-Caveat Lector-
Which Side Are We On?
America Sleeps As Civil Rights Leaders Struggle
By Carla Binion
During the late 1950s and the 1960s, white Democrats and progressives made
common cause with African-Americans as they sought civil rights and social
justice. Today most Democrats in Congress ignore the fact that large numbers
of voters, many of them African-American, were systematically disenfranchised
in election 2000.
The following is about understanding the spiritual foundations of the early
civil rights movement, and it explores the extent to which today many
Americans are asleep regarding the plight of blacks as they continue to fight
for their democratic rights and basic human dignity.
Certain members of the corporate-owned news media exhibit contempt for the
struggle of black voters, and few white viewers seem to notice. As an
example of egregious media conduct, this week Fox Network aired allegedly
"comedic" voice impressions by a Paul Shanklin. Shanklin's audio clip
ridiculed Jesse Jackson and his complaints about voting irregularities. Fox
anchor, Brit Hume, laughed as the hate speech was aired.
I call it hate speech, because Fox and some other cable networks have
systematically (and systematically is the key word here) ridiculed Jackson
and tried to undermine his efforts to enlighten the public about the fact
that black voters were disenfranchised during election 2000.
Last night Fox aired yet another segment erroneously claiming there is not
enough evidence to back up Jackson's claims that methodical voting
irregularites occurred. Again, Brit Hume led the charge, claiming there was
no "grand scheme" to deny African-Americans their voting rights.
The relentless cable network attacks against Jesse Jackson, coming at this
time, are both racially insensitive and anti-democratic for the following
reasons:
At this moment in time, given the recent election fiasco, Jackson's efforts
symbolize (for most reasonable people) both racial equality and the right to
free elections. Elections and racial equality are characteristic of
democracy. Efforts to undermine both racial equality and elections are
anti-democratic. If the public were not sound asleep, the TV networks'
continuous repetition of racially insensitive comments and focused attacks on
democracy would ring alarm bells.
Michael Lind, in "Up From Conservatism: Why The Right Is Wrong For America,"
(The Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster, 1996) discusses rightwing
radio talk show host/propagandist, Rush Limbaugh. Lind, senior editor for
The New Yorker in '96, reports that Limbaugh once snidely asked his audience:
"Have you ever noticed how all newspaper composite pictures of wanted
criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?"
According to Lind, Limbaugh has also said to his audience, "The NAACP should
have riot rehersals. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies."
Lind points out that such anti-black hate jokes are typical Limbaugh.
Evidently they are also becoming typical of Fox Network commentators -- and
white America sleeps through the network's downward drift toward the Limbaugh
level of commentary.
Rush Limbaugh also frequently refers to democracy as "mob rule," and insists
the U. S. is not a democracy, but a republic. He neglects to mention America
is, in fact, a democratic republic. When Limbaugh, Hume and pals ridicule or
minimize the voting plight of black Americans, they typify the insensitivity
described in Eric Dyson's "I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin
Luther King." (The Free Press, 2000.)
Dyson says that when it comes to offenses against African-Americans, some
people exhibit a revisionist amnesia in which "all memory is filtered through
the prism of the present." He adds, "the catch is that the past is never
viewed as causing the degree or depth of injury claimed by the offended
party."
The depth and degree of injury to black Americans include the following:
Civil rights worker Medgar Evers was shot and killed for his efforts to gain
voting rights and other civil liberties for his fellow blacks. In recalling
Evers' death, his widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams ("The Civil Rights Movement: A
Photographic History, Steven Kasler, Abbeville Press) said:
"My husband lay dying in a pool of blood on the doorstep of our home in
Jackson, Mississippi. His body had been toppled by a cowardly assassin's
bullet and left for the world -- and his children -- to see. I can still see
Medgar's handsome features distorted in excruciating pain as he succumbed to
death's premature call....I wonder about the image that my husband must have
carried with him on his quest for equality."
"How emotionally draining it must have been on his spirit to bear in mind the
unrecognizable portrait of the battered Emmet Till as Medgar pursued justice
to bring the young boy's murderers to trial. Nothing could have shielded
Medgar's eyes from the deplorable conditions of the Mississippi sharecroppers
or from the 'strange fruit' hung on trees by brutal barbarians."
And today Brit Hume laughs at Jesse Jackson for essentially doing the same
kind of work Evers was doing when he was shot and killed. And Rush Limbaugh
jokes that the NAACP should have riot rehersals.
Years ago I read the script of "My Dinner with Andre," in which playwright
Andre Gregory and actor Wallace Shawn discuss the fact that so many Americans
today seem numb and deeply asleep to the world around them. Gregory said, "I
remember a night -- it was about two weeks after my mother had died, and I
was in pretty bad shape, and I went out to dinner with three relatively close
friends, two of whom had known my mother quite well, and all three of whom
have known me for years."
"And we went through that entire evening," says Gregory, "without my being
able to, for a moment, get anywhere near what -- you know not that I wanted
to sit and have a dreary evening in which I was talking about all this pain
that I was going through and everything -- really not at all. But -- but the
fact that nobody could say, Gee, what a shame about your mother, or How are
you feeling? But it was as if nothing had happened. And everyone was just
making these jokes and laughing."
"I mean, do you realize, Wally," Gregory concludes, "if you brought that
situation into a Tibetan home, that would be just so far out -- they wouldn't
be able to understand it. I mean, that would be simply so weird, if four
Tibetans came together, and tragedy had just struck one of the ones, and they
all spent the whole evening going Aha ha ha ehee hee hee oho ho! Wo ho ho!
Those Tibetans would have looked at that and would have thought it was just
the most unimaginable behavior, but for us that's common behavior."
Gregory says that in a more spiritually awake culture, people would be
startled by the behavior of the sleeping Americans he described, and would
conclude that they were "dangerous animals or something like that." In
general, liberal Americans were more awake during the era of the early civil
rights movement. That movement, like Gandhi's nonviolent protests, was
rooted in a combination of liberal spiritual values and fierce mental
awareness.
The early movement was glued together in part by the Reverend Martin Luther
King's work to organize members of black churches, and by his background in
his own liberal spiritual tradition. In a 1958 speech on the power of
nonviolence, King, who respected Mahatma Gandhi and a wide variety of
spiritual traditions including non-religious humanitarian philosophies, said:
"I am quite aware of the fact that there are persons who believe firmly in
nonviolence who do not believe in a personal God, but I think every person
who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in
some form is on the side of justice. That there is something in the
universe, whether one speaks of it as an unconscious process, or whether one
speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether one speaks of it as a personal
God. There is something in the universe that unfolds for justice, and so in
Montgomery we felt somehow that as we struggled we had cosmic companionship."
"And this was one of the things that kept the people together," said King,
"the belief that the universe was on the side of justice....God grant that as
men and women all over the world struggle against evil systems they will
struggle with love in their hearts, with understanding good will."
King might have asked regarding the 2000 election: How can we call an
election just, if the person who received the most votes -- both popular and
electoral -- did not win? When record numbers of black voters turned out to
vote for Gore, but their votes were erased by a partisan Supreme Court's
suppressing the vote count, how can that be called justice?
In the 1958 speech on nonviolence, Martin Luther King also said: "Some people
are saying we must slow up....They are saying we must adopt a policy of
moderation. Now if moderation means moving on with wise restraint and calm
reasonableness, then moderation is a great virtue....But if moderation means
slowing up in the move for justice and capitulating to the whims and caprices
of the guardians of the deadening status quo, then moderation is a tragic
vice which all mean of good will must condemn."
Today Democrats in Congress slow the move for justice and capitulate to the
whims and caprices of the guardians of the deadening status quo as they rush
toward false and premature healing and bipartisanship. There can be no
healing until congressional Democrats wake up and address the concerns of
black voters in a meaningful way.
What would Martin Luther King have thought about Brit Hume's ridicule of
Jesse Jackson? Media critic Robert W. McChesney writes about the need for
news media organizations that will support democracy instead of serving only
the interests of their corporate owners. (McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass
Media and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 1994.)
McChesney suggests people should stay hopeful and committed to political
action regarding media reform. He says, "The first line of defense of any
inegalitarian social order is to cultivate the conviction in the subordinate
subjects that any fundamental change for the better is impossible, if not
undesirable, and therefore unworthy of consideration, let alone action."
Giving in to hopelessness regarding political action serves corporate
interests, not democracy. McChesney adds that people should stay committed
to political action "even in the darkest moment when the possibility of
altering existing social relations for the better appears most remote."
To give up hope would be to betray people such as Medgar Evers and Martin
Luther King. The people who died for civil rights live on in the hearts of
people who keep their work and their hope alive.
Although the following lyrics to the folk song "Which Side Are You On" were
about labor rights, the words apply to people concerned with civil rights,
women's rights and a variety of issues:
Don't scab for the bosses.
Don't listen to their lies,
'Cause poor folks haven't got a chance
Unless we organize.
Which side are you on?
Media organizations and Democrats in Congress who refuse to stand up for
disenfranchised voters are essentially (although possibly unconsciously) not
on our side. Election 2000 should serve as a wake-up call for any folks
beginning to stir from their slumber enough to hear the alarm bell.
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