in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, to pursue the discussion that needs to take place with black Americans about the urgent need to put a stop to the racial conflict that has riven this country from its inception. To not do so, to echo Faulkner, is to jeopardize our existence as a creole and unified nation that merits survival.
To begin to understand this from the crucial black perspective, I recommend to readers Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me (2015), which takes the form of a letter written by Coates to his teenaged son about the pitfalls that await him in white America and his need to protect himself and his body from harm. Unlike Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963) to which it is compared -- Baldwin's book was framed as a letter to his nephew -- Coates's book concludes not on a bitter note but one that espouses resistance to oppression and is accordingly more hopeful. Talk about resilience.
In that same spirit, those of us who recognize the folly of white supremacism, and have come to understand it as the principal source of fear and hate in this country, are under considerable obligation to seek out like-minded white Americans and courageous black Americans willing to take the chance and promote conversations, in community forums, in private homes, in groups large and small, where black folks can talk and white listen, and so begin to learn who each really is, and to cross and erase the color line.
Part III: Conclusion -- Music to March To:
Armies march on their stomachs. Social movements for change march in tune to the music in their heads, to the music its members make together. The labor movement had an entire catalogue of songs to sing that defined and inspired it. I remember singing "we shall not, we shall not be moved ..." marching on strike on a picket line in 1976 with my 1199 brothers and sisters in front of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. The civil-rights movement had many if not more, some drawn from the black church, others written by folk singers -- Pete, where are you now? I don't know how many times I sang "We Shall Overcome" on how many picket lines, the most recent memorable time in 2008, the day after Obama was first elected, when my fifty staff members and I, hands clasped in a circle, sang it in thanksgiving.
And the Rolling Stones, the bad boys of rock'n'roll, were credited by Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and activist and the first president of a Czechoslovakia free of an authoritarian Communist party and government, with providing the sound track for the "Velvet Revolution" which he led? To the Czechs' delight, the Stones finally got to Prague on August 17, 1990, and, according to Eduard Preisler who was there and wrote an op ed about the event in the August 17, 2010, New York Times, their presence signaled that freedom had actually come to his country. The Stones kicked things off with Mick Jagger singing "Start Me Up" (1981):
More recently, on December 6 and 7, Bono and U2 returned to Paris and gave the concerts they had been obliged to cancel after the November 13 terrorist attacks when 130 Parisians were killed and 238 wounded. HBO televised the December 7 show, U2's last stop on their world-wide "INNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE" tour, and my wife and I, who watched it together, found a welcome counterpoint to what we had witnessed little more than 3 weeks before on CNN. By all appearances, so, too, did the 15,000 or so Parisians in attendance at Accorhotels Arena, some of whom jumped up on stage, at Bono's invitation, to dance alongside him. The concert itself was organized in a very compelling manner, with its first half comprised of U2 songs rooted in band members' own personal experiences with the death and destruction inflicted by terrorists upon family members and friends and people they had gotten to know in their travels around the world.
Midway through the concert, its emotional highpoint, the band played the song that perfectly embodies what I've been writing here and which I hereby recommend as the first anthem of the social movement for change that will one day emerge -- "Invisible" (2014).
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