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Delma Jackson III

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by Delma Jackson III

I’ve tried to write this piece multiple times since the election. I don’t know if this is the piece you need right now, reader, but it’s the one I needed to write. If you’re not a fan of hip hop, that’s ok. This is bigger than hip hop. There’s several lyrical references to songs you’re free to check out on your own time. Or not. Everything isn’t for everybody. Either way, thanks for taking the time. 

Hip Hop turned 50 last year and if you were raised by the genre and it spoke to you in a way no one else could; If it saved your life like it did mine, then this is especially for you.

“Rappers have been praising Trump for over a decade. And ignoring real heroes. Americans have been excited about those who make money without thinking about the exploitation that may be involved with making that money for ages.It’s just a reflection of our values. We get the leaders we deserve.”

–Saul Williams

“Listen—people be askin’ me all the time, ‘Yo Mos, what’s gettin’ ready to happen with hip-hop?’ (Where do you think hip-hop is goin’?). I tell em’, “You know what’s gonna happen with hip-hop? Whatever’s happening with us. If we smoked out, hip-hop is gonna be smoked out. If we doin’ alright, hip-hop is gonna be doin’ alright. People talk about hip-hop like it’s some giant livin’ in the hillside comin’ down to visit the townspeople. We are hip-hop.” 

–Yasiin Bey (fka, Mos Def)  

“And even after all my logic and my theory, I add a ‘mutha fucka’ so you ig’nant niggas hear me.”

–Lauryn Hill 

The summer before I entered high school was…visceral. At 14, I felt the excitement of taking another step closer to adulthood and its freedoms (sans any sense of its responsibilities). I felt a burgeoning hormonal and constant cultural cry to lose my virginity post-haste, tampered by an exquisite sense of my awkwardness. It was that summer I felt the hot blood of a neighbor on my face as he was gunned down next to me. I felt the helplessness as I waited my turn, and the guilty relief as my turn never came. It was that summer our family reunion was in Atlanta, and it was on their mass transit system that I heard Illmatic for the first time. 

Delma Jackson III

Over DJ Premier’s masterful sample of Joe Chambers’ Mind Rain, Nas–a native New Yorker– reflected he’s got “so many rhymes, I don’t think I’m too sane. Life is parallel to hell and I must maintain. And be prosperous. Yo we live dangerous. Cops could just arrest me–blamin’ us. We’re held like hostages.” I heard my sense of home as hellishness given back to me as I watched GM continue to abandon the city of Flint. I heard my commitment to maintain my sense of self, even as the nightmares from the shooting became more frequent. I heard the audacity to strive for something beyond what was immediately in front of me. I heard an updated version of an historical analysis of law enforcement in our communities. I heard the sense of captivity that redlining facilitated. 

I heard all that. In 11 seconds. 

I felt validated. I felt connection. I felt hope. I felt moved. Most importantly, I felt seen. By directly confronting and artistically rendering death, vitality, hopelessness, and beauty, with depth and clarity, in our communities, I’d been instantly reminded of why I loved this musical genre so much. 

I found out years later, he recorded this instant classic, “New York State of Mind,” in one take. 

Growing up in an economically sieged, racially segregated community while navigating a predominantly white, Catholic school system for my K-12 education proved to be one of the most impactful dichotomies of my developmental years. The constant comparisons between “us” and “them” without socio-cultural context left me like a discarded dish rag: wrung dry of the potable waters of self-pride only to be saturated in the dirty dish waters of self-hatred rooted in wanting that which I could never become–white. 

Left too long under those conditions anyone would grow stagnant, moldy, and only capable of spreading more of the same–first throughout myself, and eventually across everything and everyone I touched. Something was wrong–with all of it. I didn’t know the story and I languished without language until hip hop gave it to me. 

I never saw myself depicted in meaningful ways by TV and Hollywood. I would’ve thought it was because I didn’t deserve to be. But you said, “…let’s make our own movies like Spike Lee. ‘Cause the roles being offered don’t strike me. As nothing that the black man could use to earn. Burn Hollywood, burn.” 

You made it ok to be me and told me anger was a perfectly acceptable response to one dimensional representation. 

When Reaganomics, the Bush years, and the mass-incarceration of the Clinton years co-created the backdrop of racialized urban planning, factory closures, and crack-cocaine, you told me the craziness I saw wasn’t isolated. I wasn’t alone anymore because you were going to describe this world back to me and you took your job seriously: 

“My restlessness is my nemesis-it’s hard to really chill and sit still. Committed to page. Write a rhyme, sometimes won’t finish for days. Scrutinize my literature–from the large to the miniature–I mathematically add-minister…” 

Despite the made up theme of “Black on Black” crime and the accusations that we ignored violent crime in our cities, you were clearly holding us accountable, reminding us that, “Back in the ’60s, our brothers and sisters were hanged. How could you gang-bang? I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan. And I shouldn’t have to run from a black man.”

When my schools made curriculum decisions which ignored the contributions of activists and writers who looked like me, you brought their works to my attention and pointed me back to myself:

“Native son. Speakin’ in a native tongue. I got my eyes on tomorrow [there it is] While you still tryin’ to find where it is–I’m on the ave where it lives and dies. Violently. Silently. Shine so vibrantly their eyes squint to catch a glimpse.” 

Before anyone else spoke to me about the right to choose, you brought it to my attention and instilled me with a sense of responsibility to consider the experience of women: 

“Supporters of the ‘H’ bomb, firebombing clinics. What type of shit is that? Orwellian in fact. If Roe v Wade was overturned, would not the desire remain intact? Leaving young girls to risk their health–doctors to botch and watch–as they killed themselves…”

And while European beauty standards were flooding our collective consciousness via media,  you reminded me to ask, “You know what some people put themselves through to look just like you? Dark stocking, high heels, lipstick, alla that” You reminded me we have choices– that we’re not bound by, “…dealin with the European standard of beauty…Turn off the TV, put the magazine away…See the evidence of divine presence.”

You gave me pride AND permission to be awkward. When I was struggling in adolescence and unsure how to express my growing interest in girls, you articulated my awe, overwhelm, frustration, and intimidation and made me feel seen:  

“…And now the world around me gets to movin’ in slow motion whenever she happens to walk by, why does the apple of my eye…Overlook and disregard my feelings no matter how much I try? Wait, nooo. I did not really pursue my little princess with persistence. And I was so low key that she was unaware of my existence–from a distance I desired her…secretly admired her.” 

Your production made me curious about music outside the genre. So many samples pointing to a musical legacy no one in my school system thought worthy of teaching. I discovered an appreciation for Jazz through a Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets. I got hip to Roberta Flack through the Fugees. The sheer number of genres you pulled together and braided made me feel responsible for studying music outside of myself. Who DOES that? You were so layered and nuanced–complex and sophisticated. 

You were accessible, relatable, funny, courageous, and poignant. You were also ignorant, violent, vain, and obsessed with extolling the virtues of your own toxicity. 

In other words, you were whole–you were us at our best and our worst. You were as American as Dutch apple pie.  

On one hand you extolled the virtues of freedom even as you too often sought to oppress the voice of Black women. I loved your anger, while also often questioning the direction of your ire. Too often, you asked Black women to accept blatant misogyny as the price for access to the community you created. Too often, black boys severed themselves from their own emotional landscape and died in that hellish environment by the droves trying to fashion an image just like you. 

We grew up with each other, and while we’ve both changed since the 80s, I often don’t recognize you anymore. Many of your worst character traits have been exacerbated; brought to the fore; mass produced and distributed by a music industry that has ALWAYS hated you and yours. 

This industry has done to you what it has done to your ancestral legacy so many times before, as Jazz, Blues, Rock, and Funk have all succumbed to the insatiable thirst for mass-produced, pre-packaged, easily marketed, sanitized, one-dimensional, reductionist, formulaic, fuck all.  

Too often you’re a cliché–a joke that everyone gets but you. You were America–the great “both/and.” You knew how to exist in both the sacred and sacrilegious, and you never lost sight of your audience even as you sought resources we didn’t have. 

Now…

There’s no easy way to say this but it needs saying: You’re an uncle tom. You’re a fucking minstrel show. In fact, you’re increasingly indistinguishable from POTUS 45/47:  

  • Outside of enriching yourselves, you offer only concepts of a plan.  
  • You both regularly produce meandering, mumbling, meaninglessness for the sake of a crowd.
  • The idea of a woman in power utterly terrifies you. 
  • You define your masculinity by surrounding yourself with women you disparage. 
  • “Grab em by the p*ssy” is a track you co-wrote.
  • I see you at MAGA rallies. 

You used to fight the power. 

Now you want to be the power.

You inadvertently encourage support for 45/47 because while your paths have been very different, you ended up at the same place. You’d trade your soul for access to power. You’d have men sell out their communities– particularly the sisters, daughters, wives, and mothers, for empty promises of a return to a time and place that never existed for the vast majority of us. You openly encourage comfort over community, ignorance over enlightenment, and violence over vision. You’ve wholly embraced and proactively encouraged MAGA politics. As usual, it is our Black women that sought to save us. As usual, you (we) didn’t listen. 

I don’t know. Maybe it was inevitable. 

Maybe hip hop was always going to go from being the rebellious, rambunctious, radical teenager to the crazy conspiracy theorist-ic, mid-life crisis corvette cruisin’, conservative, coked-out uncle espousing “christian” values over Christmas dinner. I can’t tell you how many of my peers have the audacity to question the sanity and value of gen z-ers. I have to close my mouth with my hand every time. The same generation who screamed “Fuck the Police” at the top of their lungs is wondering why “these young people” have no “respect.” It’s watching Ice-T go from “Cop Killer” to cop on Law and Order SVU. 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m willing to bet my cat (sorry, Nuri) that, by FAR, the Hip Hop community rejected Donald Trump. Like any 50-year-old genre, it’s all subgenres at this point. Black music, like its people, is often discussed as a monolith when we’re anything but. That said, you’ve probably seen the numbers by now and know Black America-as a voting block-rejected 47 by a lot.  

I’m picking on hip hop because I feel like a jilted lover. I had expectations on the genre that were never going to be fulfilled. Even as it was saving me, it was harming me. I was too often being inundated with materialism, misogyny, and machismo. Hip hop was our Bob Dylan and our John Wayne. Hip hop was our Gloria Steinam and our Hugh Hefner. It was our Americana. 

Countless young men, regardless of race, class, or musical tastes, were raised believing in stereotypes about entire populations. They confused external possessions with measures of internal worth. They confused domination with leadership, and vulnerability with weakness. They were bound to grow from young rebels without a clue to socially conservative, and confused elders. They spent their entire lives chasing and upholding an illusion of masculinity while the world around them began to question the assumptions they’d taken for granted. 47 promised to turn back the clock–to reestablish everything they thought they understood. 

Hip Hop didn’t create these issues. Hip Hop is a reflection of them. And as much as I LOVE the the genre, it can neither be patient zero nor the vaccine. Hip hop is us–for better and for worse.

That said…white folks…

W.T.F?!?!

Delma & Nuri

Delma Jackson III has been a senior fellow with CWC since 2012 – he brings an intersectional approach to our work at the intersection of environment and social justice work with an eye for organizational transformation. He invites vulnerability, critical analysis and introspection as a vehicle for liberation. He guides organizational cultures toward greater value-based visioning rooted in dialogue, transparency, grace, humor and compassion.

*Special thanks to
Rita Molestina for your patient editing. 

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by Delma Jackson III

“It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Groups are more immoral than individuals”1

– Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

“Chillin’ like a white man.”2 

– Delma Jackson Jr. 

It’s hard to admit I’m exhausted when I feel like I have no legitimate reason to be. It’s hard not to constantly beat myself up over what I think my ancestors would do if they were in my place. It’s hard to hold self-care in the left hand and unwavering commitment in the right. Like the 80s/90s movie trope of a street corner hustler, it’s easy to lose track of which hand is holding which card. So I take on more projects. Hold space for more conversations. Look for ways to hold what’s immediately in front of me even as the apartheid in Gaza blooms and the parallels feel so painfully obvious as they further delineate between who matters and who doesn’t. 

What’s both exhausting and fascinating is watching the US eat itself alive as Trumpism further exposes a large swath of the population happy to twist itself like caduceus to ensure American pluralism remains synonymous with assimilation. I’ve lived just long enough to watch the US go through yet another cycle of social movement and backlash–a cycle that repeats itself throughout this country’s history over and again. I imagine my elders from the 60’s can relate to this feeling. I imagine the 40’s and 20’s saw similar skepticism arise among black and brown folks as they watched the tide of social justice flow then ebb–hope giving way to cynicism.

I’ve lived just long enough to remember our collective shock when those who beat the blood and congestion out of Rodney King walked out of courtroom free men. We’d been telling that same old story for years but THIS TIME, it was on tape. It never occurred to my young self that some would enjoy the footage–my Jordan Peele; their Zack Snyder. I remember watching Black rage embodied as LA burned. I remember how many politicians (white ones specifically–but not exclusively) openly condemned the riots only to openly celebrate (without irony) Martin King and the 30th anniversary of the passage of the civil rights act a few years later. They can only celebrate violence when they see themselves as the protagonist: from the Boston Tea Party to January 6, 2021. 

I remember sitting in a theater and watching Spike Lee’s, Malcolm X with my father. I remember leaving feeling empowered, seen, and spoken for in a way I’d never felt before. I remember the profound relief of knowing I wasn’t crazy. I remember watching the coverage of the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX–increasingly enraged at how this predominantly white, heavily armed group could succumb to violence at the hands of the state and it be called a tragedy, but when lone, unarmed Black folks were maimed and/or killed at the hands of the state, it was justice. I remember learning that Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa’s first post-apartheid president. 

I remember the rampant Islamophobia across the US on full display for years after September 11th, 2001. I remember how the xenophobic othering of film and TV in the 80s and 90s came full circle and Islam was held responsible for the actions of a few people in a way that Christianity never was. 

I remember watching Barack Hussein Obama take the oath of office as the first Black US president eight years later–the same year social media saw a huge upswing in usage. For the first time in human history, millions of people could share their experiences with one another in real-time. So I remember the inevitable rise of documented police abuses and killings across Black and Brown communities around the country. I remember the rise of activism from #BLM to #theArabSpring, to #Metoo, to the #UmbrellaRevolution.

During the Obama years, each new documented case of police murders of unarmed Black folks –each new say their name hashtag, I had the sinking feeling that two distinct camps in white America perceived “change” and both were going to lose their collective minds. The “left” would rest on their laurels–believing they’d accomplished the impossible and their work was done. The “right” would feel called to re-assert their dominance and put everyone back into their respective places. The two sides, and their equally misguided perceptions about the world would trap everyone else in the middle. 

Despite knowing better, this work can often feel isolating. Feeling isolated can make planning for the long term more difficult. I’d love to take lessons from the right, who over the course of 30 years, leveraged spaces like the Federalist Society to move SCOTUS to the right. However, it is much easier to plan that far ahead when you’re safe, resourced and clear that your “fears” are as manufactured as a Tesla.

However, it’s much easier to plan that far ahead when you’re safe, resourced, and clear that your “fears” are as manufactured as a Tesla.

The most exhausting part: only one half of white America appears unafraid “of the word tension.”3 I often suspect it’s the half who participated and or supported the riot on the capital. 

Then there’s the well-meaning but completely clueless “progressives.” The ones King noted were too often, “more devoted to order than to justice.” You’re therefore always pulling double duty…trying to convince, cajole, force one side to stop killing you, while trying to get the other half to do more than have you over to the house, march alongside you while picking ethnic food out of their teeth, and calling you every other day to run some anecdotal shit past you to double check they’re still on the right side of history. This is a deeply disturbing take on justice, a “[s]hallow understanding from people of good will” which often proves “more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”4  

Add gender and/or sexuality into the equation and the exhaustion gets compounded. I can’t help but think Black women must be asleep on their feet most days–like the protagonist in a Spike Lee joint–pulled forward and disembodied. I wanna nap just thinking about it. What does it take to navigate a population of Black men who’ve completely accepted notions of gender created and upheld by the very white men they often claim to distrust. 

Baldwin was right. We need heroes. Not individuals wearing capes, but whole communities of people who can and will take up the cause when our kinfolk need to rest.

Baldwin was right. We need heroes. Not individuals wearing capes, but whole communities of people who can and will take up the cause when our kinfolk need to rest. Communities that can remind us of the differences between resting and quitting–between remembering and obsessing. This approach implores us to move away from the westernized–single hero narrative and embrace something bigger than ourselves. It implores us to take seriously the ongoing backlash against perceived progress by those whom over half the country never wanted to embrace in the first place. 

We live amongst a population of people who never accepted pluralism as ideal. The civil war wasn’t won by the north. The civil war ended in a stalemate and the two populations have been stuck in a proxy-cold-civil-war ever since. We live amongst people on the right and left who never accepted the idea that anyone other than white cis-gendered men should be at the helm of our collective destiny. They can’t be blamed. Half their ideas are captured in the founding documents. 

So yeah…stay or leave. Sink or swim. The constant pressure from within and without is daunting. The sheer number of us whose primary concern is making it from one day to the next is overwhelming. The number of progressives who will come for your cancellation if you don’t use the most updated language is real. The number of us who are often on the verge of crying is real. The number of us who come from the trauma of poverty is real. The journey from surviving to thriving is filled with pit stops along the way; realizations, remembrances, severings, and reconnections. Learning how to do that in community with others in service of building something new is by definition exhausting. 

That said, I’m giving myself permission to be tired. I hope you do too. We need our rest. Women, and BLACK women, specifically…I’m looking at you. Go ahead. Take my father’s advice and see what it feels like to “chill like a white man.” I’m cheering for all my life-ers out there. 

Hopefully, I’ll see you around this year–rested and ready to dream. 

 1King was referencing Niebuhr, Reinhold who wrote, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, 1932

2When I would ask my father what he was up to, he’d sometimes respond with this line.

3King, Martin Luther. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” August 1963. 

4King, Martin Luther. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” August 1963. 

Delma Jackson is a Senior Fellow with CWC and creator of the Dive in Justice Podcast. His focus is on facilitating system change in institutions through transformative practice and the power of story. He received his undergraduate degree in African-American Studies and Psychology, and his Masters in Liberal Arts with a concentration in American and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. He regularly lectures on a variety of socio-political topics with a special emphasis on intersectional approaches to social justice.

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“But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’…there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth….to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” 

-MLK, Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

“We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house.”

-Martin Luther King Jr. to Harry Belafonte shortly before King’s assassination, 1968

Original Painting by Derek Russell, derekrussellartist.com

When King’s visibility was at its zenith, the year was 1963 and there were exactly three TV broadcast companies (ABC, NBC, and CBS). On August 28, 1963, all three of them live broadcast the March on Washington. FM radio was integrated into cars the same year. If you were watching TV on August 28, 1963, you were watching the same thing as most of your fellow citizens. When you tuned into analysis about the speech, you had only a handful of options. The event was undoubtedly one of the most impactful demonstrations in US history, and when I consider the state of media today, I can’t help but wonder if the event was so impactful in part because America’s attention was so collectively focused. 

Sixty years later, we are squarely in the information age and it brings us a special kind of challenge as we think about storytelling and the ability to shape and share a collective dream. We live in a world constantly encouraging us to exist within the version of reality that maximizes the comfort of the familiar and agreeable (even when egregious), while minimizing the pain of self-reflection inherent in shifting our worldview. Today’s media landscape provides greater diversity of mediums and less diversity of messaging.   

With this in mind, I come into this King holiday paradoxically holding a tremendous amount of confidence and trepidation; contentment and discontent; patience and listlessness. To wax Gibran, I am deeply aware of the “shell encasing my understanding,” as a shell on the verge of breaking. I am on the verge of realizing a truth. Perhaps more importantly, I am on the verge of unapologetically, unabashedly, dreaming. I am on the verge of integrating lessons somewhere between Harai’s historical analysis in Sapiens with lessons from Butler’s near-future analysis in Parable of the Sower. Put differently, I’m on the verge of an audaciousness historically reserved for royals.  

I want a different world than the one I was born into. I want a world wherein the small bands that once supported close familial ties remain, while the flexibility of easy travel and exploration is accessible to all. I want engineers and other planners to design with this paradoxical existence in mind. I want to maximize our sense of connection through encouraging the growth and empowerment of individuals. I want a sustainable world–built “green” from the ground up. I want an end to the nation-state. Let migratory bird patterns and jetstreams define our borders. Let our megacities be indistinguishable from our flora and fauna. Let us no longer distinguish between ourselves and the “natural” world. Let us be and build naturally in this natural space. 

I want to use the same algorithms that keep us siloed today doing just the opposite tomorrow. I want artificial intelligence designed to maximize health and wholeness over profit margins and bottom lines. I want indigeneity realized for all of us. I want the wisdom of our ancestry maximized in the 21st century. I want “whiteness” replaced by identities much older than the idea of Europe. I want reparations that bind my African ancestry with my Mississippi Choctaw foremothers. I dream of complexity normalized. 

Let us design a world from the ground up, with deep consideration for the various ways we move, think, engage, learn, share, and love. Let us design a world for as many of its inhabitants as we possibly can. Let us take the best of our various cultural practices and find ways to integrate them even as we assimilate them. Let us not confuse genuine assimilation with criminal hegemony. Let us educate our children and learn alongside them–demonstrating and thus rendering us all lifelong learners. Let us bear witness to the wisdom of constant change and learn to live consistently within that one and only rule. Let the rest of our divisions define and guide us without imposing them upon one another. Let us have and one day be…enough. 

Let us start by finding the proverbial-public squares– places we might gather again to see the world and make meaning together. Let us start by welcoming the various tensions inherent in collective meaning-making. Let us collectively reject a specialized, westernized version of cowardice which prioritizes quiet, and thus regularly sacrifices peace on the altar of comfort if not greed. 

King’s legacy is, among other things, a call to embrace the tension that allows dreaming to become possible. America has yet to heed the call and as such, has yet to realize its highest ideals. Perhaps we’d be better served dreaming of yet another kind of America, if not another kind of place altogether. 

I invite you to join me in this ethereal royal court. Let us all dream collectively. Let us love and fight together. Let us dream beyond integration, beyond hegemony, beyond all the dichotomies that have come before us. Alas, let us be empowered to dream. Let us feel an inalienable right to articulate our highest visions regardless of our backgrounds, aesthetics, and identities. Let us welcome our inner tensions, that we might be more welcoming of the tensions bound to occur amongst and between one another. 

Join me when and as you can. I’ll save a place for you. 

Delma Jackson is a Senior Fellow with CWC. His focus is on facilitating system change on campuses and in institutions through transformative practice and the power of story. He received his undergraduate degree in African-American Studies and Psychology, and his Masters in Liberal Arts with a concentration in American and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. He regularly lectures on a variety of socio-political topics with a special emphasis on intersectional approaches to social justice.

Delma Jackson III

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“Freedom always demands sacrifice.”

-Martin Luther King

“For it is the nature of people to love, then destroy, then love again that which they value most.”

-Neale Donald Walsch 

“First come smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.” 

-Stephen King 

My father (Rest In Power) was fond of the adage, “hindsight is 20/20.” This time of year, the legacy of Martin Luther King often comes to mind in connection to that phrase. King died with a 75% disapproval rating among white Americans and a 60% disapproval rating among African Americans. King’s legacy as we collectively celebrate it began some two decades after he was assassinated. King’s poll numbers plummeted as he became more outspoken about the war in Vietnam. This lack of support compared to his relative popularity at the height of the Civil Rights movement was jarring for this man who’d dealt with depression most of his life. People sometimes wonder what they’d do during some of history’s most contentious moments. What you’ve been doing all along, is your answer to that question. 

READ MORE FROM DELMA HERE

On April 4, 1968, King was shot through the right cheek. The bullet broke his jaw and several vertebrae, continued down his throat, “severing his jugular vein and major arteries” and finally lodged in his left shoulder. However, we see that King was first attacked with words which tore at his mind and heart. Rather than find healing and reprieve from these scurrilous attacks, he was then attacked with a high caliber bullet which tore at his body. However, King was not alone. History is littered with the bodies of those who died persona non grata, only to receive acclaim decades later. From my understanding of the New Testament, Jesus was such an example–his life sacrificed in order to secure the release of another man whose name I can’t even recall. All too often, we are more James Earl Ray and Pontius Pilate than we’d like to admit. 

Every MLK Day calls us to lean into King’s legacy; calls us to remember what King stood for and to emulate his example throughout our daily lives. Every year, we organize community service projects, vigils, memorials, remembrances, recognitions, and celebrations. Every year, we are reminded of how radical King’s love was. Every year we are called to be a little more like King. By the time I was in my early 20’s, at the height of my idealism, I would attend such events and wonder why we hadn’t already achieved this collective goal. I wondered how so many people could come together annually, in earnest, and yet we see such little progress. 

The older I get, the more I think the answer lies in the way we remember King to forget ourselves. We are often reminded of his dream, but rarely discuss the nightmare that was his last few years on earth: the death threats, the constant harassment from the FBI, his widely publicized lack of popularity, and his waning influence on young people who were increasingly frustrated with a nonviolent approach to justice. We like the version of King’s story that allows us to feel good about what we’re not doing–the risks we’re not taking. We cannot begin to embody King’s legacy without fully remembering the ways we are deeply invested in the very systems we seek to reform. We have dismembered his legacy and in doing so, ourselves. Our healing is going to require a fuller accounting of his legacy, a more honest accounting of our own, and a reckoning of the past and the present. 

In today’s world, we cannot simultaneously chase “likes” and justice. Most of us will not speak truth to power while trying to stay employed. Fundamental change often feels anything but safe and therefore most of us don’t actually want reform. We simply want to appear as though we do. Most of us don’t want to sacrifice our lives for change. Most of us don’t even want to be inconvenienced. One rarely speaks truth to power while remaining oblivious to hard truths in the private recesses of their own mind. 

In my case, this isn’t about maintaining my personal safety or the safety of my children. My activism has not rendered that an immediate threat. The truth is, I’m way too invested in keeping my job to always tell my truth. I’m invested in keeping my job in large part because I’m invested in the resources that my income provides. Yes I want to be able to provide for my children–a most noble and worthy calling. However, I also like my electronics too much. I like having the option to send my children to private schools. I like dining out too much. It’s not simply about getting the resources I need. It’s also about maintaining access to the things I simply want. While both my current and previous places of employment encouraged agency around using my voice, I can still find myself mush-mouthed when a truth is staring me in the face–often choosing the comfort of embodying oppression in order to further secure my own comfort. 

If I can’t say what’s obvious to me in front of twenty-five people on a zoom call, wtf am I gonna tell America? I often find it easier to speak of leaning into his legacy, rather than naming the myriad of reasons I choose not to. This year, I want to invite myself into a different kind of remembrance. This year, I want to acknowledge that I will not be able to lean into MLK’s legacy because I am not yet willing. This year, I want to invite you to join me in taking off your cape long enough to see that we don’t actually deserve it. This year, I want to invite us to embrace who we are–to remember that which has for so long been dismembered and see what happens.

It is my sincere hope that by such an acknowledgement, we might begin to unravel the web of lies we’ve wrapped ourselves in. Who knows? Maybe by 2023, I’ll feel less judgmental of others because I see myself as I actually am. By 2024, I might actually be able to start telling the truth in the recess of my mind. By ‘25, I might be able to say those things I’ve known were true for years without anger toward those who didn’t see it. By 2030…I might then be able to lean into King’s legacy. History teaches us that you don’t lean into such a radical legacy without sacrifice and shifting. That’s why it’s called “radical.” History therefore teaches us that you don’t have a legacy of love like King’s without some serious hatred and violence accumulating and surfacing along the way. This is a key component of such legacies and often prevents us from following the examples of those we venerate. 

Finally, for our purposes, history teaches us that if we don’t understand our personal and honest place in a legacy like King’s, we are far more likely to reenact the role of the violent oppressor. We are far more likely to run into modern-day versions of King and enact the same sort of violence against them in order to protect the very system we say we want to change.  We’ll do it with a smile even while celebrating King. 

So…Say it with me now: “I am in no way embodying MLK’s legacy in 2022 because I’m too deeply invested in the very system I also want to change.” Now…doesn’t that feel both shameful and freeing? It certainly does for me. 

*Editing & thought partnership credit to Rita Molestina 

Delma Jackson is a Senior Fellow with CWC. His focus is on facilitating system change on campuses and in institutions through transformative practice and the power of story. He received his undergraduate degree in African-American Studies and Psychology, and his Masters in Liberal Arts with a concentration in American and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. He regularly lectures on a variety of socio-political topics with a special emphasis on intersectional approaches to social justice.

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Rage was never a thing I had easy access to.

In the staggeringly stereotypical tradition of “ol’ school,” Black parents, emotional outbursts were not tolerated and suppressing any rage was always preferable to censure. Positionality was key. I had my position, and I played my part. I learned quickly that I got much further with my parents with reasoned, well-timed questions and demonstrable fealty. 

However, as I became increasingly politicized in undergrad, my rage blossomed and found a righteous home. It’s the little stories–the off-hand anecdotes that stuck with me. It’s not just the source material that changes you. It’s also the one-offs and the “by the ways.”

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It’s learning about the hundreds of postcards circulating throughout the US with “I wish you were here” printed on one side and photos of lynchings decorating the other.  

It’s learning that dysentery killed so many of us on the transatlantic voyage that tubs were installed to save more lives (read: investments). It’s learning that children often risked (and presumably some succumbed to) drowning[1] in these tubs full of the human waste of their fellow captives because their legs were too short to brace themselves in the often turbulent waters. 

It’s learning the story of Mary Turner, who in 1918 dared to speak out against the lynching of her husband. On May 19, 1918, the day after her husband was lynched, the mob sought to “teach her a lesson.”[2] A mob took her to “a lonely and secluded spot…near Folsom’s Bridge.”[3] Mary Turner, who was 8 months pregnant, was hung upside down by her ankles to an oak tree. After which:

“gasoline and oil from the automobiles were thrown on her clothing and while she writhed in agony and the mob howled in glee, a match was applied and her clothes burned from her person…and while she was yet alive, a knife, evidently one such as is used in splitting hogs, was taken and the woman’s abdomen was cut open, the unborn babe falling from her womb to ground. The infant, prematurely born, gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel. Hundreds of bullets were then fired into the body of the woman….”[4]

These are the stories that changed me forever. They are the anecdotes that stick with me forever. They are one side of a bloody, brutal bridge which connects the past to the present wherein viral videos of police brutality/murder form the opposite end. 

It’s watching the indifference to another child killed in the visage of Tamir Rice who SO resembles Emmet Till*…as though the soul of an ancestor is doomed to relive racialized violence over and again. My continuous intimacy with these images—the accompanying scholarship, and the never-ending news cycles of state-sanctioned violence–accompanied by the realization that this history was kept from me throughout my K-12 education–renders me bitter.   

Herein lies the precarious space I occupy. While I love the work I do, I’m often invited into spaces where people ask for culture change when what they actually want is diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This now-ubiquitous acronym is just close enough to the mark as to leave me all-the-more bitter…rageful. The ascendancy of DEI embodies everything I resent about our industrialized, assembly-lined, capitalistic system. The same is true for sensitivity training, cultural competency, and echo chamber courageous conversations. 

To be clear, CWC does NOT do DEI work. If we did, they’d be doing it without me. 

DEI work rarely asks white people to embrace their full humanity— humiliation, fear, frustration, and/or fury. These processes are designed to allow a psychological distance–an internal safe-space wherein silence and a sign-in sheet co-conspire to convey completion without confession, conscious raising, or catharsis. This reality becomes more obvious In the age of Covid-induced zoom trainings. I’ve found myself conveying historical and contemporary tragedies, pouring out my heart and soul to black screens with names and (sometimes) accompanying gender pronouns (because that’s a box easily-enough checked whether you truly appreciate the significance or not).  

Working in predominantly white spaces to discuss white supremacy and other components of identity politik comprises the bulk of my work. While it feels like a vocation (and every calling has its less-than-ideal components), it is a draining one…often an enraging one. Every docile, sheepish, impassive face is a reminder of everything I hate about this work. I’m not “allowed” to be pissed at your indifference–the very indifference that gave rise to the need for these conversations in the first place. 

I was taught to never use the word hate lightly.

However… 

I hate injustice. You seem to hate discussing it.  

I hate that we’re dying. You seem to hate the guilt you feel from thinking about it. 

I want change so that I can be left alone in peace, you want the status-quo so you can be left alone. That makes it hard not to hate you. 

What I hate most, is that eliminating your discomfort remains prioritized. DEI and other modalities largely embraced by the public are mechanized–designed for mass-production without mass-backlash–passivity prioritized over possibility.  While I’ve made it clear to any and all I work with that I don’t do traditional DEI work, the often unspoken expectation is often that participants will be able to remain comfy-cozy in the face of brutality. Participants too often want solutions without soul-searching. They want to see the world change without having to change themselves. They want the equity equation–a set of explicit directions that will allow them to be on the “right” side of history without risking anything. 

This further fuels my rage, and I’m not even clear about what my ask is…in part because I often believe you’re incapable of meeting it. Asking a depleted soul to feel something for others when they have a hard time connecting to themselves is a big ask. 

Either way, it’s painful to watch you grapple at the space where your ignorance and comfort fight for territory against the impending guilt and growing discomfort that comes with facing hard truths. Or you attach “meaningful” to “outcomes” as though this whole exploration is only worth your time if there’s a prize at the bottom of the box. Your orientation to check something off a box only extends to the external world around you, but there is little enthusiasm for checking off the boxes in the universe within you. I suspect if I could give you a list of things to do to avoid being “perceived” as racist, you’d happily take it and never do anything to address who you actually are. 

Do you honestly believe that who you are doesn’t matter? That you should be able to do this work without touching something inside yourself that yearns to be free? Perhaps. But I suspect there’s more to it than that…

I can spend so much time staring at a blank screen, attempting to figure out how to talk about something which has been discussed so often and by far better minds than my own. Yet, so long as the ignorance-induced-indifference of some, the benign neglect of many, and the outright hostility of still others continues to permeate the social landscape of this nation, I suppose the observers must continue to watch and alchemize the often intangible into something held, felt, and eventually, if we’re lucky, grappled with. 

When organizations ask for culture change and the individuals within said organization realize they don’t know where this work will take them—because they don’t know where they are—they get nervous. They hide behind the organizations “need for clearly-defined outcomes” and beg for answers the way one clutches for twigs after a ship capsizes. They want all the nuances laid bare and plain. They want to feel better. They haven’t even begun the work in earnest and they’re already falling apart. Group agreements like, “expect and accept non-closure” are logically understood yet emotionally abandoned. 

At times, these spaces feel like daycares full of ill-tempered, passive-aggressive toddlers. And despite their temperament and lack of life experience, they’re ostensibly trying. So…I show up—in all my rage—and prepare to hold their hand even as I know I can never go back and hold the hands of all my ancestors and contemporaries who could’ve used it far more–not to simply feel soothed, but to survive. 

*I chose NOT to include a trigger warning precisely because I never got one upon entering my body, my African American Studies courses, or my daily life. I wanted my readers unprepared because that is ALWAYS part of the trauma…to know a thing logically, but to remain always woefully unprepared….

[1] See: The Life of Olaudah Equiano [1789] (Dover Thrift Edition), p.53
[2] “The Work of a Mob.” Crisis Magazine, September 1918, pp. 221-223
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid

Delma Jackson is a Senior Fellow with CWC. His focus is on facilitating system change on campuses and in institutions through transformative practice and the power of story. He received his undergraduate degree in African-American Studies and Psychology, and his Masters in Liberal Arts with a concentration in American and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. He regularly lectures on a variety of socio-political topics with a special emphasis on intersectional approaches to social justice.

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