My
blood tends to run a little faster every year when the calendar flips to
January. It’s not so much the Cleveland winter — global warming is taking care
of that; rather it’s the one time of year when our community kinda sorta
celebrates blackness, or at least says it’s ok to talk about it in a positive
way. The period lasts about six weeks or so, from the observance of Martin
Luther King Jr. Day through the end of Black History Month, and then it’s “ok,
recess is over, back to normal.”
I’m
not referring to “our community” as either just black folks or white folks.
It’s almost as if an unspoken pact exists between in-laws. Most everybody
around here tiptoes around race. We know the subject is explosive; we know it’s
problematic. We know it’s the Eight Ton Gorilla in the family room. Which is
why we stay in the kitchen and visit the family room only on special occasions,
and even then according to carefully scripted rules of engagement. So during
MLK day we talk about the content of our character but not about our national
propensity for warmongering and sustained violence at home. And during BHM
African Americans can salute our ancestors and how they overcame the Middle
Passage, Slavery, and Jim Crow, without any discussion or analysis of why we are
not doing anything about 21st Century New Jim Crow in education,
criminal justice, or the economy.
This
year feels a little different to me. Thank you Django! It seems everywhere I
turn people are talking about the movie, and therefore talking about ticklish
aspects of our history. If there were an Oscar category for most provocative
film, Django would be a hands-down winner.
Of
course a lot of our discourse on race is echoed in views long ago forged into cast-iron.
Many times when we think we want to talk about race we can’t get past skin. So
an ESPN commentator questions the racial bona fides of Washington ‘Skins
quarterback Robert L Griffin III — is he a ‘down’ brother or a ‘cornball
brother’? — because RGIII: a) has a white fiancée and b) disdains simplistic
comparison to other mobile quarterbacks who happen to be black, aspiring to one
day achieve the status of the best QBs ever. (The commentator, Rob Parker, was first suspended and then let go. This was an appropriate result, not because
Parker crossed some forbidden line but because his analytical frame is too flat
for him to be a social commentator in any medium.)
 |
| Jeffrey Blanck, Reno NAACP president |
In
a similar vein is the reaction of many across the country to the headline that the
Reno NAACP elected the first white president in its 66-year history. Many
blacks greeted this news with groans from a familiar grab bag of perpetual
victimization and helplessness: ‘white folks gotta run everything’, ‘couldn’t
they find a black man’, ‘black people always think white is right’, etc. They
were oblivious to the story of the NAACP’s interracial founding, its guiding
principles, or the decades of civil rights advocacy that justified the fellow
being entrusted with the honor of serving as branch president.
These
examples of call to mind the succinct and wise counsel my friend Julian Earls
likes to share with young, aspiring black folk: “Every black person is not your
friend, and every white person is not your enemy.”
Agentic African Americans
Still,
this season seems different to me because I see local African Americans who are
not making automatic skin responses but choosing instead to be agentic in the struggle to address core
community issues. Microsoft Word doesn’t seem to like “agentic”, giving it the
red underline; it is a fine word, and I use it here to describe people who do
not accept victimhood but are “active agents in their own deliverance”.
That
quote is from another friend Trevelle Harp. Trevelle is a community organizer
who heads the Northeast Ohio Alliance for Hope [NOAH]. In two weeks his group
will present the Cleveland-area premiere of “The House I Live In”, which last
year won top documentary honors at the acclaimed Sundance Film Festival. The powerful
film questions why the United States has spent over One Trillion Dollars on
drug arrests since the beginning of the Nixon Administration, only to become
the world’s leading jailer of its own people, while drugs remain cheaper, purer
and more available than ever.
To
quote Eugene Jarecki, the film’s director, a prime result of the “drug war” is
that “We have more black men incarcerated today, in one form or another, than
were enslaved at the end of slavery 10 years before the Civil War ended.”
The
special screening will be Saturday,
January 26, at the East Cleveland Library, 14101 Euclid Ave. Admission is
free and doors open at 1 PM.
The film will start at 1:30 PM.
A moderated discussion will follow the screening.
NOAH
under Harp has concentrated its efforts on the East Cleveland community. Its
organizing approach involves training and developing local leadership,
identifying common issues, finding collaborative and strategic ways to address
those issues while systematically strengthening the institutions in our
regions. They are on a perpetual search for agentic partners.
South
Euclid councilwoman Ruth Gray is advancing a second example of agentic approach.
Concerned about her community’s failure to offer sufficient resources to its
youth, she has convened a forum next week to address this issue. I will talk
about this effort more on Monday but I encourage you to put the event, “Youth
in Peril”, on your calendar. It will be held Wednesday, January 16 from 7-9 PM
at the South Euclid Community Center, 1370 Victory Drive, in South Euclid OH
44121.
