Two weeks ago, local Flint news source East Village Magazine premiered a video project called “FACES of Flint: a message from the anvil of American democracy,” (available here), a photo montage of scores of Flint residents, photos taken by a professional on a couple of different days at a couple of different Flint venues.
The announcement of the premier was intriguing, a “heart-touching Get Out the Vote message. Featuring narration by Flint poet laureate Semaj Brown” among others. (Woodside shared the announcement of this event, and changed our worship team meeting to allow us to watch.)
In these days, as racism and deadly policing have sparked Black-led, unrelenting protests across the country and a violent response by police at every level of government, it has seemed especially important to hear what Black people are telling the country, what they are asking of white people who are reluctant to tend to the racism that has defined America for 400 years.
In that context, I was looking forward to Ms. Brown’s narration. Surely we need a word of something, I thought, and a Black woman, poet, prophet, seemed a good choice to speak for Flint, our majority-Black city, which surely has something to contribute to the national conversation.
EVM does good work, but this project I consider to be a fail. I walked away frustrated with the video project that so thoroughly disregarded such a pivotal moment in our national life.
Let me describe.
There are two videos; they share features, including the soundtrack.
So, the first issue is the music, instrumental renditions of nationalistic songs that highlight an American myth with which we are struggling to come to terms:
The Star-Spangled Banner, out of sync with American reality, and subject of protests-by-kneeling, which have led to sanctions against Black athletes, students and others who have chosen to participate; and
America, the Beautiful, arguably a prayer for a better America, but showering America in exceptionalism and sanctimony.
The second issue is the narration, which continues the exceptionalism. In this regard, the second video, the longer one, is particularly on my mind.
Aside from the problematic claim that America invented democracy (we didn’t), and with only the thinnest suggestion that America hasn’t lived up to its hype, the narration declares voting as the power to heal America’s “deep discord, division and danger.”
I would contend, rather, that voting has never made it better; if it did, we wouldn’t be experiencing the largest social movement this country has ever seen. We are especially insensitive to hail the virtue and fairness of voting while the Current Occupant of the White House and his Party employ every means available (legality, be damned) to ensure that people who would vote against them are not allowed to vote at all.
The narration further fails to represent the realities of Americans who have had to take to the streets for the very rights we sing about: Black people, People of Color, immigrants, indigenous, queer people, women, and the millions who have fed our ravenous prison industrial complex, who, BTW, are largely prohibited from voting forever.
Which leads to the third, and grossest insult of all: the narration was written by a white man and only read by the Poet Laureate, certainly a metaphor for the issue at the heart of American racism — a highly qualified Black woman tasked with delivering the words and message of a white man; then her stature used to promote the event. In a moment that called for handing over the microphone, instead a Black woman’s voice was silenced, replaced by a white man. (And if you are tempted to counter that “no one forced her to do it,” I would remind us that people not in a position of power — by race, money, gender or other privilege — aren’t as free as the myth would have us believe.)
So, there you go. At a time when white people can and must do better, this project instead contributed to exactly the culture that Black people are trying diligently, desperately to overhaul and bring to our attention. As far as I could tell, apart from Ms. Brown, it was a project of white people.
I wonder, I wrote to the editors, I wonder what this video project might have portrayed had the poet been invited to write a narration herself, and had black artists and musicians been invited to choose a soundtrack that speaks to them. I imagine they would have portrayed an entirely different America.
I struggled to write this essay. I even struggled over whether to write it, (hence the delay), having shared thoughts already, privately, with the project leaders. I knew writing it had potential to hurt feelings, and I’m not generally inclined to blow up relationships just for the hell of it. But I reminded myself that, if it were any other news source, I would have no hesitation in writing a public response, a letter to the editor or an op-ed. Public voices need to be challenged publicly.
Plus, at the heart of anti-racism work is the work of white people to hold one another accountable. White supremacy is not just about skinheads and the re-emergence of Nazis in public life; it is in the way that we structure life to keep whiteness at the center and color at the margins. We need to stop doing that, and the first step to stopping is seeing. We can do better only when we recognize the problem. It the role of white folks to challenge other white people on behaviors that are troublesome, even when the offense is unintentional. We can challenge private remarks privately and public acts publicly, but we must speak up.
If we are to become the better people that the very aspirational narration suggests, it will only come from telling the truth, counting on others to speak the truth to us, and recognizing that Black lives matter more than white feelings about racism, more than white resistance to conversations about race.
Anti-racism work is hard. And it is life-long. There is no arriving; there is only being on the way. But ‘be on the way’ we must. It is a work of faith; it is a work of love.
There is no other way.