The Black American: Object or Subject?

The dedication of the Martin Luther King Memorial on the National Mall encourages us to reflect on our past as a people and to consider our future.

There is a Great American Myth that treats Blacks as objects rather than subjects.  In numerous movies, for example, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Mississippi Burning and Hairspray, Black Americans suffer with dignity until a moral Awakening transforms the hearts of White Americans.  The unspoken moral is that racial peace, freedom and equality come about when Whites decide to become liberals.

This gloss is wrong, repugnant and harmful.  It is wrong because throughout their history in America, Blacks struggled and fought for their own freedom, rights and welfare.  During the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of slaves emancipated themselves by escaping to Union lines.  Nearly 200,000 Black Americans served in uniform, while tens of thousands of others served in pioneer construction battalions or in the war economy.  Blacks fought and died for their rights during Reconstruction and persevered to maintain their families and communities during Jim Crow, with millions migrating North for work and freer lives.  As the Civil Rights era opened, Black Americans had organized themselves around churches, Black educational institutions and community organizations to militate for their rights. 

In light of this history, the Great American Myth as expressed in the film Mississippi Burning is particularly repugnant since it uses the backdrop of real events to tell a White buddy action story.  The FBI is portrayed as the white knight come to rescue the helpless Blacks.  In reality, Hoover's FBI was convinced the Civil Rights movement was Communist motivated and sought to weaken, not support, the movement.  What's particularly vile about Mississippi Burning is that, although Blacks have been murdered, raped and beaten throughout the story, the act which drives the by-the-book FBI agent to finally get tough is the beating of a White woman.

So why is all of this harmful?  In re-writing American history as a White Awakening, the Great American Myth treats Blacks as inferior and incapable.  As recipients of White sympathy and largess, Blacks remain the other, the passive objects of White benevolence, victims incapable of deciding and achieving for themselves.  Blacks serve as salves for White consciences and lab rats for Progressive social experimenters.

Rosa Parks, whose refusal to yield her bus seat to a White person triggered the Montgomery bus boycott, has been depicted as a "humble seamstress."  Like Mac in Yertle the Turtle, she cracked when she could take no more.  In reality, Ms Parks was a hard-nosed activist, part of a network of activists, who understood their rights and asserted them through a calculated act of law breaking.

Rosa Parks, like millions of other Black Americans who have struggled and fought in the political, economic and social arenas, was the subject of her own life.  To pretend otherwise so Whites can feel good about themselves, or so that politicians and activists of various races can make a living tending a grievance industry, is to perpetuate the racism and discrimination we should have rejected as a people long ago.