Good evening,
In second grade, I became obsessed with Martin Luther King, Jr. I learned about him in Mrs. Latin's class and became completely transfixed. I was fixated to the point that I would routinely guess him (incorrectly) as the answer to our regular classroom game of 20 Questions. When it was my turn to choose a person for my classmates to guess, some discerning 8-year-old colleague of mine guessed Martin Luther King with the first question and thereby set the record for shortest game of 20 Questions in the 2L classroom that year.
My guileless game-playing notwithstanding, awe is really the best word for the emotion I felt toward this titanic figure. I was awed that he could enact positive societal change through peaceful means. I was awed by a man who had the courage to put himself in harm's way in the service of his commitment to what was right. I was awed by how wholly he dedicated his life to creating a brighter, better, more just future.
So of course, I saw "Selma" (2014).
I knew at the outset that it would obviously be an intensely emotional viewing experience.
What I didn't know was how painful it would be to experience precisely how little has changed in the fifty years since the events depicted in this movie.
To focus briefly on the positive, the cast of "Selma" is absolutely wonderful. David Oyelowo is steadfastly composed, bearing the burden of generations of suffering with sturdiness and grace as Dr. King. Carmen Ejogo is lovely and formidable as Coretta Scott King. Oprah Winfrey is magnetic and gut-wrenching as Annie Lee Cooper. Tessa Thompson is stoically resolute and radical as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) co-founder Diane Nash, one of the few women on the front lines of the movement.
And now, the rest.
One of the most potent emotions I experienced while watching "Selma" was unbearable tension. As a viewer, you endure only minutes of acts of protest that often lasted hours, yet those minutes are agony laced with immense dread.
You know the activists represented in these scenes had no recourse to gain their rights other than to engage in acts of civil disobedience, and you simultaneously know that terrible things happened to them precisely because of that civil disobedience. Yet you have to wait with the knowledge that those things will, inevitably, unfold.
"Selma" captures those unfoldings with a terrible, time-slowing beauty, holding African American suffering firmly in the viewer's gaze as a commandment: We must not look away from faces of people seeking justice, especially in these moments when it is viciously withheld from them with violence and oppression.
Especially when it is withheld in our names.
Another potent emotion evoked by "Selma" is pain. It is painful watching people struggle for rights to which they are unquestionably entitled and watching them be literally beaten down for demanding them. It is painful seeing how despicably and systematically our country has failed to uphold the values it is meant to embody.
But watching "Selma" as a white person brings with it a special kind of pain. It's painful because white people were and are unequivocally responsible for this oppression, as if sharing rights with African American fellow citizens somehow makes their rights mean less. It's painful because you witness white civilians--not purported officers of the law or the state, just average people--take time away from their daily lives to head over to a bridge with bats and tire irons so they can mercilessly beat the shit out of peaceful protesters. It's painful knowing that was done in my name, because those white people perceived some kind of kinship in our whiteness that transcended their kinship with all human beings.
The guilt that knowledge brings is sickening. The shame is impossible to bear. But it's critical to be brought face to face with it. It's imperative that we weigh this one tiny piece of the price of white privilege, in these moments of suffering and courage while facing acts of hatred.
In addition to confronting us with the realities of African American suffering and the brutality of white supremacy, "Selma" succinctly sums up how witheringly high the stakes were before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. African Americans who attempted to register to vote in the South, like Annie Lee Cooper, often lost their jobs. They were required to pay poll taxes and submit to examinations often on incredibly obscure factoids about federal and local governments. They had to find a registered voter to endorse them with the full goddamned knowledge that no one in their community was eligible to do so. Because they were not registered to vote, they were barred from participating as jurors, so the white people who murdered their loved ones or neighbors would walk free from fear of conviction because they would be tried in front of a jury of only their white peers.
The desperate fight for voting rights was about so much more than being able to choose one's elected officials--as if being denied a right so fundamental to democracy wasn't enough of an explanation--it was a fight for the right to exist.
After all of that inter-generational white guilt, shame, and pain, you'd think I'd be heartened by the apparent sea change that occurs when white activists start joining Dr. King's movement in Alabama. But after counting the price already paid in blood, broken bones, and lives by the time those white activists show up and after seeing how ruthlessly white officers and civilians exacted that price, it's sickening and infuriating watching the police resistance to the protest evaporate as the movement makes its second attempt at crossing that bridge.
The message that sends is that we as a nation refuse to hear African American voices unless white voices lend them credence. We refuse to listen to them simply on their merit as fellow Americans. We will only allow them to walk safely, to protest peacefully, to demand their rights, to speak and be heard if they are temporarily bestowed with the mantle of white privilege. Only then will we listen.
Of course many things have improved since the era depicted in "Selma," but so many things feel the same: police brutality toward peaceful protesters, police use of unnecessary lethal force toward African Americans with reminder upon reminder that justice will never come, and systematically racist implementations of the legal system still prevail. Unbelievably, Dr. King's work in winning voting rights was undone fewer than fifty years after he finally succeeded, as if we're suddenly living in a different America than the very real very unjust one confronting us day after day.
Especially with the problematic complexity of the role white people have taken in advocating for equal rights, it might feel like there's nothing to be done. It might feel like there's no hope.
But of course that's not true. It doesn't mean white people should stay home, but it means we must reflect on these dynamics of power and privilege and the role we play, even unintentionally, in perpetuating them. We must each call on ourselves to listen better to perspectives other than our own, and for insisting on more equitable distribution of privilege in our society.
It is precisely because we still have so much to do that we must never give up. We must all be better at giving our time and our hearts and our ears and our money and our words to the tireless pursuit of justice, because although the arc of the moral universe is long, that is ultimately where it bends.
{Heart}
