Dr. King and American Mythologies

To hear Brandi read this essay instead, click here: https://youtu.be/IuK8HnC6WVs

As the national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr approaches, I hope we can honor his legacy by confronting our myths. First, let’s think about the fact that he is a national hero, lifted up by Civil Rights leaders, pastors of every creed, a Dodge Super Bowl commercial, and, most recently in Tennessee, by a community group working to ban books about him from public schools. Wut? If our mythology is to be believed, King is beloved by those who live his legacy and by those actively trying to dismantle his legacy.

We need to expect more of ourselves. Pretending like we support a guy whose ideas we wholly reject is not a good look. The genius of Dr. King is that he patiently forced America to confront its own hypocrisy. He dispelled the myths white America believed about themselves and the society they created. This year, as I honor King, I’d like to offer another round of mythbusting for your consideration.

In 1966, a Gallup Poll measured King’s favorability at 33%, while 63% of those polled disapproved of him.  This was over 10 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which launched him to prominence and focused the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement. This was 3 years after he delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech on the Washington Mall, unifying the call for freedom and the need for jobs. This was 1 year after the successful march from Selma to Montgomery, a march attempted 3 times, where white and black civilians linked arms, allowing their conviction and hope to propel them to walk across a bridge and a state, some sacrificing their wellbeing—or very lives—as civilians and policeman brutally, openly, attacked them. The violence broadcast that month woke the conscience of a nation, encouraging the Congress of the United States to support the Voting Rights Bill.  Dr. King was the face of a movement that lifted the spirits of his fellow African American brothers and sisters; importantly, he also required the gaze of a country to confront the suffering of Black folks by observing the sacrifices they made. Many Americans love our mythology so much that we maintain it even when we see evidence that we are not who we think we are.

Dr. King and the SCLC forced the country to observe the actual status quo. Their bravery was remarkable, but it was effective because it created a setting in which African Americans and their white allies were vilified and attacked for doing every day life: for sitting on a bus on the way to work, for walking across a bridge, or for ordering coffee at a lunch counter. These acts of resistance were brilliant because they were mundane. Everyone knows what it is like to order a drink expecting to receive one. Although not many white folks knew what it was like to be Black, they could certainly understand what it meant to be refused service just for existing. To be beaten for walking in your Sunday best. 

Dr. King and the SCLC reminded the country of visceral, instinctive compassion.  The images captured and scenes witnessed were so uncivil that they “announced that hurt is to be taken seriously, that hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness” (Bruggemann).  Most folks in the white majority would have argued, then and now, that our society is not full of hate; rather, people are civil and America is fair as long as African Americans and other people of color stay in their lane. This is the myth thriving today, even after King exposed it as untrue.

This type of delusional break from reality is only possible when compassion, connection and empathy are dead. This is how the antebellum South could be remembered as a place known for genteel manners, kind hospitality and gorgeous vistas in settings where bodies were chained, whipped and forced to work in the glare of said gorgeous vista. We cannot hold onto both ideas at once, so we ignore the ugly and mythologize the good. Dr. King was both wildly unpopular and most effective because he exposed the average citizen to the flaws in their own mythologies. Truth tellers are often avoided (Cassandra, anyone?), and Dr. King kept showing the country the truth of the everyday, mundane trauma Black folks experienced, dispelling the delusions that America was a land of respected and kind free people who rewarded hard work.

The actions of those in the movement disrupted what felt “normal” and forced people to realize there is a vast difference in order and in peace. King called out those of us “more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity,” people “who prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice” (King). These distinctions hold true today. His actions break the beloved mythology of ‘separate but equal’, a centuries-long commitment of society to silence dissent. Naming inequality is not an act of aggression, but a step toward making peace. Think about how your respond when a person acknowledges inequality. Do you think they are causing trouble or telling the truth?

Dr. King’s words also made him unfavorable with a very powerful group in the South: White Christians and their churches. Dr. King, always willing to collaborate with those who followed Christ in the work of doing justice and making things right for their neighbors, forcefully outed those in the church who chose power over sacrifice, the ‘peace and purity’ of the church over justice for all. Indeed, his words claimed that—especially for Christians—the measure of peace cannot be the absence of trouble, but must instead be the flourishing of all people. He wrote, “somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied to a single garment of destiny….I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.” For a Church committed to theologies of victory and favor, to a status quo that maintains power for personal comfort, such words of interdependence wound deeply, demonstrating why he was unpopular then, and why many white Christians reject his claims today.

Nevertheless, in our decade, Gallup found that Dr. King has a 94% favorability rating. He is celebrated and quoted by many, but I’ll close with a simple reminder that we can’t love King and pretend like our status quo is just. If we aren’t actively dismantling the racial hierarchies imbedded all around us, we are protecting them. Our myths about who we are are hard to spot. Honor King by acknowledging what you think about our status quo, about his actual legacy, not the whitewashed one. Do you lament the mundane trauma of the marginalized or do you discredit and ignore their hurt? Do you take the pain of others seriously, or do you trust your mythology?

on pandemics and interdependence

I am not the first American to notice that the COVID-19 pandemic exposes a few points of tension we are aware of and accustomed to ignoring. We are the wealthiest country on earth and over half of our citizens have essentially no savings to sustain them in hard times. We have a massive economy that struggles to survive a dip in consumer spending or confidence. We all depend on the federal government, but many of us pretend like said government is either incapable of doing good, or at least not involved in our success. We actively rely on a globalized world, while demonizing the organizations that represent global partnerships. We think of ourselves as a people committed to the greater good, gladly pulling together to help our neighbors, while also maintaining our insistence on independence and absolute freedom.

Our need to make collective sacrifices, inhibiting our perception of liberty in order to protect vulnerable others, is starting to chafe. Instead of pointing fingers, I suggest we consider our relationships—past and present—with the communities around us. 

I grew up in a home where beating the odds with hard work was the norm. My parents’ life trajectories took them to unchartered territories. Fueled by huge dreams and backed by even bigger work ethics, they rose. They raised us to do the same, providing us with opportunities to belong in every room we entered, teaching us to overcome any obstacle by relying on our own purposed determination.

I am grateful for every single achievement they helped me access, and I take credit for breaking through all sorts of barriers presented to me in my 42 years of life.  This recent quarantine at first felt like another challenge I needed to overcome. So I did. We made bread and tried new recipes, we did home improvements and transplanted plants, we built raised garden beds and are growing vegetables, we are teaching our kids to create even as they bring order to chaos. We are masters of our domains, overcoming the odds.

Except for that sometimes my need to overcome makes me unbearable to live with.

Sometimes my agenda is revealed as raw selfishness.

Sometimes my kids fail to do anything I ask of them.

Sometimes my “liberty” is terribly costly for others.

Sometimes I realize my life story as a one-of-a-kind badass is a lie.

The truth is that every single thing I have ever achieved is the product of group effort. From study habits to writing skills to rhetoric to teaching, others taught me. From sticking with a life partner to raising kids to learning to care about my neighbors, I leaned on others as I learned to find my way. I haven’t even ever moved into a new house without massive help from my sisters, parents and friends. From painting to boxing to unboxing, I did nothing alone. I learned to make bread and biscuits and dumplings from mom and mom-in-law and sister. I learned to design and build with power tools from dad and brother. I learned how to be a grown up in the world because my family and community taught me.

And yet, my own life mythology mostly erases this story, replacing it with one of my own stubborn independence and will to succeed. I am responsible for all that I have and am, and therefore have earned my autonomy. I have grown into a person more comfortable giving orders than receiving them. I would rather lead than follow, and trust my own instincts more than nearly anyone else’s.

There is the rub: COVID-19 asks us to trust our leaders instead of ourselves. COVID-19 asks us to limit our independence in order to protect people we don’t know. COVID-19 asks us to belong to a community, to remember others share responsibility for us even as we bear responsibility for others. None of us is truly autonomous.

COVID-19 forces us to confront the tensions that exist between two beloved American mythologies:

We are a neighborly people willing to work together to rise.

AND

We are a country full of totally independent frontierspeople who pull up our bootstraps and beat the odds on our own.

Are we fundamentally a generous people willing to sacrifice to help others, or are we a people whose need for independence requires us to achieve our dreams alone? I believe that expanding our us, growing our capacity to know and care for a wider circle of diverse peoples, is the antidote to living isolated, competitive lives where my success demands someone’s failure. Competing claims on the essence of the American Spirit makes this difficult to do.

Our evolving response to COVID-19 suggests we are watching the pendulum swing from “We’re all in this together”, to “Quit taking away my rights!” Our reliance on binaries—in our media, political parties, religious institutions and rhetoric—suggests we must pick one or the other. We are either part of the we, willing to be mindful of the needs of others, or we are on our own, aggressively autonomous. If we want to expand our us, we have to reject such binaries, and resist the idea that these ideologies are mutually exclusive. The mythologies of America suggest we are both rugged individuals AND communally minded burden sharers.

Spend a little time with your own story, and allow it to reaffirm the beautiful truth that you are both independent and a product of the community who invested in you. Resist the urge to allow one narrative to dominate your story, and resist the urge to respond to this challenging time by elevating binaries. Each of us has a track record of being responsible for others AND of making choices alone, and each of us maintains the capacity to do so now.