Woke up to this quote from Angela Davis:
The Occupant has been defeated. Celebrate. But we cannot breathe a sigh a relief, this must be a preamble for a new beginning. Have we learned the lessons revealed to us during this period?
Fell asleep last night after finishing the Showtime series The Good Lord Bird starring Ethan Hawke as the fiery abolitionist ‘Osawatomie’ John Brown. Many historians believe the War Against Slavery was effectively kicked off with Brown’s incompetent but courageously stupid attempt to commandeer the nation’s largest armory while inciting slaves and freedman to insurrection.
I just want to comment about ‘this moment’.
This moment being an awakening that we must not let pass. Dr. Angela Davis is absolutely correct. This must be a preamble to a new beginning.
This moment may be like those heady days in South Africa when apartheid was relegated to the trash bin of history. After all, this administration is the living embodiment of everything dark about America’s past. From the Make America Great Again slogan to the racist birther conspiracy theory the occupant used to gin up his base and get himself elected the first go around. From the nixing of Harriet Tubman’s portrait on the twenty dollar bill (replacing Andrew Jackson) at the start of his administration to the appointing of a woman who wouldn’t know a public school’s problems any more than she would know how to weld underwater.
I don’t know if this president was the most racist of all the presidents but there is no doubt he was inspirational to all of the rabid racists in America. I’d say he was their honorary Grand Wizard. I doubt a day went by during his presidency that he didn’t loose a dog whistle to his agitated followers.
Eight years of a Black man and his family in the White House stirred the “South shall rise again” crowd to a fever pitch. Confederate battle flags and military grade weaponry probably never saw a buying spike like those two terms. The Grand Wizard’s four years boosted sales even more.
I am hoping all of this white angst will - ultimately - be a good thing.
First of all, no one can deny there is deep-seated racism in this country. Colin Kaepernick would still be a quarterback in the NFL if there weren’t.
Second of all, they’re exposed for all the world to see. Their Grand Wizard gave them carte blanche to be themselves and, man, have they run with it. Spouting racist tropes is no longer just a pastime on some dark web chat room. You can find them on your town’s group social media page. Pledging their allegiance to bigotry.
But, it feels as if progress is happening. Or a moment is unfolding.
The incoming administration looks to be striving to be the most diverse ever. Democrats may finally be coming to the realization that, without Black voters, they are rudderless. They need to remember that every single election and not just presidential elections. The House continues to look more and more like America.
Black Lives Matters signs can be found everywhere. Even throughout my conservative mountain town. Black content online is going mainstream. From educational documentaries like 13th about the 13th amendment to podcasts like the 1619 Project. From the series Watchmen to Lovecraft Country, both of which incorporate strands of historical incidents like the Tulsa Massacre of 1921.
The Harriet Tubman story was out as a major motion picture last year before the pandemic shut theaters down. The hit NBC series This Is Us does an excellent job confronting a multitude of issues including race.
Clearly, the makers of video content - Hollywood and across all streaming services - are flinging the doors open to diversity. The demand must be there.
I almost forgot. The WNBA dedicated it’s entire season to Breonna Taylor and Say Her Name and, it wasn’t a ‘one-off’ like NFL teams linking arms or kneeling once at the beginning of their season, it carried on throughout the season. Enough as to elicit a denunciation and threatening letter from one of the Atlanta Dream owners, none other than the insider traitor running for one of the senate seats in the Georgia runoff, Kelly Loeffler.
Fortunately, the league ignored her, trumpeted the Breonna Taylor story and pushed hard to get out the vote.
All of this is anecdotal, and much of it has been in the process for some time. Black Panther, for instance, the first movie starring a Black superhero, was several years back. But, besides Angela Davis’ comment highlighted in Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley’s tweet and the final minutes of The Good Lord Bird where the filmmaker featured each Black actor one by one in their respective roles, I heard a couple of recordings of a former NFL defensive back named Aqib Talib getting his chance to color commentate a professional football game. Nothing unusual these days about a Black commentator working a professional football game except the beauty of it was that his speaking wasn’t polished, they didn’t dial back his dialect and they let him speak his game and his mind.
The reason I believe we are living a watershed moment is because we slept through the Obama years thinking we had reached a post-racial world. We were lulled into complacency not thinking that racism was dead, necessarily, but that it was dying or unacceptable behavior to be displayed in public or gasping on the ropes.
The Great White Hope proved that was wistful and wishful thinking.
But now we know. It’s alive and well in every pocket of America and all of us need to acknowledge it.
So, if journalists come snooping around wanting to know why I cast my vote for Biden/Harris, wanting to plumb the recesses of my mind for why I would vote against my interests as a small businessman, as an angry, white male in a changing world, I’ll tell them as a white person it’s up to me to recognize the world is wide and big enough for all of us and there’s no reason for systemic racism.
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Beat By Dre ad that has the advertising community abuzz.
Also, it is my understanding Dolly Parton invested a significant amount of money in the effort to come up with a vaccine for the coronavirus. Her money might have played a role in the Moderna vaccine. I think I mentioned quite a while back how remarkable Dolly Parton’s career has been. She has a Number 1 selling single or album in every decade she has been in the music industry. That’s a long time.
Thanks for reading and sharing. - JLM