Commentariat Central: Social Justice Edition (Part One)

Today the country honors Martin Luther King Jr. on his official birthday, which is conveniently tacked on to the end of a long weekend so as to remove as much meaning and actual history from the occasion as possible. Rather than emulating King's civil disobedience, anti-consumerism and economic boycotts, antiwar activism and championship of organized labor strikes, we are urged to partake in contrived "days of service." We are urged to emulate celebrities like Barack and Michelle Obama as they flock to their local soup kitchens, personal videographers in tow, to inspire (shame) us to forgo our supposedly privileged lifestyles for just an hour or two in order to "give back."

Not that the poor and the hungry and the oppressed will receive the "give-back" of guaranteed health care, housing, and food that they can actually prepare and eat in their own homes. They will get at most some collateral publicity as the extras in the annual show - mere fleeting targets of the tiniest possible spurts of noblesse oblige,

And come to think of it, all that the elite social influence class really has to do these days is send out an innocuous tweet lauding Dr. King on his very special day. It only takes a minute, as Obama so ably demonstrated today:

Every so often, I re-read Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. While some of the injustices may have changed, his poetic brilliance, moral clarity, and tests of conscience still reverberate today. Take a moment to reflect on his righteous call.

And for those feeling especially virtuous, the New York Times tops its digital Martin Luther King Jr. coverage with instructions on how to bake a bourbon pecan pie in his honor, along with expert advice to use your day off to try out that instant pot ($79, Amazon choice) you got for Christmas. You can even take a moment to reverently read something that Dr. King wrote while you are cooking and feasting.

But as New York Times columnist Charles Blow writes, way below the digital fold:

I had been taught only the "Dream" King. That is what America wants King to remain: Frozen in perpetual optimism, urging more than demanding, appealing to America's better angels rather than ruthlessly calling out its persistent demons.

 But that must not be done. That must not be done.

As King put it about his Poor People's Campaign, "Now, when we come to Washington in this campaign. we're coming to get our check."

 King was assassinated a month before the campaign was supposed to head to Washington.

While touching upon King's inherent radicalism, Blow doesn't tell his readers what the civil rights leader really had in mind.

My submitted (still unpublished) response:

From Dr. King's Massey Lecture Series, here's what our leaders don't want us to remember:

  "The dispossessed of this nation -- the poor, both white and Negro -- live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty."

  With that rhetoric, were he alive today, he'd probably be rotting in jail with Chelsea Manning and other political dissidents. He'd planned the literal occupation and takeover of the Capitol, with protesters setting up camp and refusing to leave until politicians voted in a living wage law and a jobs bill.

  "If you're poor, or if you're unemployed anyway, you can choose to stay in Washington as long as the struggle needs you." he said. "And if that official says, 'But Congress would have to approve this,' or 'But the President would have to be consulted on that,' you can say, 'All right, we'll wait.' And you can settle down in his office as long a stay as necessary."

And then he was conveniently assassinated, supposedly by a lone gunman, right in the middle of a Memphis sanitation workers' strike. 

Did he envision a bona fide,violence-fomenting fascist in the White House. or a nation full of militarized police and a whole gulag of private prisons with quotas to fill? He likely saw it coming, but his "admirers" have nonetheless preferred to bury their own heads in the sand.

  May the truth as King spoke it set us free, and soon.

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"The New Jim Crow" author Michelle Alexander marked the tenth anniversary of her groundbreaking book's publication with a Times column that forcefully pushes back against Joe Biden's insistence that the Trump presidency is just an "aberration."

Without mentioning the leading Democratic presidential contender by name, she is unflinching in her criticism of his boss, Barack Obama and the damaging "colorblind" policies he implemented - policies such as mass deportations and drone killings that were and still are largely immune from criticism by the liberal class.

I was right to worry about the aftermath of Obama's election. After he was inaugurated, our nation was awash in 'post-racialism.".Black History Month events revolved around 'how far we've come. Many in the black community felt that, if Obama could win the presidency, anything was possible. Few people wanted to hear the message I felt desperate to convey: Despite appearances, our nation remains trapped in a cycle of racial reform, backlash, and re-formation of systems of racial and social control.

From that stage of feel-good denialism comes the apparent polar-opposite of Donald Trump, who has unabashedly made America feel safe to hate again. "But," Alexander continues,"contrary to what many people would have us believe, what our nation is experiencing is not an 'aberration.' The politics of Trumpism and 'fake news' are not new. They are as old as the nation itself."

I wonder if her essay had initially mentioned Joseph Biden by name, but the Times edited it out.

My submitted (in the holding bin for the past 24 hours) comment did mention Biden by name:

The common wisdom floating around is that if we can only get rid of Trump and get back to the good old days of Obama, everything will be fine.

What a return to "norms" really means is that we'd be able to once again bury our heads in the sand with another president skilled enough to pay lip service to anti-racism while continuing, as Ms. Alexander notes, the same - if not brand new - Jim Crow policies. As she noted in her book, these policies are always evolving, and they're never in favor of brown and black-skinned people.

 Look at the current angst over #OscarsSoWhite and #DemocraticPrimarySoWhite. As if more minority actresses or another minority president can erase racism by dint of sheer personal identity. In fact, these "winners" still serve a system ruled by oligarchs, who for the most part are white and male.

Some pundits and party operatives are talking up Stacey Abrams as Joe Biden's running mate. This is a cringe-worthy attempt to erase his own outsize role in creating the modern Jim Crow carceral state.

 Most telling of all is that Trump is not being impeached for what is his worst crime of all: the kidnapping and imprisonment of thousands of migrant and refugee children at the border. Perhaps that's because for Congress to indict him for this crime against humanity, they'd also have to indict themselves.

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(I'll post Part Two of my Times commentariat stuff either tonight or tomorrow morning.)