Three-word philosophies

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2015
The Weekly Screed (#735)

Three-word philosophies

by David Benjamin

“… And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing…”
— The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

PARIS — I remember — when I was about six — a sign. It was in front of a house on Jackson Street and it read, I thought, “Johnsons Live Best.”

I was impressed with the Johnsons, and a little envious. They possessed such confidence in their way of life that they dared to post a placard on their lawn, for all to see, that they had it better than anybody else in Tomah!

One grade later, I realized — with some chagrin — that the sign really said, “Johnson’s Live Bait.” This letdown proved a sort of opportunity, because I did a lot of fishing, and Mr. Johnson turned out to be a reliable source of fresh worms.

Around that time, I was taking the advanced course in Irony from my dad. So, it wasn’t a great stretch for me to perceive that if you have to climb out of a warm bed at 5:30 a.m. to sell 50 cents worth of nightcrawlers to a ten-year-old, you were not living the best life in town.

Nowadays, it seems to me that the Johnsons’ unintended boast bears an eerie resemblance to the latest civil rights motto, “Black Lives Matter, partly because they share the same middle word. If I were six years old today, I might see this phrase as “Blacks Live Better,” a reading both positive and ironic.

But the feature that captivates me about the cri de coeur of Ferguson and Baltimore — as did the Johnson sign when I was a semi-literate little kid — is its ambiguity, although to some readers, “black lives matter” is crystal clear.

As the New York Times editorialized: “Demonstrators who chant the phrase are making the same declaration that voting rights and civil rights activists made a half-century ago. They are not asserting that black lives are more precious than white lives. They are underlining an undisputable fact — that the lives of black citizens in the United States historically have not mattered, and have been discounted and devalued.”

True, but name me a liberal or progressive who didn’t get that point instantly. When people like me — who’ve been agitating for social justice all our lives — hear “black lives matter,” we understand because that’s what we’re talking about.

But there’s the rub. This isn’t how it’s heard by America’s millions of aggrieved and defensive white folks, the great ambivalent mass of closet bigots who would help an old black lady across the street or buy an ice cream cone for a cute pickaninny but seethe with rage at the thought of a Cadillac welfare queen buying Pringles and caviar with her food stamps.

Semantically, “Black lives matter” begs a false equivalency that inadvertently serves the racists it seeks to overcome. Conservative blowhards like Scott Walker, Ted Cruz and Bill O’Reilly retort that “White lives matter, too” or that “All lives matter.” All three assertions, after all, are manifestly true. Lumping them together foments a rhetorical dodge that muddles — for too many (non-Times-reading) casual listeners — the serious implications of the original formulation.

When I first heard “Black lives matter,” I thought it forceful and poignant, a spontaneous objection to the myriad injustices that shackle the African-American community. But then I watched as repetition diluted its insouciant potency. Pretty soon, “Black lives matter” was a mere slogan, splashed on signs, printed on t-shirts and coffee mugs, chanted numbingly through long protest marches and hastily inserted into hiphop lyrics.

Even that moment has passed. Now, “Black Lives Matter” (BLM?) is less a campaign slogan than it is a brand. As such, it tends to choke public discourse because too many people adhere to the belief that when you’ve said it, it’s like when you’ve said “Budweiser.” You’ve said it all.

In short, yes, black lives matter. That’s obvious. What else you got?

The historic civil rights movement cited in the Times editorial had brilliant, powerful, intellectual and spiritual leaders whose philosophy could not, would not confine itself to three or four words in all capital letters. The Memphis “I Am A Man” sanitation strike, for example, made history not for its epigraph, but for the Rev. Martin Luther King, who was its voice and its martyr. By appearing, speaking, resisting and leading in Memphis and elsewhere, King made his humanity and that of every black, minority and female American a matter of utmost significance and profound urgency. The timeless genius of King’s non-violent movement was that it confronted without dividing. This distinction is embodied in the rare slogan associated with Dr. King: “We Shall Overcome.”

“We Shall Overcome” suggests no divisions and invites no misinterpretations, either accidental or facile. Its operative noun is an unspecific “we” that could, should, and does include all of us in the struggle for social justice.

“Black lives matter” suggests the polarity that was unfortunately implicit in the Black Power movement. It foreshadows a similar irrelevancy. The idea behind the slogan — from real-estate redlining to education funding to police misconduct to mass incarceration to gun laws and vote suppression — are far too complicated and too important to be squeezed and reduced into a three-word philosophy, especially one whose strongest connotation is division rather than union. Black Lives Matter needs something more than “black lives matter.” It needs leadership.

Picture the civil rights movement without the voice, the charisma, the sacrifice and the management of Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, Medger Evers, Julian Bond, Amelia Boynton, John Lewis, Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and you’re looking at an America without the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

This means that if Black Lives Matter is going to amount to anything, someone — preferably someone famous (like Frederick Douglass) — has to make that demand, and then keep talking, eloquently, about the history and the ideas and the agony behind that demand, as did Dr. King in the March on Washington, and in the Birmingham jail and from the pulpit of a hundred churches.

“Black Lives Matter” was fun, and meaningful for a while. But a three-word philosophy is too easily reducible to an irony, like “Johnsons Live Best.” One of the ironies of “black lives matter” is the spectacle of its nameless minions climbing several times onstage with Bernie Sanders — the fiercest advocate for social justice in the current U.S. Senate — and bullying him into silence with a three-word cliché. Those aggrieved but inarticulate sloganeers scripted their ambush with nary a coherent word, leaving behind only a confused audience and a frustrated silence.

Now that their slogan has passed its expiration date, the “Black Lives Matter” people face the same dilemma that shuffled the leaderless and ultimately ineffectual “Occupy Wall Street” people into obscurity. They have to grow beyond a three-word philosophy. The time has come to fish or cut bait.

I know where they can buy the bait.