America Is An Idea
And, even for the melanated person, it’s an idea worth fighting for.
I. I Have Finally Been in Included in ‘We The People’
There’s a new crop of social media keyboard warrior and writer popping up. One who professes to posses all truth and power in their veins and brains, and who, is in my assertion, far too comfortable with strawman, hyperbolic critiques of ancestors for whom they disagree with.
I’ll refrain from naming names and invoking the at button, primarily out of the insignificance of such decisions. Why take nuanced thoughts and diminish them with petty bickering.
There are valid critiques of contemporary figures that require scathing criticism (Barack Obama and Jay-Z come to mind), yet those individuals have the benefit of living in our present times. They are not to be given free passes or mulligans for their incessant idolatry of Black capitalism, largely because we’ve come to know that devotion to said systemic inequity isn’t a system they see worth overhauling but one in which they personally find great pleasure in exploiting. What may have began as genuine ignorance in the belief of Black symbolism, representation, and assimilated ownership has morphed into an selfish display of indulgence not quite on the scale of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison, but not too far off either.
In recent memory, the legacy of figures like Martin Luther King Jr. has come under greater scrutiny, though by and large, the criticism is more apt to apply to hoteps whose sperm donor wasn’t even thought of at the time of King’s assassination. In our arrogant naivete, we rush to venerate our heroes who openly advocated for violence, as if they, too, were more than imperfect human beings.
Our present times require a convergence of political, philosophical, and economic thought which has existed since the founding of this nation, and which has been crucical to any resemblance of incremental and explosive freedoms gained and cherished by those who were once completely under bondage. Frederick Douglass disagreed with many other abolitionists. Walter White and W.E.B DuBois couldn’t stand one another. Malcolm and Martin sat on the ideological fringes of one another. And the beat goes on.
I often wonder what anarchists who are non-White believe a totally disarrayed union would look like for non-White people. Their retorts are often fanciful and deflective. “Are you free now, brother?” In which I often inquire about what makes them believe the fall of any resemblance of a social structure or order will lend itself to the people who have been historically subjugated not being further enchained. I do not disagree with my revolutionary brothers and sisters, yet I do not condone stupidity, either. If I put a .45 and a .357 down in front of you and you can’t dismantle it, reassemble, and put it back together, you are not a revolutionary. Martin may have felt like he was leading us all into a burning building, but so too are you. If there’s no adequate plan of both defense and attack when you’re outmanned, outgunned, and outflanked, there are more than conversations to be had and Substack articles to write.
Perhaps we’re in need of de-colonizers and revolutinaries of all stripes and tactics? Maybe Barbara Jordan, Ida B. Wells, Eve Ewing and a host of others are revolutionary in their own right? Perhaps there’s a world where people we don’t always agree with still live radical lives by building institutions of mutual aid, rejecting the consumerism of the State, and sacrficing of themselves constantly to give unto their people? There are ballots and bullets, but there’s also food, health care services, places of worship, and childcare. Words and lives need not drip with venom and agitation to be considered revolutionary.
II. My Faith in the Constitution is Whole
On the list of figures I still choose to venerate, who in all of their wisdom and Jim Crow experience found it most reasonable to endeavor to force this American experiment to live up its ideals and principles rather than seek a utopia through mass violence or exodus, former Congressman Barbara Jordan stands out.
At the 1976 Democratic National Convention, congresswoman Barbara Jordan took the stage at Madison Square Garden in New York City to deliver a second keynote address to the hall.
Even today, conventions are hardly spaces where oratorical masterpieces come to fruition, though there are a few notable exceptions. The party’s nominee captures the attention and imagination of the crowd, and occasionally, you get special, memorable moments from keynote speakers, however stale the contents of their speech may be in retrospect. The most notable example of this is Barack Obama’s keynote at the 2004 DNC, which catapulted his national star and run for the presidency.
Jordan’s speech stands out, not only for its contents, but for the time and context in which it was delivered. After thousands of Black and poor and working class Americans had died in the senseless Vietnam War, American found itself at yet another crossroads. The president has been impeached and resigned just a couple years before. Nearly twnety years after the Supreme Court ruled separate but equal was unconsitutional, most school districts remain segregated.
In the summer of 1976, America celebrated its 200th anniversary, with many of the problems, challenges, and inequities present then that still exist today. Jordan’s most potent stand was clear — that to believe in the Constitution is to believe that one has a responsibility to ensure that the words and ideas expressed at this nation’s founding in fact one day become a reality for all of its citizens.
III. An Idea Born Out of Violence
In our sanitized telling of the American Revolution, we often remove the intricacies of the struggle’s violence. Wherever there is revolution, there is violence. And so, this nation we find ourselves in, the one that insists on pledging allegiance to a flag and standing for an anthem, has its founding roots in bloodshed and gruesome combat.
You’d be forgiven for not having a fluid understanding of the revolution. Even now, our images of violence are grotesque, but often, they are quick, distant, terse in their infliction. The evolution of military-grade weapons that enable humans to kill others at quick and alarming rates has enabled such a reality.
The American Revolution, however, is far from that. 18th-century combat knew not of AK-47s and other high-capacity magazine rifles. This violence is intimate. This violence is up close. This violence happens eye to eye. You see the holes in bodies and faces as you run for cover. You pierce the heart of your enemy with your bayonet, and trickle around long enough to hear him gurgle blood for the final time. You fear for the safety of your children and loved ones as the enemy marches closer, hell-bent on inflicting sexual violence as they march to the next post. Of this violence, America was born. Of this intimate combat, an idea began to flourish.
America is an idea, a collection of ideals that individuals who inhabit this land, either by choice or by force, collectively owe a sense of ownership to. Many of us didn’t choose to believe or agree to the terms of such a social construct, but since we are here, and since there’s an affinity for these ideas that we can’t seem to shake, we insist on this land inching itself closer to a true embrace of the ideals it put on paper, and the ones it seeks for each of us to celebrate.
There is a contingent of people occupying this land – hoarding wealth at unfathomable levels, seeking out a new way to ensure our deterioration, committed to achieving an authoritarian state that enables them to financially capitalize off it – that want you to believe America is something different. They want you to believe that America is a group of people with a shared history and shared values. They want you to believe that the founding of this nation is the truest and purest form by which the ideal has and can exist. They don’t believe many people have inalienable rights. I’m starting to think they don’t believe in a Creator either, and if they do, they don’t believe anyone or any being can hear the prayers and cries of the marginalized and oppressed.
In the century preceding the founding, Indigenous tribes roamed freely, having established their own systems of bartering and governance. In the century before that, slaves built critical infrastructure while experiencing insatiable brutality. All men, then, means all human beings, or it means wealthy white landowners. The founders, however, must have been hip to the idea that social mores would inevitably change over time. They knew the evil that was slavery. They understood that the will of the people would require a mechanism to correct their flawed execution, yet they were brilliant in creating ideals. After all, why would something perfect be amended 17 times?
IV. The Oligarchic Urge to Commit Mass Murder/What We Can Do About It.
Ideas are thoughts or conceptions. They are purposes, plans, or goals. At its best, an idea illustrates mental acumen. At its worst, it forms into actions of genocide and rape, of pillage and extermination, of death and destruction. The current rulers of the world would have us believe that we are committed to the destructive forces of society we currently live under, for to challenge such fortitude is incompatible with the barriers they’ve spent decades indoctrinating us with.
They see our divisions as penny stocks worth bottoming out for profit. They see our collective angst as an opportunity to harvest data. They see our pain as comedic fodder. They see our idea of democracy as a constraint on their profitability. They do not believe in democratic nation states, and thus, cannot be expected to protect, preserve, defend, or uphold the rights of a free-thinking people. They are devoted to deconstructing the ideals of America into a binary love-hate horse race. To them, anyone who chooses to recognize the beauty of American ideals and thus stands firm in the criticism of her unwillingness to live up to her professed truths shall be banished. Blind blanket support is their criteria for a patriot. Yet as every true intellectual gone before us has seen and professed, I see more prosaic things.
All we remain to ask of America is be true to what it said on paper, and now, more than ever, it is up to those of us who are artists, organizers, creatives, clergy, immigrants, activists and everything in between, to require the Empire be true to its words, to be punched in the sternum of their own hypocrisy, to repent of their damnation worthy sins, and to read and pretend to believe in the self-evident truths they espouse with the emptiness of a bucket of dung.
You are not the patriots.
We are.
To be abundantly clear, the oligarchs have won in the short term. The near-term prognosis of the idea of democracy is depressing. It seeps with infectious wounds and numbing pain. There’s a long way to stabilization, let alone healing, let alone restitution. This truth must be plainly stated.
Nevertheless, those of us who know our ancestors demanded better shall never waver in our admonishment of the current makeup. And we may find ourselves overwhelmed at times during the journey, in spaces that require exile or escapism, some short-term, others indefinitely. And you would be no less of a freedom fighter for doing so. Every soul to its own accord.
But while you are here, the fight requires your attention. Not doing so is an affront to your ancestors.
And you will be someone’s ancestor one day.
Act accordingly.
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