January 17, 2021
work from home for justice - MLK Day edition
Good evening,
All holidays begin at sunset for Jews. Tonight is the beginning of my new favorite holiday, Tu B’shevat, a celebration of trees. I have never celebrated it before, but the trees “save me, and daily.” If you want to pour yourself a glass of wine, have a piece of fruit and/or some nuts, this can be your holiday too.
It is also the eve of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, which we are not celebrating, at the behest of King’s family, until Congress passes federal voting rights legislation.
As background to this post, I need to mention that I’ve been reading The 1619 Project on a serious schedule because I thought I was going to teach the curriculum this spring. We’re holding off until the fall, which gives me more time to soak in the ideas. Meanwhile, I hope you will be the beneficiaries of my long steep.
Please note that I have not yet read the whole book, and have not been reading it in order. Also, you will want to read it yourself.
In a chapter called “Progress,” Ibram X. Kendi writes about our tendency to tell the American story as one of inexorable racial progress. Kendi points out that this telling is “ahistorical, mythical, and incomplete.” Instead, history is running on two tracks:
When the long sweep of American history is cast as a constant widening of equity and justice, it overlooks this parallel constant widening of inequity and injustice. The two forces have existed in tandem, dueling throughout our history.
We can’t simply take the average of the two and still tell a true story.
[W]hat is left out of this story is that [the] Second Reconstruction was needed because the First Reconstruction, after the Civil War ended in 1865, failed to bring into being and sustain an equitable nation — an effort undermined by the propaganda of racial progress. What is left out of the story of our time is that a Third Reconstruction is needed because the Second Reconstruction failed to actualize King’s dream, again undermined by the racial progress propaganda.
The duel is on between the voter mobilization that brought triumph in Georgia’s Senate contests just a year ago and the war on voting rights that has been underway since the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision struck down the most important sections of the Voting Rights Act.
Kendi notes that thinkers like Dinesh D’Souza, in the 1990s, and John McWhorter, following Obama’s election, are among many who have prematurely trumpeted the end of racism as a serious problem. Can anyone believe this in 2022?
In a book review of the last volume of Taylor Branch’s chronicle, “America in the King Years,” David Levering Lewis described King’s speech in March 1965, before the march to Selma:
[T]welve thousand pilgrims were exhilarated by King’s preaching. His sermon was a stem-winder, beginning with an encapsulation of Reconstruction history and ending in a riff of magnificent call and response. “How long will justice be crucified and truth buried?” he asked, and went on to provide the answer: “Not long!” Branch writes, “Already shouts echoed and anticipated his refrain at a driving pace, above cries of encouragement and a low roar of anticipation.” King continued, “How long? Not long! Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. How long? Not long! Because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act two months later.
Kendi remarks on MLK’s own frustration that the civil rights victories ran alongside the persistent poverty and police violence that led to the urban rebellions of 1964-67. King knew we could not take an average.
Anthea Butler’s chapter, “Church,” is, thus far, the most revelatory for me. I knew that the emergence of Black Power put church leaders like King in a bind, as frustration grew with the halting progress of the nonviolent movement, but I was unfamiliar with the work of James Cone, a Black theologian and father of Black liberation theology.
Cone’s work, first published the year after King’s assassination, was shaped by the struggle within the Black Church and the movement for civil rights.
Cone’s vision not only recognized the struggles of Black people as the “point of departure” for a new theology but also called to account the manner in which white churches had been instrumental in upholding the structures of racism.”
In addition to being a major influence on Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose “incendiary language” Obama disavowed in order to win the 2008 primary, Cone was Raphael Warnock’s teacher at Union Theological Seminary.
Butler sees Senator Warnock as
a bridge between the Black church, past, present, and future, and political action.
Warnock has spoken powerfully against the failure to protect voting rights. In a recent conversation on PBS News Hour, Warnock reminded the interviewer that he is not just a senator, but
somebody who preaches the Gospel every Sunday morning.
And regardless of where we are in this moment, I'm going to keep preaching the gospel of democracy, because I actually believe that democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea, this idea that all of us have dignity, and so we ought to have a voice in the process.
I agree with my colleague Senator Sinema that we ought to come together, we ought to have conversation, we ought to have robust argument about all of these issues.
The problem with her argument is that it does not recognize that what we're dealing with in this moment is an effort to forestall the ability of some people to be at the table. Those of us who are in the Senate, we didn't just appear here. We were sent here by the people.
And we have to keep fighting the good fight. This is a moral moment. This is what Dr. King meant when he talked about the fierce urgency of now.
Join Monday’s rally at 1 PM for voting rights.
The Texas primaries are in March.
The Travis county clerk’s office said it had not received enough information from the Texas secretary of state to help voters provide the correct information. “Many other counties are experiencing the same high rejection rate,” the office told the Washington Post. “We have not received instructions from the state outlining what our office can do to assist voters in submitting a completed application.”
The secretary of state, however, said he was “surprised” by the high rejection rate in Travis county and called on officials to revisit the ballots.
I suspect that the Texas Republicans who voted for the new rules are not surprised by the results.
My understanding is still that the passage of the new all-in-one “Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act” by the House of Representatives means that the voting rights legislation is not subject to a filibuster in the Senate. Senate rules are not my specialty; the work-around is a bit of McConnell-type scheming, in this case done by Speaker Pelosi in consultation with Senator Schumer.
They need to get it done.
There are 40 young people and faith leaders on a hunger strike in DC for voting rights.
Join Monday’s rally at 1 PM for voting rights.
I hope to see you there!
with love,
L