I
would first like to thank Rabbi Wirtschafter for inviting me to speak with you
today in honor of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. I was incredibly humbled by the request
because it is always an honor when people of faith ask you to stand before
them, but also I am humbled by the importance of the philosophy and words and
life of Martin Luther King, who is so incredibly important to how I think about
all the ideas we celebrate each year as we commemorate his birth—justice,
freedom, equality, dignity, and humanity.
So as we begin I would like to start with a
few disclaimers. I am a big fan of disclaimers.
It is probably the lawyer in me.
So, first I would like to say that unlike the
Rabbi and Pastor E, this is not my regular gig.
I mostly stand in front of classrooms where the power of the pen
dictates that the audience feign some interest.
So the truth is my gauge for what constitutes a really interesting talk
can be a little off.
Second and final disclaimer, is that although
I admire King and have read much of his work I am not a King scholar. I have studied and taught religion and
politics for many years, so I speak to you today from my individual, but
informed-ish opinion on the works of King. But, I often tell my law students
that part of what we are training them for is to be public citizens, which
means that sometimes you will be called upon by your local library or high
school or synagogue to discuss topics on which you are not an expert but
hopefully we have give you enough to say something worthy. So that is goal today to say something worthy.
As I was preparing for this evening, I began
looking through some of King’s speeches and sermons. My favorite compilation of King’s work is A Knock at Midnight because these less
treaded speeches and sermons are in many ways the most useful for understanding
the legacy of King. They are less about the kind of democratic optimistic of
his more well known speeches like “I have a Dream.” They are really King making strong claims
about the then current social structure.
The lived reality of black people in the United States at the moment at
which he is making those claims. I am
mostly drawing from a piece that was a commencement addresses for both Oberlin
and Morehouse College called Remaining
Awake Through A Great Revolution.
This speech was given in roughly the same version to both black and
white audience. I think this is
important to mention in our world of the 24-hour news cycle, to remind us that
the kids at Morehouse didn’t see the version King did at Oberlin on
Buzzfeed. It wasn’t spoiled by live
tweeting. King did this often, where he would give slightly different versions
of the same sermon/speech in different venues.
Those of us who are academics understand this retreading the same
material for a new audience very well. But
that was before the internet, so now I wonder if Martin Luther King may have
been taken down by inelegant tweet too if he were still alive. The Instagram
photos? Poor Snapchat choices?
I am intentional in my references to social
media platforms because the revolution may not be televised but it may
available in 20-second video clips on the
Vine. If you don’t know what these
are ask a friendly teen.
This particular speech caught my eye as well
because it so close to a very common phrase in the parlance of black activist
and intellectuals who often say among them selves to STAY WOKE. It is used as a
statement of affirmation or agreement among the like-minded but also as a
clarion call to those who by choice or lack of exposure are unaware of the
workings of injustice and oppression. I
have heard it said in passing like a greeting. “Stay woke” accompanied by a
head nod. The singer Erykah Badu uses as
a refrain in her song Master Teacher. She says, “Even though you go through struggle
and strife to keep a healthy life, I stay woke”
In
his speech, King uses a lot of points of reference of liberation movements that
are taking place at that time across the globe at the time. He points out the revolutionary
nature of the moment, particularly in Africa. He outlines for the students 3
challenges of staying awake in a revolution when because he says, “There would
be nothing more tragic than during this period of social change to allow our mental
and moral attitudes to sleep while this tremendous social change takes place”
I
should insert here that King opens with speech with a story of Rip Van Winkle
by Washington Irving and he makes the point that I had not considered but points
to Kings keen insight and his humor. We all focus on the fact that Rip Van
Winkle falls asleep from drinking suspicious moonshine, which as Kentuckians we
all know is not wise. Van Winkle wakes to
find that his son is now an adult. We
focus on the sleeping and not the critical fact for King, which is that Van
Winkle slept through the Revolution. The
biggest political change of his life has happened while he was is in the forest
unconscious.
I
wasn’t sure if I would share this other part about why this sermon appealed to
me, because I wasn’t sure how it would reflect on me. Whether it would
undermine my standing in your eyes as person of gravitas. Don’t judge me harshly.
So, I am a big fan of a television program called Sleepy Hollow. Notice how I said program as if give it more import
like its Masterpiece Theater. It is an update of Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow where Ichabod Crane comes back from the
dead to modern day Sleepy Hollow, Massachusetts of 2010. Also, where
suspiciously no one has read this story or ever says, “Hey! You know there is
this Irving story about this guy named Ichabod.” Though highly historically
inaccurate and a bit of a bodice ripper, I have taken to this show. Not only because it is hilarious to watch
this person from early America mover around a modern town perplexed by why
there are just so many Starbucks and outraged by sales tax, but because he has
returned on a mission. The exact mission
is unclear to me at this moment but he is very handsome. His partner in
fulfilling his mission is young black woman police detective who is a
descendant of free black people who have long been a part of the struggle for
good over evil known as Witnesses. Once
you open the door to time travel on TV show anybody can show up and they
do. I can see in your eyes you have
reached the point where you are either like why is she telling us this or is
this available on HULU. First, yes to
HULU. Second, I am telling you this because as a lawyer I have been trained to
think of witnesses and participants and distinct. Of witnesses as someone who just reports what
they have seen.
You
had no idea that Washington Irving was in any way relevant to black
philosophies of liberation? Did
you? The Witnesses of Sleepy Hollow are actively engaged in
the battle of their times and the one’s left over from the past. They are not
asleep. And King is telling these young people at Oberlin and Morehouse to Stay
Woke, to get engaged. He is saying to them that they were living in Freedom
time. If you do not give your mental, political and spiritual effort to it, you
will wake up where your children have grown past you and the world is a place
that you do not know.
Yet,
King knew it was going to be hard. Being a present participant in your times is
not easy. One of my favorite Bible
verses is “Be not weary in well doing, for one day ye shall reap, if you don’t
faint.” (Galatians 6:9) King like the
writer of that verse recognized that staying woke was a challenge that could
overwhelm you, drag you down, or even perhaps, under. King gives three challenges in Remaining
Awake Through a Revolution.
Listen
to how prescient these challenges are for our own times.
One,
“we are challenged to rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic
concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity”
The
second challenge was to keep our moral and spiritual development in line with
our scientific and technological growth.
The
third response to the challenge of living in a revolutionary period is that it
“demands excellence in our various fields of endeavor.” This last point makes sense. King is speaking
in particularly to the students at Morehouse because he knew the necessity for
education for the young who would see access to spaces previously unavailable
to their parents and grandparents. His democratic vision for the nation was
expansive and he saw the need for the black community to acquire skills they
previously did not posses. This is also part of the much-debated politics of
respectability in the black community right now.
The
second point opens the door for a multitude of sentences on environmental racism.
The continually unfolding tragedy of Flint, Michigan comes to the front of my
mind and King’s concern about nuclear expansion and potential
annihilation. King was also concerned
about the degradation of human interaction that these same social media
platforms I am about to laud in a moment foment.
I
am going to focus on the first challenge.
The first challenge is to see the broader concerns of humanity. When
King is making his challenge he has just returned from India and he remarks on
the poverty and economic inequality that he saw. At it’s core, the Civil Rights
Movement and really most of the black freedom struggle in American and the
struggle against anti-Semitism and the struggle against homophobia and the
struggle against all the –isms is the struggle to recognize the humanity of those
who hold these identities. Soon after Emancipation,
you see the formerly enslaved developing all of these strategies for what they
can do to make themselves worthy of the citizenship that once given is rapidly
being taken away. This moral refashioning becomes an ongoing strategy that
leads someone like King, a Morehouse graduate himself, to emphasize to these
now college educated descendant of formerly enslaved Africans of the need to
better themselves. King is letting them know that there is work to be done and
telling them how to make their humanity legible. He was telling them that they have a role to
play. He was telling them that Black Lives Matter.
Although I tire of the misuse of the word movement in conjunction with politics, I think we are certainly in a moment if not a movement and the title of my talk uses the moniker that has been given to this new brand of political activism—hashtag politics. Hashtag is a reference to Twitter and the way a word or words are preceded by symbol formerly know as the pound sign. The power of social media as a connective vehicle was already pretty well known but the political power revealed itself with the calls for justice in the case of Trayvon Martin and now there are so many names to add to this list. The current sentiment of political frustration and injustice combined with the new technology that King urged us to be cautious about has given birth to #BlackLivesMatter.
The
young people who are doing the hard labor of this effort, and those who worked
with Occupy and those who work against injustice on every front. The foot soldiers of The Black Lives Matter movement,
are again, busy at the same work as King.
They are trying to make the humanity of black people, nay all people
visible. The young, and alongside them
those who have been toiling for a long time, understand that the ability to
read the humanity of others and value that humanity is ongoing work of human
rights. The ongoing work of justice.
King says to those students what we must say
to each other now. What is your
contribution to the revolution? It will
not be the same for everyone. It is not
our job to be Rip Van Winkles, but to be Witnesses. See y’all didn’t see that was coming back did
you? You need your eyes wide open. The
Martin Luther King holiday is a collective celebration of an individual
man. A great man. An Honorable Man. A man who was prophetic in his understanding
of the conditions of his time and how the failure to deal with them might
impact generations to come. We live in
the successes and the failures of his hard work.
My
perspective and appreciation of King continues to evolve. My view of King and his work are changing as
the lens of my life changes. We, you and
I, our nation, our world, are in a revolutionary moment. King was working. He was a witness. He was a participant in the struggle to
undermine and undo the larger system of Jim Crow and its structural impact that
shackled black people and really continues to obstruct real equality. I think the challenge that is left to us—where
King can guide us, but only we can know—is the intimate and close personal
meaning of race in our nation. How does
a police officer recognize the humanity of unarmed black child? How can an
armed white man in Florida walk up to a car of black teens and shoot them
because he thought their music was too loud and claim he was standing his
ground? What part of that earth belonged to them? Where is the common ground of humanity in an
America that seems more divided, less open, and armed to the teeth than in
previous periods?
Since
the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, we have been witness to one video after
another. And much of why we know who the
names of these women and men, girls and boys is due to the technology of Twitter and the social connectedness
that could have me in my mother’s living room in Houston or my kitchen in Lexington,
get real world text or video on what is happening in Ferguson, Chicago,
Cleveland, Baltimore. I say that this is the intimate rather than individual
work because we are talking about how we make the humanity of children
visible. This impacts how we parent, how
we love, and how we fear for our children. How can there not be a revolutionary
movement, when black parents are teaching their children Jim Crow lessons of
how to engage with state agents in the 21st century.
The
Urban Dictionary, which is web-based primer to help, I am guessing from the
title, the non-urban (which is a euphemism for Black). It also helps
non-blacks. I am learning a new use as I
age in that is also helps old people of all races understand what young people
are saying. . This is real thing by the way, so parents of
teens go find it. If only they had an app?
The urban dictionary defines Stay Woke as having a presence of mind. To
in the moment disrupt and call a foul on the play. I am from Texas where
Football, not basketball, is the secular religion so the last one speaks to me
in a very deep way.
Staying
woke. Being an active witness. Calling
foul on the play. You have to speak to
injustice in the micro ways we teach our children to embrace their humanity even
as other deny it. In the way we
structure out intimate relationships. In how we engage with technology. I now
make a pitch when given the opportunity to speak to groups for the need to
remain engaged in spaces where the conversations are being had. So I challenge
you all to find a friendly teen. Approach cautiously. Some of them are feral. Let them walk you through twitter, facebook,
the vine. You can only be in the
conversation if you stay in the room and increasingly the room is digital. In
the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. I was with my mother who was glued to the
television while my then 22-year-old niece and I were glued to Twitter. She was so amazed at the difference in the
pace and amount of information we received that I signed her up.
One of the beautiful things about this speech,
Remaining Awake Through a Revolution, is that if you go online you can see the
speech in King’s own hand. They don’t
teach children cursive anymore so future generations may have difficulty, and
many children now, reading such material.
Having both the written text of the speech and media coverage, we also
know the places where King, moved perhaps in the moment, departed from the
text, At Morehouse King deviated from the text and he gives a caution to the
young students. The media reports say
that King closed with a “warning against inaction” by saying “If you go home,
sit down and do nothing about the revolution which we are witnessing. You will
be the victims of dangerous optimism.” In so many ways that is exactly where we
are. We are entering the aftermath of
the “green screen” of political aspirations that is Barack Obama recognizing
that we do not live in post-racial America and although there have been gains
there is so much further to go. Although
I have strong critique of the hope-mongering of Barack Obama, I understand the
righteous hope of oppressed people that has led to action, to triumph, to small
and large injustices, but like King suggests and young sisters and brothers
have said, we have to Stay Woke.
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