Delma Jackson III

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. 

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:

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

I posted my completed Pfizer card on FB without once considering how I was fighting a cultural war sans acknowledging the humanitarian / socio-political crisis right in front of me. While I was posting, I failed to consider the people all over the world who would love to post their card but can’t because there’s little-to-no access. I was fronting for the camera, seeking to contribute to the normalization of vaccination in the US, without regard for the normalization of access that comes with living in the US. 

Living in massa’s house, I get massa’s scraps and thus have access before many on the larger plantation. My inability to hold that fact in front of me at all times renders me…less. Less compassionate, less human, less connected, less humane…like Chauvin himself.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the myriad of ways that choosing to post my completed Pfizer card is nothing like Chauvin choosing to kneel on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes. I am not speaking to my actions v. his. I am speaking to the mindset that informs them–a mindset that many of us share even as the actions we take can vary greatly. I draw this comparison for the same reason King explained the heart of every Black protest from the March on Washington to the formation of BLM Plaza: “to dramatize a shameful condition.” Otherwise, we constantly risk being beset by a narrowing world-view in moments wherein the culture war immediately in front of us can blind us to the larger complexities in the world beyond our immediate purview. 

He wasn’t practicing protocol, he was likewise fronting for the camera. He had chosen sides in a culture war and used Floyd’s Black body as a pedestal upon which to trophy-ize himself (think: big game hunters) and demonstrate his domination and thus his allegiances. He knew that precedent was on his side, for not only did he live in massa’s house– he was among massa’s favorite children. 

Whenever I seek to demonstrate my side of the ongoing culture wars here in the US without taking into account the global context in which I operate, I too kneel upon the necks of billions who would, if able, declare their choices just as boldly were access, and thus choices, an option.

I am speaking to the indifference of distance. I am physically distant and thus more readily indifferent to the plight of India, Brazil, and South Africa. Chauvin was psychologically distant, and thus, more readily indifferent to the plight of George Floyd. And even while we’re both surrounded by the pleas of witnesses, our distance renders us both insulated from their urgency and the end result is the same: death. 

Three days after the Chauvin verdict was handed down, I caught the season finale of “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” and I had SO many feels. ***SPOILERS AHEAD***

Anthony Mackie (a Black actor) is the new Captain America (“Cap”). Cap’s monologue toward the end of the episode could have easily been for the Bill Gateses and the mega-pharma companies of the world, whose relative inaction on vaccine distribution remains mired in patent debates. Cap argues that there’s “a common struggle now,” wherein people are “begging for you to feel how hard any given day is” because we are collectively facing “a force so powerful, it could erase half the planet.” 

Similarly, when Cap was told he simply didn’t understand the complexity of responding to global crisis, I was reminded of the complexity inherent in holding the impacts and implications of global crisis while being Black in the US–both the empathy and indifference it can spur–as he responded, “I’m a Black man carrying the stars and stripes. What don’t I understand?” It is in this land of immense power and wealth that I have been shaped. I am therefore not immune (nor should I be), to the “millions of people who are going to hate me for it…the stares, the judgement.” And yet, like Cap, “I’m still here.” 

To live in massa’s house and lose sight of the plantation, even for a second, is perhaps the greatest single indictment of cultural hegemony’s allure, AND of our individual failings which allow it to thrive. Since my initial awakening to the impacts of cultural hegemony on members across the African diaspora, I’ve had mixed feelings about my American identity. I am painfully aware that while we’ve been here for over four centuries, we were never meant to be citizens in the eyes of the colonizers. 

So long as I live here in the US, I have a responsibility to fight the good fight at home and abroad–to use my voice to raise awareness within these borders and beyond them. To lose sight of the global context in which I operate, while accessing the resources that global kleptocracy provides, is to narrow my world-view in ways that contribute to the death of billions. 

Because my choice to post my vaccine status is encouraged, I will not be tried by a jury of my peers. In fact, I’ll get a LOT of likes ‘n’ hearts. However, there are juries of public opinion all over the world that may feel both glad to see another person vaccinated, but also enraged by my apparent indifference to their plight. 

Yet all is not lost. I write this both as catharsis and clarion, a collective call to raise awareness through our own channels of influence and social engagement. Like Cap, I come to this fight with “no super serum. No blonde hair or blue eyes.” Like Cap, the “only power I have is that I believe we can do better.” Moving forward, I’ll strive to do better. I’ll strive to remember what it means to live on the plantation–particularly because I live in massa’s house. I’ll strive to remember the world beyond the plantation and name that world so far removed from the resources and norms by which I am both marred and bolstered. 

To live in America as a so-called minority is to know the worst of the best. Water, water everywhere and only a few drops to drink. It’s easy to forget that for many others, the water is still harder to come by. As long as that’s true, we’re all the worse for it. As long as we name it, we can see it, and potentially do something about it….

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Delma Jackson, III 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.

On January 6, 2021, US citizen-terrorists (terrorzens?) broke into what was, ostensibly, their own house: ravenously looted and destroyed symbols of democracy; sought out specific lawmakers for vigilante justice; and demanded the immediate end to the peaceful transfer of presidential power. 

For the first time in the history of the republic, technology facilitated a global watch party: front row seats to a republic that would sooner burn itself to the ground than allow for the peaceful replacement of a white supremacist, would-be dictator. Like so many, I watched it all in real-time. Malcolm X’s observation on the assassination of JFKennedy immediately came to mind: “The chickens” had, yet again, “come home to roost.”    

Sooooo, I took note when Slate Magazine recently published two headlines that I found profoundly typical and incomplete: 

“Republicans are tough on terrorism until the terrorists are Republicans” 

“Republicans have an insurrectionist caucus” 

Full disclosure: I have not yet read these articles, and while I’ve come to expect good, nuanced writing from the folks over at Slate, these headlines are problematic on the surface because, in my humble opinion, they skirt a larger, uglier, and much older issue. 

Republicans are not the sole problem. White America at large is the problem. White Americans are tough on terror until the terrorist is white. White America has, and has always had, an insurrectionist caucus. 

One could argue, therefore, that America is, at its core, an insurrectionist caucus. 

When Thomas Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal,” on territory stolen from the Lenape people only 13 years earlier, and James Madison facilitated the Three-Fifths Compromise, the foundations of insurrection were more firmly planted. The lofty ideas of democracy, rule of law, liberty, and justice were drafted in the backdrop of massacre, thievery, chattel slavery, kleptocracy, and white supremacy. 

From its inception, the US required white America to ride a spiked fence post–forever teetering between these warring realities–to never pick a side, but rather, to live in a constant, amorphous cognitive dissonance driven by two world views that never require real commitment to one or the other. America’s genuine exceptionalism is thus rooted in making exceptions for its loftier values rather than reaching for them in earnest.  

The nation has always capitulated to its base nature–via the Missouri Compromise (1820), The Fugitive Slave Act (1850), The Dred Scott Case (1857), Plessy v Ferguson (1896), all the way through the 2013 repeal of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, just to name a few. 

As Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw brilliantly pointed out, in the context of the contested election of 1876/1877, for example, President Hayes removed federal troops from the south in exchange for the formal recognition of his presidency from southern Democrats. The compromise ended Reconstruction in the south and paved the way for duly elected Black officials and their supporters across the south to be “killed in political violence” through “…coups across the south.” 

In 1877, and for every decade to come, coups and other forms of political violence/suppression are largely tolerated in the American body-politic because the violence is perpetrated against non-white bodies. In 2021, the failed coup attempt and its apparent toleration vis-a-vis the relative lack of violence happened, in part, because the primary actors were white bodies. 

America tolerates political violence, both in the name of the state and against the state–so long as everyone involved is white. 

Let’s be clear, the US has never known what to do when the “other” is the self. Never forget, the Civil War was white supremacy fighting itself for economic and political dominance. 

Slavery in and of itself did not start the Civil War. The south attacked Fort Sumter and sought to secede from the Union. Violence was perpetrated by a white supremacist culture of chattel slavery that would not be appeased until its tentacles could reach from sea to shining sea. Likewise, this violence was also perpetrated against a culture of white supremacy, one that forced the union to stand but never forced an end to its core tenets, policies, procedures, or cultural products.

Why would it? In white supremacy, there was profound agreement. Thus, the north allowed–even encouraged– the south to build temples to the lost cause, wave a traitorous flag, make demands for segregation in the highest courts of the land, and find them supported. Infiltrate every American public school with your revisionist histories and tell the story of the “lost cause” just as you’d like. So long as white supremacy is centered–we stand united. 

From legislative policies like the 3/5 Compromise to an officer’s enthusiastic and intimate capitulation to terrorism via selfies in 2021, to media outlets’ painstakingly slow shift toward accurate language to describe the insurrection before our very eyes–never forget, January 6, 2021 was white supremacy fighting itself over voter franchisment. 

So as I watched the footage of a Black man single-handedly face down a gaggle of white terrorists and reroute them away from the Senate floor, I had two immediate thoughts. First, he was placing his Black body on the line to protect an institution which has only had 11 Black members since 1776. Secondly, I wondered if any of his white colleagues let those terrorists inside to begin with. 

One of the greatest single indictments of the U.S. that American’s often utter in moments like this, goes: “This is not who we are.” This is exactly who you are. 

There’s a reason post-WWII Germany didn’t ask for “unity” with the Nazi party. There’s a reason the US didn’t ask for “unity” with l-Qaeda after 9/11. Asking for unity assumes there are “very good people on both sides.” On January 6, 2021, US terror-zens ceased “standing back and standing by.” They showed up and showed out. 

Don’t even bother asking me to unify with them. Da fuck? I come from a long line of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and LGBTQ+ folks who actually take the founding documents at face value, despite having every reason not to. So long as I (and/or other members of the global majority) live on this land, I’ll have the same request of America that King articulated in his final speech: “…be true to what you said on paper.” 

Writing Soundtrack: 

“This is America” – Childish Gambino

“The Magic Carpet” – Jazzinuf 

“Les Fleurs” – Minnie Ripperton

“Equinox” – John Coltrane 

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Delma Jackson, III 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.