#StayWoke: Martin Luther King and The Necessity of Awareness in the Era of Hashtag Politics

 

 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 21^st 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.

What I Would Save With the Work I Do...If I Could

Within weeks of finding out I was pregnant, I knew in my heart my child would be a boy. By the time I reached the sonogram in the twenty-fourth week when the sex can be verified, I had already chosen his first name. I named him James for my mother’s third brother and my first substitute father. In the first twenty-three weeks, this child and I were forced to have deep conversations that take some parents into adulthood to share with their children. A swirl of troubling genetic tests, faltering hormone levels, cross-country moves, and concerns about the reception of friends, family and colleagues to an unwed pregnancy—even to a woman in her late thirties with two advanced degrees and a room of her own—forced my developing boy and I to have many heart to hearts. I was elated when science confirmed what my heart knew. In less than twenty-four hours that elation would transform into intense worry.

My son was conceived in Texas. A place where my family has lived in relatively the same place for nine generations. Texas is the place where my family’s home and labor and blood are built in the soil. Where their race had for most of those generations determined their destiny. James was also conceived in “the field” or what social scientists call the places where we conduct our research. For just one year I had returned to Texas to immerse myself in this place where my intellectual efforts, if not my body, are always toiling. I visited death row. I attended hearings. I sat next to lawyers who were my teachers and models for how to be a lawyer and the ability of lawyers to change and save lives. I read. I wrote. I conceived a child.

Despite being submerged in the history and sadness of the death penalty, I had not connected that part of my life to the part that was about to be a parent until the day the sonographer said, “it is definitely a boy.” Happiness became worry when I thought about the black men I had met in prisons, jails, and other unproductive places over the years. I thought about how easy it can be for black men to be caught up in a system that does not value their survival or preservation. I thought about the first day he would be pulled over by the police for performing the ordinary task of driving an automobile. I thought about the intra-racial contests of masculinity that have lead to young black men being, at times, their own worst enemy. I thought of how, because he is my child and will surely have my mouth, the public school system will try to pathologize what I know to be precociousness. I thought about my father who only learned the grown up art of parenting a few years before his death with his 14^th child and 3^rd son who was too young at his death to fully benefit from his late maturation. All I could see were the negative statistics on the lives of black men I trade on in my professional life.

I was once asked by the poet Nikky Finney: what I would save with the work I do? If I could save anything with my work, it would be those first hours of elation without the gradual worry for the physical and mental health of the black man in my womb now born. I thought about that day when modern medicine confirmed what I knew from mother wit. I would save the world, if I could. I would save it for my son and all the other black men, women and children, high yellow and pitch black whose mothers have the right to have their burden of worry free from the concern that their children’s blackness will make them vulnerable in ways our arms and love will not be able to protect them.

This piece in longer form was publish in the Tidal Basin Review under the title "Thoughts in the Aftermath of an Execution"

Homeslice: Words in Praise of Hanes Walton.

homeslice: Another term for homie, but more personal and often used amongst friends of the highest value. (Urban Dictionary)

When I left Prairie View A&M University for the University of Michigan, my professors—Dr. Jewel Prestage and Drs. Barbara and Mack Jones–told me to find Hanes Walton.  They all went way back in the way that so many of the intellectual craftspeople who molded me do.  They said I should meet Hanes Walton and that he would help me, but the other black professor in the department at that time, I should “avoid at all costs”.  Like the obedient child that I am, I sought him out and he did what they said.  He helped me. 

Others will discuss Hanes Walton’s monumental intellect and his amazing contribution to the fields of political science, black politics and African American Studies.  But I will say a few words about how inspiring it is to see your professor in the library more than the department.  In the first few years I was at Michigan this was often the case with Hanes.  In navigating the maze that is the Graduate Library, I would often run into Hanes—on the weekends, in the early mornings, on a random afternoon.  There he was with his signature baseball cap, long black overcoat worn in the too long winters of Michigan for anyone born is the sea salt air of Georgia or Texas.  I would jokingly ask, “ Do you live here?” He would laugh in a way that became a regular and ready communication that he appreciated a joke and that he appreciated you.

That laugh, for me, also became a communication of recognition.  The transition to Michigan from Prairie View was extremely difficult, not because I had a degree in physics and found myself in a top tier political science program. It was difficult because the warm, loving, supportive incubator of blackness that I had known was gone and I found myself in the cold winter white world of the University of Michigan.  I was a black girl from a working class family one generation out of the cotton fields and from under the hood of a car in Southeast Texas who found herself in an elite educational environment where even my understanding of the place from whence I came seemed open for challenge. No one understood this transition better than Hanes having received his education in similar institutions and then taught in them until he was called to, what was considered by some, “the big leagues,” but what was for me, and I think for him, an alternative space to gain resources and access to answer questions of concern for our communities and ourselves.  Because of this big transition I had made…we had made…we would discuss the differences and he would help me see how to better navigate my new space and the space I would occupy as a faculty member.  In our common recollections of the black institutions that had nurtured us he helped to ease me into and then out of what was, at least socially and, in terms of mentoring, a radically different learning environment. In a passing conversation on a frigid midwestern day, he could be the band at halftime, a step show on the yard, Dr. Prestage’s admonition of “dear, I think we can do better.”

Overtime, I would teach under his guidance and then he would work with me on my dissertation.  And when I came to him nearly in tears after a problematic committee member who for two days looked at 6 months of writing, 2 years worth of research, and 8 years of post-undergraduate education and tried to tear down my work and my spirit, Hanes said, “You are the expert now. You have done the work. Do not let anyone challenge you on what you know to be the truth.” With that, I walked to the graduate school officially told that guy to kick rocks and defended my dissertation one month later. 

Hanes Walton was the homeplace.  He too was Southern. And to borrow the language of Chicago minister, he was unapologetically black.  He was fully himself and encouraged you to be your full intellectual and personal self.  He celebrated your accomplishments as if they were his own and, in part, they were.  Whether you called to say you had been awarded tenure or your first book contract or given birth to your first baby, you could hear his sincere joy through the phone…can we all just laugh and say one more time on the phone…as he would say, “ya done good, kiddo!”  He did not judge your choices, but he would advise and help you figure out the best way and, in difficult moments, the best way out. 

When I saw him this past September at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in Pittsburgh at a panel honoring the Life and Work of our colleague Ron Walters…a meeting I had never attended before…a meeting I did not know Hanes attended…a meeting where like those days in Ann Arbor, I happened upon Hanes in a place where I was seeking to learn something new and find a new intellectual community. I told him all my good news and he smiled and congratulated me saying, “good job, kiddo!” He asked after my child and told him that I hoped they could meet. Maybe on a trip to Michigan in the summer? A summer that now will not come.

What I learned from Hanes was that a ready smile in difficult circumstances can be a shield.  What I have learned from Hanes is that home is where the heart is.  What I learned from Hanes is that my job as a professor is to guide my students to the level of competency to answer the questions that they have. What I learned from Hanes is that my professional rise was bereft of joy unless I could celebrate the achievements of those who were in community with me.  What I learned from Hanes Walton was the deep, rigorous, empirical study of black people could be an intellectual act, but also an act of love

Thoughts on Amending the Constitution

My brief suggestion of what I would change about the U.S. Constitution in the NYTimes.com Room for Debate.   I think a positive first step would be rethinking our interpretation of the Second Amendment.  I am proud to be among legal scholars I admire. I am also proud and a little bothered that this 300 words has generated my first hate mail. And we move forward...

Thoughts on Learning Balance Before Trying to Keep Up

This weekend I bought my son his first bike.  A balance bike to be exact.  It has no pedals. It instead requires the child to walk along while straddling a miniature bike frame.  Just when they have mastered this trick of perambulating and steering, they lift their feet and glide.  It was explained to me that the hardest part of learning to ride a bike is maintaining one’s balance. Once they understand balance, then pedaling is easy.

I have a lot of emotion not just because I am watching a child ride a bike who this time last year still fed from my breast. I am filled with emotion because I wonder how I will keep this lesson of prioritizing balance rather than myopically pursuing the distant goal at the front of his mind as he moves from infancy to childhood to man. I wonder because it is not a lesson that I have fully learned in my nearly four decades.  So much of my life has flown by like wind, airy and fleeting, while I pursued all the things I was taught made a life secure. 

This summer we will spend a lot of time biking with me walking beside—then running behind—trying to teach him that the pursuit of balance is as much a part of following the path.    

Everything I Know About Power My Uncles Learned in Viet Nam (Part II)

The second story is less about the private power of family and more about understanding a personal response to public power’s willingness to sacrifice life it feels has no value.  The history of this country is marked by that kind of sacrifice by men just like my Uncles.  As a scholar of the death penalty, I am constantly reminded of the willingness of the state to sacrifice black bodies on the alters of power and progress.  In times of war, this domestic inclination goes international.  As a person who has met men on death row, I also know that, in often small and unacknowledged ways, men like my uncles resist.  In that afternoon of my high school years, my Uncle James would tell me how he also resisted the attempts of the state to sacrifice him for its better good. 

Both my uncles fixed things in the military.  My Uncle Alex repaired ships.  My Uncle James repaired tanks.  My uncle explained the difficulty of moving a tank through a jungle.  I have now spoken with three of my Uncles about their experiences in Viet Nam, and the most common narrative is the brutality of the terrain.  Always wet and bogged down in mud and muck, the war was as much with the nature of the place as with the people. All their accounts gave me the impression of constant movement toward some unspecified point periodically interrupted by the encounters with an unspecified enemy.   When the tank could not maneuver the terrain or just broke under the stress of combat, they would stop.  When the tank stopped, my Uncle James was the first step in the return to forward motion.  In that war with nature and men, movement seemed to be somehow equated with safety.  

Uncle James was the lowest level mechanic. He was only authorized to repair the most basic functions of the tank. He repaired belts, wheels and chains. At least these are the parts my girl child brain recorded.  I am truly unsure if tanks have wheels, but if they did, I am sure my Uncle fixed them.  Because of the emphasis on forward motion, all repairs had to be made within a certain time period.  If he could not make the repairs in the specified time, he would be left on his own to make the repairs and he would follow with the next unit to cross his path.  They would leave him alone in a jungle in Southeast Asia. They would leave him, like black men and poor men of all races before him, as a lamb awaiting slaughter for America’s obsession with forward motion. But, my Uncle would not lie down.  He would resist.  He understood who he was and the meaning and manipulation of power.

 All more complicated repairs had to be made by mechanics with higher levels of training—the upper echelon.  The upper echelon consisted, as I was told, mostly of white men.  Maybe these men had some college or just more training from the army. I do not know.  They were responsible for the sophisticated repairs and my uncle the simple.  If my Uncle could not make the repair, the sergeant would be forced to call in the upper echelon allowing my Uncle to continue with his unit.  In true military fashion and in the life all my Uncles later lived, the division of labor was rigid.  My uncle was not the in the upper echelon in Viet Nam nor in the United States.

By the time I was interviewing him about his experiences in Viet Nam, he had created a different life than the one he lived immediately after his return.  All of my uncles returned to various parts of the U.S. broken and drinking.  The need to self-medicate was not completely motivated by the loss of Viet Nam.  My Uncle James used alcohol to push back the memories of war, to numb the pain of being spit upon by anti-war protesters on his return, and surely to lighten the load of baggage her carried with him from the poverty of Jim Crow Texas.   Most of my Uncles would sober by the time I was in middle school.  My Uncle James’ transformation would be the most profound.  He returned to Philadelphia to find his wife, child and business gone. He went to work at a tool and dye factory.  He drank and then he stopped.   Then in the mid-nineteen eighties, he heard the calling.  He went to seminary at night and got a degree in theology. He would then spend the rest of his life ministering to senior citizens.  He found is daughter and they reconciled.  Together, they would prepare dinner and hold services in the community room of the oldest residential facility for black senior citizens in the United States for nearly two decades.   When he died, he was as much my father as my uncle.  By the time I was interviewing him, I could not have believed he was capable of sabotage. I am older now.  I know he was capable of surviving and the ethics of survival sometimes require sabotage. 

My Uncle took his duties as a mechanic seriously.  He would work hard to make the necessary repairs.  I remember the brief hesitation and then the sincerity in his voice when he relayed the next part of the story.  Even years later, he had difficulty discussing the fear that was with him all the time.  In the beginning, he would follow the protocol.  Make the repair.  If the repair could not be made in time, stay behind and follow with the next unit.  After this happened several times, he began to think about his wife, his child and the rest of his family.  It is often only in the context of family that black people truly know they are valued and valuable. I believe in a tank in Viet Nam, distant from my family’s loving context, that he learned things of value must survive.  When it became clear that he could not make repairs he knew were within his echelon of knowledge in sufficient time to continue with his unit, he would do what he felt it took to survive.  He would wait for a distraction.  He would find his moment.  He would then break something that could only be repaired by the upper echelon. 

I know as I write this some will only see him as saboteur.  This is not the traditional story of heroic service to which most Americans are accustomed.  As one who has existed in the lower and upper echelons of both personal and professional battlefields, it is the only type of heroism I can now trust—fearful attempts to do the right thing fueled and tempered by a desire to survive.  By the time we were discussing his experiences in Viet Nam, he was already my hero.  My awe for him then was a childish adoration for a man who loved and doted on a small girl who needed a father’s love.  I am no longer a child.  In my maturation, my awe for him, at times, overwhelms me.  I think about him as a young man alone in a tank with mind racing trying to do the right thing and to live.  Now as a woman, I know that what is right is not fixed when one’s survival is on the line. 

The image of my Uncle in that tank comes to me as frequently as the taffeta prom dresses he bought for me and every girl child in my family for decades or our trip to the Liberty Bell on my first visit to Philadelphia when I was 12.  In a crucial moment, he understood who he was and who he did not want to be in relation to powers that were both outside and within his control.  Eyeing the constraints of his situation, he took his fate as much into his own hands as he possibly could.  He was neither martyr nor sacrifice.  He was a man who chose to live even when living for black men was not easy.  I cherish these stories because they help to fully explain the man, and men, I came to know in their later years.  I cherish these stories in a family that, at times, equates physical proximity with communication.  Sometimes the most difficult thing to see is the thing right next to you.  Distance has given me my greatest view of my family.  

When that distance took me to Ann Arbor and then colleges through out the U.S. in my search for academic employment, I would remember my Uncles’ education in power.  Because so many of my Uncles, cousins, and racial kin went to Viet Nam, I have sometimes forgotten that young men did other things during that time.  On more than one occasion in an academic setting, I have been told by older, usually white, men that they had not intended to make a life in academia.  They had prolonged their educations solely to avoid the war in Viet Nam.  These would-be colleagues brazenly, sometimes tinged with braggadocio, relayed all the things they did because they did not want to go to Viet Nam.  I would think.  My Uncles also did not want to go to Viet Nam, but they did not know that classroom doors were escape hatches.  I know what classrooms can mean.  They, my Uncles, were intelligent men.  In that small town whose mention led my Uncles one to another in Hawaii, my family is known for their smarts.  In these interactions with men who did not know that sabotage can be one’s salvation, I was not angered.  I would not wish the experiences of my uncles on any one.  I was aware, however, of the difference between these men and my Uncles and how their differences still defined their difference from me. 

Academia is not literally a war zone, but at moments I have felt threatened and fearful.  It is those identities—not the experiences—that distinguish my would-be colleagues from my Uncles that have put me in their midst and at times, their crosshairs.  I, like my Uncles, grew up poor in the racial complexities of Texas, but in a time when a black girl could be rewarded for intellect.  I, like my Uncles, am young and black and in a place that views my body and its effort as a tool for someone else’s project.  I, like my Uncles, do not inhabit this battlefield alone: my twin sister, Melanye, also a university professor shares it with me.  I, like my Uncles, have had to remain keenly aware of the shifting landscape that could at any point strand or engulf me.  I study the law because I have always had a need to know the rules. 

Unlike my Uncles, I am now, in certain ways, in the upper echelon. I hold more degrees than most people and teach in places where blacks have only recently been allowed entrance and have solidified my place with tenure.  In my personal and professional life, I fix things or at least try.  I am always aware, however, in all my attempts at repair that in our society’s commitment to hierarchies there are those who still hold positions above and below me with corresponding relations and access to power.  I am very proud of the place and space I possess in the world, but I am never brazen about it nor do I brag.  Too many are still in echelons that make their survival a hope or a question.  I try to remember that people like me have not always been kind to people like me and my Uncles.  I try not to strand or sacrifice—in the small ways that we can—anyone in my pursuit of survival, but my family has taught me that I am valuable.  Valuable things must survive.

My Uncle James died a quick but brutal death from pancreatic cancer the summer after my first year in law school.  Two years later, I graduated and was sworn into the Texas Bar the next day.  As I stood a few steps away listening to the plans of a classmate, I heard my mother and two of her siblings speaking in tones that as a child always made me want to listen harder.  These tones signaled conversations that were not for children’s ears—the best kind of adult conversation when you are young.  Now, each time they ring in my ear I must remind myself that I am grown now.  Without moving, I still strained to hear the conversation of my mother her siblings who would be the last of their kind standing.  My Aunt Mary says how proud and exciting.  She is my touchstone for enthusiasm—always a phone call away with praise and interest.  My mom, the picture of graceful reserve, says yes it is.  My Uncle Joe, the only of his brothers not to do battle in a far away war, is the last man standing in many ways.  He has no children, but we have made him a father.  He is a watcher and lends his words when they are only perfectly crafted for impact.  There is silence and he says, “You know who would have loved this?”  I cannot see them clearly, but I know they are shaking their collective heads.  My mom, the matriarch of our family since her oldest sister became ill shortly after my high school graduation, speaks for them all.  She said with love and sadness and power, “James.”

For the students who fill my classrooms today, Viet Nam has little personal significance.  Though I was barely living, Viet Nam will be as much my war as the two in the deserts of the Middle East and caves of Afghanistan.  When I chastise my students for the failure to appreciate this recent history, they ask me why is it so important.  I tell them everything I know about power my Uncles learned in Viet Nam.  They look at me quizzically.  Maybe this will explain.

Everything I Know About Power My Uncles Learned in Viet Nam (Part I)

When my high school history teacher assigned each of us to interview someone who served in Viet Nam, I could feel the tension in my shoulders mounting.  The assignment would not be hard.   At least six of my uncles served in Viet Nam—blossoming into manhood in this far away jungle.  At the time finding someone to interview was less of a concern than the memories of being harangued by an elderly deacon with detailed stories of digging latrines in Yellowstone Park when we covered the Great Depression.   Somehow I felt this assignment would end similarly. 

I chose to interview my Uncle James.  One of three of my mother’s five brothers to fight in Viet Nam, he was for many reasons the easiest choice for me.  He and my mother’s love for him were a constant of my childhood.  He came to Texas from his new home in North Philly like a regular whirlwind of love and activity and masculinity.  His visits to us, for my siblings and I, were extended days of joy even when sadness brought him home.  If I had to endure being regaled with times long gone by my teenage mind’s estimation, enduring it with him would make it easier.  At the time I did not consider whether my ease was a cause of dis-ease for him.  Asking him to share a time little discussed in my family whose history is only recorded in the communal retelling of my mother and her siblings gave me little hesitation, though now I appreciate the need—for me and them—to pause before entering the pain of others.

 At the time, I was not aware that this would be the first, of many, times my intellectual pursuits would require me to record life put in the balance by the state decisions.  Today, most of the lives in balance are only known to me by the pages of court documents or news articles, but I am all too aware that these early immersions in my family’s legends makes them familiar to even my most objective scholarly eye.  At the time, I could not know that my Uncle’s stories would be life lessons in power and knowledge.  Yet, they are.  At the time, I was young and had little time for old men’s stories.  At the time, I did not have my own war to protest.  At the time, I did not know that he would die too young from the factory dye that perpetually tinted his fingers and nails.  At the time I did not know that hard work could kill.  At the time I did not know anything.  I only knew what I was told.  Find someone who was in Viet Nam and interview them.  I chose my Uncle James.

I cannot remember the exact questions I asked.   Even now as I comb through my memory, I cannot tell you any of the particulars.  How long he was there.  Exactly where in the country he was.  What was his rank?  Who took care of my Aunt Ella and my Cousin Michelle while he was gone?  Why he, a man who was married with a child, was drafted in the first place? What was in those lost letters he wrote my mother that always grieved at their mention?   Were the ghosts that haunted him for more than a decade after his return a specific spook or a more general poltergeist? 

I only remember two stories, but so vividly that they rerun through my mind like a late night movie only partially viewed after interrupted sleep.  The names and colors are muted, but the overwhelming impression lingers.  Like a found snapshot, what happened immediately before and after are obscured in comparison to the events of that one moment.  If I had not been a student of politics maybe these simple stories of a young man away from home and fighting for someone else’s rights would not have lingered.  What follows are the snapshot of Viet Nam my Uncle gave me that day obscured by time—time from the happening to his telling me to my re-telling now.  The first is a story of being found and the other is a story of not being lost. 

To appreciate the first story of him, I must first say a little about us.  I have often joked that my fanaticism for movies about the mafia is because they remind me of my own family, minus the violence.  What resonates with me is the cemented nature of the relationships among those who bind themselves one to another.  If you are in the family, your membership obliges you to the collective above all other relationships.  There is the sense among the members that the hands of la famiglia can reach you at any time and from anywhere.  There is no escape.  It has always seemed that my family followed a similar, but more loving and caring, code. 

We were a close-knit clan who had little need for outsiders.  For the bulk of my life, the majority of my family lived within miles, if not minutes or steps, of one another.  The cartography of our homes was also a study of our history.  Although by the time I was born most everyone lived in the city, all of our houses were just off the road that led directly to the town where my mother was born and where her family had lived since before emancipation.   We were tied to each other physically and emotionally.  As a child, I felt safe under their watch and always within seconds of their grasps.  In the first of my uncle’s stories, I learned the extent of that reach.

On his way to Viet Nam, as I remember it, my Uncle James was stationed in Hawaii.  His time in Hawaii was not completely like that of South Pacific fame filled with song and dance, but it was similarly marked by racial prejudice.  Of the people I have met who have lived in or visited this paradise in the Pacific, my Uncle James is the only person to have left with the sincere belief that is was not beautiful.  For him, it was a staging ground for war with beaches and palm trees.  This was the first step to a place where he could die and leave his wife and young child in a worse situation than they were at the time. 

He spent a lot of his free time in his bunk. Thinking is what I think he said he did most.  As a teen, I had no imaginings of what those thoughts must have been.  My uncle, like my mother and her other siblings, had grown up much under his own tutelage after the death of their mother.  Though known for his smarts, he meandered through school.  His meandering led him to my great aunt and uncle—Ruth and I.G.—in Philadelphia.  In Philadelphia, he met his wife, fathered my cousin, and opened a small restaurant in North Philly. Then he was drafted.  I now feel strongly he must have wondered about the set of circumstances that landed him in a metal military bunk on an island in the Pacific awaiting a trip to Viet Nam.  I am sure he did not deconstruct the ideological views at that particular point in the Cold War that saw this small former French Colony as the lynchpin in preventing the world from falling into the hands of communists, though he may have.  It is my family who has taught me that knowledge and education are not necessarily equivalents.  I am sure he understood the effects of race that led him, a poor black man, to stand in rifled opposition to his Vietnamese counterpart.  I know he thought of his wife and young daughter.  He thought of my mom because he wrote her letters.  In that bunk, he pondered his universe and others in ways my mind is just maturing enough to imagine. 

On one of those thoughtful afternoons with his eyes closed, he sensed a presence.  He opened his eyes.  Above him, smiling ear-to-ear, was his brother Alex.  Alex, two years his junior, left Texas on a direct path to the U.S. military, with no detours in the economic promised land of the North.  By the time he left the service, he would be a soldier, a marine, and finally and longest, a sailor.  The sea was his calling.  He was a Seabee--the nickname for the Naval construction battalion.  On my last visit to his home in California just up the road from Port Hueneme where the Seabees are based, the first thing he told me was to go to the back yard.  In the backyard under the orange tree leaning against the fence was a huge sign 15 feet wide and 5 feet high that read, U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay Philippines.  I turned to see my Uncle with the smile I am sure he gave his brother that day in Hawaii.

 I have never been to Subic Bay but I know it because it is where my Uncle Alex met my Aunt Lilly.  They would live there for much of their early married-life at this naval facility on the coast of the island of Luzon in the province of Zimbales.  Zimbales is the starred capitol of my mental map of the Philippines because of the collection of people who with my Aunt have reconstructed their hometown in Southern California mostly out of love and longing for origins.   It is the place where my cousin, their son, Jimmy would be deported for complicated governmental definitions of family that said he was not really one of us.  Jimmy’s Philippine birth made him too much of a threat to remain in a post-September 11^th America. I turned again to the sign trying to imagine the feats necessary to get the sign, put it on a ship, remove it from the ship, get it off the base and then put it in his back yard.  I asked my uncle how and still smiling, he said he had no idea.  I looked at my uncle and his sign bearing the name of a place he loves and where his son now lives again. In that moment, I knew he was a man whose love could move things.  I thought of his brother, my Uncle James, for whom my son is named and whose recent death had shaken my family at its foundation and I knew he was also a man whose love could also find things.

My uncle—the sailor—found his brother—the soldier—on an army base in the Pacific.  In Uncle James’ version of the story, Alex—like most Texans—told everyone within hearing distance about the mighty state from which he haled and his home town.  There were others like these brothers—black men from small southern towns fighting again for a democracy they did not know in the United States—who would find each other and form new Georgias, Alabamas and South Carolinas in foreign lands.  One man told another who knew of a guy who was from a small town in Texas that sounded like the one someone said in a conversation.  This chain of information was only one manifestation of the links between these two men. They were able to spend the most time together since they had left Texas as boys looking for manhood.  Because they are men and men in my family—a particularly breed of man I have long observed—I know they did not express their concern for themselves and the other.  Nor did they acknowledge the deep and abiding love they shared.  But I know now that sometimes the most loving act can be physical presence: This is an act they would perform again and again. Criss-crossing this continent until illness and death kept them still.  They happened across each other’s paths several times in Southeast Asia. They would meet again only to depart for their separate battles.  They would find, but never lose, each other through their tours in war and life.

(The above post and the next to come were published in an essay collection on Black in Texas)