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A Celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
When I look into the mirror, I don't want to see white. I'm not talking about color-blindness. I don't mean to say that that white skin isn't beautiful, it is, because skin itself is beautiful, whatever shade it comes in.
I also don't mean that I'm not proud of my ethnic and cultural heritage, nor to deny that being an American white man from a middle-class family is a heritage that comes with baggage. My heritage gives me the privilege of blending in with the majority in this country and often unacknowledged benefits given by default to people who look like me.
What I mean is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his speech "I Have A Dream:" "to live in a nation where [I] will not be judged by the color of [my] skin but by the content of [my] character." I don't want to see white when I look in the mirror. I want to see kindness, a loving heart, an able mind, solid skills of hand and speech.
Whiteness comes as part of the packaging, but I want the package itself to be opened, displayed, loved. In my studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, I've been getting into what educators and historians often refer to as the Black Arts Movement.
I'm beginning to love Jazz, its ebb and flow, its naturalness and how it sounds like the musician made it up on the spot. I feel the blues in every brown hair, every white pore, every red muscle. I love the work of poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Thomas Sayers Ellis, James Baldwin and authors like Alice Walker. I love them for their color and culture, so different from my own, but I also love them as the expression of a universal creativity.
As my library expands to include more work from other cultures, I realize that there's no need for a writer of any ethnicity to be recognized by the mainstream to validate his/her work. In fact, I just have to see or hear or read something to recognize that the artist and I share the same language of beauty, the same language of pain. I can love the art for its humanity and the artist for his/her courage in giving birth to the art. I see that I couldn't have made that myself, and I value it more for that reason. I value it more because I can't control or own it. I just have to be with it.
Thomas Sayers Ellis wrote a provocative poem called "Ways to Be Black in a Poem." It goes like this:
You’ll need a talk, an oral walk,
Something natural and recognizable by your folk,
Something of music something of meaning,
A style capable of running-off at-the-mouth
When Massa AmEuroBrit Lit irks you most,
A little something-something of ancestry
And the courage not to accept any award
that helps you
and hurts others.
You’ll need “Saturation”,
Your own profanity of Sundays,
Breakfast and Blackfist.
Wherever there is living You must listen
For the if and when the vernacular gives birth, again.
You will need more than reference
Coulda woulda shoulda
And more than edjumacation.
You may even need to sell you and buy you,
So low
So long
Sold
Or to slant yourself into a container whose symbolism
Is unknowingly superior
To standard usage,
A brilliant Attitude loved by Good.
His poem gives me hope that I can get past being merely "white." I don't have the ancestry, but I sure am sick of "Massa AmEuroBrit Lit." I've had to buy and sell myself. I had the opportunity to question Ellis on this poem. I asked: "I'm a poet who happens to be white. Can I be black in a poem?"
"We live in an age where when it comes to culture or cultural selection, it really is up to the individual. I mean there’s more choice and room for exchange, culturally, so it is really is up to the individual, the desire of the seeker. Everything is for sale and anything can be adopted. The lesson of...the briar patch is a gift for all of America, for everyone to consume and learn and to become a part of. To be black in a poem might just mean to struggle to be free in the selfhood of your work."
His answer gives me hope, but I'm hesitant to borrow another person's culture for my own artistic benefit. We have such a history in this country of white people taking...taking Native American land, or taking African-American art to sell as their own and not giving credit where credit is due. This has always been wrong, and that's not who I want to be. Yet I worry that I will always be an outsider when it comes to cultures other than my own. It's such a powerful and pervasive line that we divide ourselves up with: outside vs. inside. Must it always be this way?
As a working artist, I see that a further shame stem from these past sins: the shame that people, particularly artists, are not as free as we could be to inspire one another across racial lines. Another shame is that creative work—particularly if the artist is a person of color—gets pigeon-holed or typed by race: he's a Latin-American painter; she's an African-American writer. I notice that white people are usually referred to merely as 'artists' and 'writers.'
In its worst form, the form TS Ellis mentions in his poem, the attitude that white people's poetry is for everyone, but art and culture of color is only for people of that color. These attitudes are so subtle if you're on the majority side that it's easy not to notice them. Human beings of moral character must notice them and say "that's not how the world is, anymore!" We need to shout it and act it out, until it's true . That's the only way it can happen.
You might say that it's easy for me to talk about these things, that I don't have to live my life as a person of color and go through the down-side of race relations in America. It's true . What I have to live up to is my friend Darrick Jackson's challenge.
When Darrick preached last summer at the Arlington Street Church, Unitarian Universalist in Boston, he challenged my long-held understanding of diversity. He said, "We want more people of color, but we want them to leave their noise, their culture, their differences at home. We want them to come to where we are and be just like us." Darrick gave me a new framework to understand the true nature of diversity by sharing this quote from William M. Chace's The Language of Action:
"Diversity, generally understood and embraced, is not casual liberal tolerance of anything and everything not yourself. It is not polite accommodation. Instead, diversity is, in action, the sometimes painful awareness that other people, other races, other voices, other habits of mind, have as much integrity of being, as much claim upon the world, as you do. No one has an obligation greater than your own to change, or yield, or to assimilate into the mass. The irreconcilable is as much a part of social life as the congenial."
Diversity is about accepting the other into our selves and lives and changing ourselves to co-exist. Diversity is neither color-blindness—for to ignore a person's color is to potentially exclude his/her unique history and experience of the world—nor is it tolerance, a condescending position of magnanimous superiority. Diversity is not "us" vs. "them." The real practice of diversity, and part of the message of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is that there is no "them," we're all "us."
Christians have a practice of seeing every person on the street as Jesus, and to treat each one as you would Him that goes back to the Bible. In the Gospels, Jesus in fact said that he would be each of those people.
Buddhists do the same thing with Buddha, imagining him in challenging stranger as much as the beloved friend, and they take it one step further. Imagine that each person is your mother, your daughter, your brother, your son. The Buddhist belief in reincarnation actually tells us that in one lifetime in our consciousness' history, this was or will actually be the case.
So, let's just blend in. It's so tempting, right? Not to be different. Not to march to our own drumbeat. Let's figure out what the majority does and do that. Let's figure out who the people in power are and become just like them, regardless of where we come from, what gender we identify as, whom we sleep with, what color our skin is. It's an easy and ultimately flawed vision of success.
Success is not a single vision of the future. It's a plural vision. We are individual, we shape one another, we are not all the same, yet we each can be one another when we truly see with plural eyes. We can even be that lone, dissenting voice that points at that the barriers we build between ourselves are artificial. While it's easy and comforting to know that humans are one race, the practice of diversity demand that we don't leave out our differences.
We are one infinitely varied race: varied in identity, culture, appearance, sexual orientation, skills, monetary position, belief system. And we're all here together. There is no one size fits all, one way to live, one way to be.
Diversity is how life propagates itself. Nothing could be more natural. It's coded into our very DNA. Eco-systems rely on biodiversity to remain healthy. Evolution is driven by diversity and change. Welcoming the other is about dialogue and learning, not monologue and conformity. To achieve the nation of freedom and love that Dr. King dreamed about, we need to mix things up and love that other as much as we love the familiar, and we must love the other for its own sake.
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