Black

     In 1968 DeKalb College was a hub for the peace movement, civil rights movement and the free love generation.  I was a few years removed from these activities, having returned home from the military a few years older than most students. A wife and baby made a difference, also.

       Imagine my surprise to find these words written on the bathroom walls: Niggers, Honkies and Jews- which became a working title for my freshman public speaking class. My white seriousness about prejudice and discrimination issues astounded my classmates. The last line of that speech was, “Don’t give me any ax handle waving Lester Maddox, nor any Bible totin’ Hosea Williams.  I choose not to discriminate!” 

       How passionate,  . . . and how naive.  

       It has been 39 years since Maynard Jackson was elected Atlanta’s first black Vice Mayor.  Sounds funny, doesn’t it? It sounds like there was a government position in Atlanta called the Black Vice Mayor.

Maynard Jackson was not only the first, but also the last, person to be elected to the position of Black Vice Mayor. The position was subsequently called Vice Mayor. The Atlanta City Government later created a position for Maynard Jackson designated the ‘Black Mayor’.

       You may dismiss these descriptions as mere semantic antics, and also reject the concept which they put forth.  But you should be warned. It is not as simple as black and white.  It is as complicated as black and white.

      When Maynard Jackson was elected Vice Mayor, I wrote a paper because I was distressed that the Atlanta Newspaper had created so sharp a division on their front page in reporting the election.  Like the ink and the paper it was written on, the AJC’s coverage of Maynard Jackson’s first election succinctly divided the city’s population into black and white.

       As a native and lifelong resident of the Atlanta area, I was an experiential witness to inhumane discrimination and segregation of negros, colored people and blacks as I grew up in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s.  Now a white convert to non-violence via Selma on TV, and a disciple of Dr. King, I have tried to find a way, in our society, to not discriminate.  I choose to not discriminate.  But it is very hard to do in a world where we are so intent on having a reportable dividing line between black and white.

       Then there was Roots.  What a phenomenon!  How could I deprive blacks of their rich heritage and history just because my moral conscience wanted to ignore the fact that they were black.  In my original essay on Maynard Jackson, I brought out the characteristics of his skin and facial features, including eye color, all clearly Caucasian.  I removed those paragraphs later because I found them distasteful.  But then the arrival of Barack Obama begged the same questions.

       The Saturday, Oct. 25, 2008, AJC reports the staggering number of voters taking advantage of the ability to vote early in the 2008 historical presidential election.  These record breaking numbers were not sufficient for the story, not without a report of the ‘demographics’ of the voters.  ‘Demographics’ means how can we divide ourselves? How can we preserve the separateness of black and white?  How can we quantify and thereby perpetuate black and white? 

President Obama chooses to be black, but how can he?  Are not his genes bi-racial?  How can he be black and not white?  How is it fair to either race for him to choose one or the other?  How can he be black?  How can he be white?  So, if he cannot choose one race, at the exclusion of the other, what race is he?

       Oh, the absurdity of it. When can we let it go? When will we be able to accept that there is no race- but one race to which all men and women belong.  We are the human race.  But can we ever dispose of differentiation and be able to not discriminate.

        God truly inspired the dedication of Dick Gregory’s autobiography to his mother.   The profundity of his concept for titling the book was a gift from God. The book’s title was not ‘N-word’. We should not euphemize the ugliness of the word nor de-emphasize the need to totally eradicate it from our language. If we stopped granting an exemption for the connotation of affection when blacks use the word ‘nigger’ to refer to each other, it would help excise this cancer and purge its malignancy from the human vernacular, and the day might come that it is never heard from any human tongue.

       What prophetic new concept could have a chance to affect those who profane themselves by the affectionate use of the most catastrophic word in our vocabulary? Who could advance a call for purging the metastasis of this horrid word from our society and our cultures?

       In the year 2010, forty two years after my self defining speech and paper, what do I hear?  What do I read?  What do I see?

Black, black, black, black, black.

On the TV news, in the paper, in schools, on the radio, everywhere!  The world is uncontrollably divided into black and white, malignant and metastasized classifications. We cannot escape it.  We cannot escape our senses being bombarded constantly by:     

            black-white-black-white-black-white!

       When will it end, my brother?  Will we be subjected to this plague even unto our deaths.  Have we no choice other than to interbreed out the differences.  That would certainly solve the problem, leaving no differences to discriminate.

       What will it take?  Another charismatic, enigmatic leader like Dr. King?  Where will we find him?

Will he be black, . . . or white? 

       Is there no escape?  Who will come forth?  Who will climb this mountain and tell us what is on the other side?