"We Will Not Get There with You" Lecture by D. Brooms
Monday, January 21, 2014
I'm giving a lecture on Dr. King and wanted to share two thoughts (both inspired by today's NBA games):
1) The reality is that we live in a time (and a nation) where amnesia is more powerful
than memory. Even during today's NBA game between Brooklyn and New
York, to which I was listening to via audio stream, I cringed (again) as
I heard a commentator summarize MLK's entire body of work with the
oft-quoted, worn out, completely out of context statement: "He dreamed
that we would live in a nation that you could be judged by the content
of your character..." How many times will this line be repeated and
folks completely ignore the entirety of his speech? Mass
incarcerations... stop and frisk... Oscar Grant... Reka Boyd... Trayvon
Martin... and so many others... How about this part of the speech?:
"But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free. One hundred
years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the
manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred
years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst
of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the
Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds
himself an exile in his own land..."
2) The upcoming game of
New Orleans at Memphis provides a great point of reality given the
histories of these two cities. For New Orleans, many current and former
residents are still being "Katrina-ed" since 2006-- people have been
dislocated for years and this has impacted the educational opportunities
along with the social, cultural, and political realities of so many
people. And, for Memphis, the state of affairs are still at a critical
level. Memphis: 27% poverty rate... 42% child poverty... 11-12%
unemployment... These are realities of our time. We STILL need the poor
people's campaign because clearly the "war on poverty" has turned into
and resulted in a "war on the poor"...
As Dr. King argued,
"When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war it loses its social
perspective; programs of social uplift suffer."
Clearly, for
many of the folks making decisions, it has not gotten dark "enough" so
that they can see the light. Let the trumpets sound so that the amnesia
is lifted, the willful forgetting is too cold, and the winds of default,
denial and neglect are uprooted.
