A Vital Necessity

• Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director

  The writer and activist James Baldwin is often quoted from the last lines of an essay he published in 1961,  “There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”[i]

  I have taken that to mean that in every “now,” there remains work to be done in the service of liberatory change.  I believe that to be true. In fact that’s part of the reason I continue to suggest we work for liberatory change, rather than the general concept of “liberation.”  Liberation in a general sense is too often understood as a goal, a task that can be finished -- but it can’t be finished. That’s because the nature of change is always to change, so when one piece of work gets done, there’s another piece of work to do. 

  There’s another reason I’m not convinced that liberation – again I mean in a widespread and final sense – is possible.  Human beings are vulnerable to fear, greed, insecurity and tribalism , and those are the aspects of our character that breed and drive and create oppression.  So even if racism, for example, disappeared from the face of the earth there would be other manifestations of our vulnerabilities that require our attention to liberatory change.

  I’m not being morbid here or even pessimistic.  I believe that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”[ii]  That doesn’t just happen though, it takes intention and work, and always will.

  But it’s the paragraph before those last lines in Baldwin’s essay that have got my attention today, when he quotes his contemporary, the writer Robert Penn Warren, “In a country where moral identity is hard to come by, the South, because it has had to deal concretely with a moral problem, may offer some leadership. And we need any we can get if we are to break out of the national rhythm, the rhythm between complacency and panic[iii].”

  Replace just two words, “the south” with “white people”  and it seems that Warren and Baldwin are calling out urgently from the past to get our attention in the present. White folks, having abetted, benefitted from and in many cases intentionally created structural racism for hundreds of years, indeed have to deal with a very complex moral problem, and the world of color is calling on us for leadership in the service of working out this moral problem, as Baldwin insisted we must, now, not one second later.

  A response to that call for white leadership around the white moral problem of racism and white supremacy is arguably being answered more concretely, and by more white folks, than ever before. Many have suggested that’s reason for hope.

  But the phrase of Warren’s that’s got me sitting up and paying new attention is this, “the national rhythm, the rhythm between complacency and panic.”  That feels deeply, disturbingly true, and it has me worried.  It’s entirely possible that what we’re seeing in these weeks of often astounding results of protest and disturbing affirmations of what’s being protested, is panic, and panic is not known for clear thinking or staying power.

  So what will happen now? The changes we’ve seen are primarily first steps and promises.  Even solid changes can be fickle, many easily undone or affirmed by the ebbs and flows of political process, especially the now very vulnerable pillar of democracy, voting.  Will panic stand up after change starts to be evident?

  Resistance to the changes called for in these weeks is already fierce, on the street, on social media, in the highest levels of national leadership.  If this is simply a panic brought on by a killing that was finally unspeakable enough for white people who had remained on the sidelines before, will it stand up to a well-organized, determined and powerful resistance? 

  Or will the mass of people, overwhelmingly white, who find themselves finally disturbed enough to act, swing back to complacency?

  We’d better not. We’d better decide, and we will have to actively decide over and over again, to resist the gravity of our heritage and history. If this is panic, we’d better transform it to persistence and determination. We’d better learn to recognize complacency so we can set it aside. 

  To borrow from Audre Lorde, this not a luxury; “It is a vital necessity of our existence.” [iv]

  [i] “Faulker and Desegregation,” in Nobody Knows My Name. 1961. P. 126

  [ii] Rev. Dr Martin Luther King made this phrase famous when he included it in his 1964 Baccalaureate sermon at the commencement exercises for Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.  It’s widely accepted that Dr King was borrowing from a sermon by Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, published in Ten Sermons of Religion by Theodore Parker, Of Justice and the Conscience. 1853. Crosby, Nichols and Company. Boston.

  [iii] Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. 1956. U of Georgia P, 1994. P. 60

  [iv] Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is not a luxury”  was first published in 1977 in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, and again in 1985 in her collection, Sister Outsider.   Lorde wrote, “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”