11-18-2017
THURGOOD MARSHALL
If you want to help change the awareness of the culture in this country, go to your nearest movie theatre immediately and buy a ticket to Marshall. Take your best ethnic friends with you and after you watch this movie go somewhere and have dinner and talk, serious dialogue, about this film. Don’t hold back. Say what you think!
Chadwick Boseman plays Marshall in this remarkable film set in 1941 before Marshall became famous for Brown v. Board of Education before he sat as Judge on the Supreme Court. After you have begun to chew on that, go and get tickets to Hamilton, the amazing play written and brilliantly played by Lin-Manuel Miranda, inspired by the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by historian Ron Chernow. These two remarkable works of art, unless your heart is made of stone, will change you. No matter what -you will be changed. We should show them to every family in America, no matter what their race or ethnicity or color. We must change the way we look at each other. What we see when we look at each other.
What have we been indoctrinated by our childhood context to believe? We must go back and read history for ourselves. Develop a lust for history! History is made up of stories of people like you and me who believed they could make a difference in the world. They were committed to doing what they could to change the wrongs in the world. They told it like it was! They didn’t let fear stop them from their commitment. Thurgood Marshall was a rabble-rouser. His passion made people uncomfortable with their complacency. He was out to get justice and he did it because he was passionately motivated to seek truth and justice. That is what is so remarkable about the film Marshall. It’s not truth prettied up in its Sunday best. It’s truth that’s dirty, torn and muddy …and at times brilliantly beautiful…and it is a truth that makes us question our complacency in the face of racism, sexism, political justification and our tacit approval of the evil we tolerate because of our fear and complacency.
We breathe in our beliefs like we breathe in oxygen from the context of our families where we are born. And we breathe in what our family believes until that truth is challenged and we have the possibility of learning something different. The context of our environment is what creates our lack of individuality as adults. If Dad is a bully and beats me every other night after he has fought with mom and had a few beers- chances are that because dad is my role model I may learn this is what men do as adults, and adopt some of those behaviors along with Dad’s beliefs. When I grow up I will justify them because that is what happened to me and it is what I know as truth. If I’m a girl, I may choose to marry someone who is just like Dad, because that is what is familiar to me. If my family is racist, sexist or doctrinaire Democrats or doctrinaire Republicans, I will likely adopt those beliefs as truth because that is where I learn to think, learn what is right or wrong, what is good or evil. If I never stop to consider who I want to be and begin to individuate, it is likely I will end up a statistic of some pretty crazy beliefs I never examined. Chances are in that family I am likely to have poor self-esteem or confidence. So, guess what? I compensate by becoming a blustery, blow-hard, bully to fit into my violent family.
Like it or not, we are a product of our times, our family, and our genetics. When we are born we need our family to accept and care for us. We are babies for goodness sake! You can’t feed yourself. You can’t do much of anything, so we need whoever is taking care of us to like us enough to take care of us. So we try to please them. We smile, coo and giggle (it’s all we’ve got at first!). Very early in our development, we start to mimic our parents. They teach us how to BE. We please them and they reward us. We displease them and they punish- and a frown from Dad or Mom is the punishment to a young toddler. We learn to make meaning out of our experience through their sometimes subtle and often blatant responses, and it continues until and unless we hit a brick wall that allows us to consider what/who we are separate from our parents!
Look, I personally believe very few parents want to hurt their children. Most want to do their best! But raising children is the most difficult job we will ever have. It is often exhausting, chaotic, stinky, infuriating, embarrassing, frustrating, etc. Most parents do the best they can, and often the best they can is not good enough. Remember they were parented by less than perfect parents in less than perfect times, and their parents were, and their parents were– back to the beginning of time. Remember they didn’t have the conveniences we had. My son showed me an App. that can show you the location of your children if they are carrying a cell phone. That would have been extremely helpful when he was a teenager! Wisdom isn’t accumulative, but knowledge is.
If we can stop long enough to develop empathy towards an entire race of people who were treated as if they were less than human in ways that are painful just to consider, what is wrong with that? Their generations all the way back were tortured, spat upon, beaten, raped, shamed, humiliated, in ways we can’t imagine. They are just people like we are. Some of us are kind, some are not. Some of us are awful, some are not. On and On and On and On. Just people, people! What’s it going to cost you to admit that? Frankly, I’m sick of identity politics! I can see I am a different color and other than that I can’t see a difference that allows me freedom and not you based on color! What kind of ignorant craziness is that?
The wisdom of films and plays like Marshall and Hamilton allow me hope.I was born in 1942 in a small town in the South. It was a year after the time frame for the film Marshall. So many opportunities for equality were squandered and ignored during my lifetime. The Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court 1954 decision declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. Integration of schools and public places begins. I went all the way from first grade to graduate from high school in segregated schools. I saw signs “White Only. Then “There is no separate but equal,“ said the Supreme Court. The sit-ins when I was in middle school. Going to St. Augustine to hear Martin Luther King speak when I was a senior. First Black students at the University of Georgia when I was a Junior. The riots of the 60’s– George Wallace and the dogs and the firehoses– John F. Kennedy elected as President of the United States in 1961- and hope flowed like water until he was assassinated on Nov. 1963. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968 and Robert Kennedy in June 1968. Lyndon Johnson, who was JFK’s Vice President enacted many of the measures Kennedy had been urging at the time of his death, including a new civil rights bill. Johnson’s agenda for Congress in January of 1965: aid to education, Medicare, anti-poverty bill and anti-discrimination bill, removal of obstacles to the right to vote. Viet Nam was raging and eventually, 1968 Johnson withdrew as a candidate for reelection. Thurgood Marshall was the first African American confirmed as a Supreme Court justice on August 30, 1967. I was 25 years old. By the time Richard Nixon became President the nation was divided. Faced with impeachment by 1974, Nixon announced his resignation and his Vice President, Gerald Ford, became President. Then Jimmy Carter 1977 to 1981 (I was living in Atlanta and Lester Maddox was governor of Georgia…a racist and an embarrassment). Learn what YOU believe, people. Figure out who you are when you are alone with yourself
My point is this: I am old and I am sick of racism! It makes no sense! Go see this movie. Go see this play. Discuss everything about both till you are exhausted and finally let go and allow everyone the right to do and be without you putting up barriers!
11-18-17