racism

The King Center

Hope you all saw my hopeful letter to Martin, yesterday, but today I want to ask people to spend a little time further investigating the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and challenge everyone to get busy if they are not already in furthering his precepts though activism.

One of the best places to advance your education is The Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, known as The King Center. Here you will find thousands of digitized documents pertaining to his legacy which established and newly minted activists will find enlightening and empowering. Dr. King’s life and teachings are accessible and the most apt anchor to guide and ground our collective social justice campaigns while giving hope to all the individuals who today, more than ever before, are willing to lay down their lives on behalf of freedom for all people.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. November 15, 1964 Flickr/creative commons

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
November 15, 1964
Flickr/creative commons

The philosophy of Dr. King underpins his entire life and the lives of his many followers. At The King Center website, you can read all about it in just a few pages. It is guaranteed to give you a new or newly invigorated focus because he addresses the entire breadth of effective activism on any front, regardless of your specific cause for freedom: the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism that exist in an intersectional and vicious cycle; the six principles of nonviolence; the six steps to nonviolent social change; and, concluding, an outline of what Dr. King called, The Beloved Community. In your organizational spaces or at home, print out these few pages and put them on the wall; look and re-read them often.

The goal of Dr. King’s philosophy culminates in the realization of The Beloved Community, the future humane world where old, coercive, and inhumane systems are vanishing, and being replaced with new, voluntary, humane ways of doing things that do not leave anyone behind. VenusPlusX points to the same end point. Dr. King teaches us that this is not an idealistic, perfected world but one where the reconciliation of adversaries is based on a “mutual, determined commitment to non-violence,” where all conflicts are resolved peacefully, “a type of love that can transform opponents into friends.”

In his 1959 Sermon on Gandhi, Dr. King elaborated on the after-effects of choosing nonviolence over violence: “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle’s over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.” In the same sermon, he contrasted violent versus nonviolent resistance to oppression. “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.”

Laying down one’s life for the cause of freedom is perhaps the best, the most noble thing you can do because until everyone is free, no one is free. (For those wondering, yes, that’s also a Jesusonian principle, that the greatest love we have have is to lay down our lives for a friend. But this doesn’t mean dying, it just means living another way.) I can have all the money in the world but if there is one child, perhaps a poor child, maybe a hungry child, living under an oppressive system, I cannot be silent. So I challenge all of you lurkers out there to commit just one hour, 60 minutes, on one day of the week, to do something to advance freedom for all people. You will find it is the most interesting and life-giving party around.

 

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Dear Martin

Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968 by Caboindex Flickr/creative commons

Martin Luther King, Jr.
1929-1968
by Caboindex
Flickr/creative commons

Dear Martin . . . How happy I am today to see the next generation fully embrace the ideals that identified your short life: the end of poverty, racism, and war, precepts to which I have continued to dedicate my life.

With numerous conferences and forums throughout your birthday weekend, before and after, your mass of followers are playing an invigorating and crucial role right now in schooling the mass of newly minted young activists who are fully committed to ending the murder of young black people, and all attempts to erase an entire race through mass incarceration and domestic and foreign policies favoring whites. This new, gigantic effort is committed to non-violent means to solve these conflicts, a true testament to your life’s work.

As an idealistic teen growing up in post-war America, your ideals called to me as they still do. As a pre-teen I  came into contact with young freedom rider friends of my (Jewish) family who were helping black southerners register to vote, and challenge a rigged system (that is today being re-rigged, unfortunately). I became an activist working throughout the 1960s and 70s, putting more than just boots on the ground in protest of the Vietnam War. Your life and work were the keys that completed my full radicalization, and still motivate my activism today.

In our youth, you and I wrongly supposed that, “Oh, this is going to be solved next week because our arguments were so persuasive and the evidence so damning!” But it wasn’t solved in a week. Instead, it is being solved by the generation we gave birth to.

Today, more than ever before in history, legacy and new activists are working together, communicating through free mass communications, bringing about co-equal citizens of the world who fully envision that better and more humane future: a happy and healthy cohabitation of world citizens in place of the corporatized, enslaving stranglehold by a small number of elites (all old, white, men).

Your dream is becoming a reality, Martin. Your deep compassion for all of humanity is in full flower. It’s just taking this long because it turned out there was and is so much work to do. Nevertheless, we are reveling in this major step forward in out quest for Peace.

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Back To The Future

Lance Shields Installation: "Cosmic Kisses Illuminated"  slurl.com/secondlife/ North Dolores/202/61/23/ Flickr/creative commons

Lance Shields
Installation: “Cosmic Kisses Illuminated”
slurl.com/secondlife/ North Dolores/202/61/23/
Flickr/creative commons

My blog break turned out to be a bit longer than it should have, sorry. But if you have been following the Twitter/venusplusx feed you know I’ve been very busy with activists everywhere as we see, finally, an energizing of the forces for good despite the pain of getting to our destination. And it is and will be painful, very painful for a while, make no doubt, but there’s a new inter-sectional majority able to co-envision the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not a mirage, it’s real. A new day is here.

More than at any point in history, our past and present are showing us what we do NOT want to bring into the future. We are now capable of uniting across the world as never before to rescue our planet from the coercive and inhmane systems which enslave us, and at the same time to build, collectively, a survivable culture comrpising humane and voluntary systems devoted to universal safety and peace. (See our Manifesto for more.)

The midwifery of our pain is delivering a new cohesiveness, a new world consciousness, an energized generation of young people who can speak with one voice. VenusPlusX’s mission calls for the end racism and sexual and gender oppression, and equates the fulfillment of that mission with The New Age of Sexual Freedom, as the singular bedrock to all other freedoms because it is the only one that encompasses all other freedoms. For this reason, we are always concerned with the inter-sectionality of all issues pre-empting or otherwise inhibiting this new age, such as Fundamentalism/Xenophobia/Racism/Discrimination, World Poverty/Income Inequality, Climate Change/Migrations/Immigration, etc.

#CharlieHebdo and #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie) are trending today as we witness another tragic example of this inter-sectionality, this time in Paris, a terrorist attack against free speech. Attacks on any type of freedom come from fundamentalist extremists who have distorted their own religious teachings (Islam/Judaism/Christianity) to excuse their ignorance and hatred of “other.” Fundamentalist extremists are only concerned with killing or otherwise disappearing certain groups of people they are primitively afraid of, whether in Paris, Uganda, or onMain Street USA. Even Right Wingnut and Xeonophobe Laura Ingraham‘s cynical spin on today’s Paris attack is itself an example of fundamentalist extremism. There is no evidence of mental capacity in her vitriol; if there was a shred of it she would soon discover the intellectual impossibility of her own words. By contrast, editorial cartoonists across the world responded loudly and clearly, showing the power of truth.

#BlackLivesMatter has been a fragile meme under constant attack by the #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter crowd who just don’t get it. These individuals have been conditioned culturally to reject all matter of “other” and fear everyone. These are the people who want to go backward in history instead of forward, and by resisting progress, including the evolution of their own thoughts, they have effectively created their own minority that will soon be irrelevant to the march towards racial justice.

#NetNeutrality is fast coming to a head, and, just like #ClimateChange, it’s another battle of corporations versus people. Preparation to fight these issues has never been more focused, organized, and energized.

Likewise, we are prepared to rectify #Immigration and #IncomeInequality by demonstrating the economic rewards of opening rather than tightening borders, and at the same time taking joint responsibility for the physical welfare of all people. Fewer and fewer of us can stand still thinking of those who are suffering under these coercive systems right now, children going to bed fearful, hungry, and often homeless.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately, and as always will welcome your feedback. The inherent inter-sectionality of each of these hashtags can be negative or positive, but we are beginning to see factual proof of the arc of progress that is capable even of transforming great pain towards the legacy of all that is good. Count on that and stay busy.

Be strong now because things will get better.

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Unacknowledged Racism Feeds Institutional Prejudice

Prejudice  by Mo Flickr/creative commons

Prejudice
by Mo
Flickr/creative commons

This morning, The New York Times Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristof asks, Is Everyone A Little Bit Racist? This bit of genius melds diverse findings that suggest that yes, we are, whether we are white or a person of color.

Blind research has proven over and over again that unacknowledged racism throughout society has fed institutional prejudice.

When injured, non-whites were less frequently prescribed pain-killers.

Black students are three times more likely to be suspended from school.

Young black people are almost 4 times more likely than their white cohorts.

A black sounding name on a resume is much less likely to result in a call back.

Kristof points out that while we tend to blame overt racism, the real culprits are the “broad swath of people who consider themselves enlightened, who intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and behavior.”

We challenge you to become a part of the research that explains why these facts are true by playing an on-line shooting game and/or some other tests to self-reveal your implied social cognition, the unconscious attitudes about race we all possess to one degree or another. By uncovering and owning our unconscious attitudes we become better equipped to do something about them. I’ve worked since my teens fighting racism but my results taking several tests show that, unconsciously I moderately favor white people over Asian and black people.

Black, brown, white, and Asian people are equally affected by the same cultural programming, but it is up to each of us to bring our gut impulses more in line with our intellectual aspirations.  

Prejudice can be cured, and you can help bring about change by knowing yourself better by privately exploring your most innermost impulses. If you are brave enough to test yourself, let us know how it goes.

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Love Pierces Hate

by Rafee Jewell Flickr/cretaive commons

by Rafee Jewell
Flickr/cretaive commons

 

After a week of writing about the senseless murder of Michael Brown, a young, unarmed African-Americn in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white policeman, I’ve spent the last few days reading posts we have written over the past few years, and those from other authors, condemning racism. It’s become a meditation on the racism upon which this country was founded.

Fear of other did not begin with America. Fear of something different than yourself springs from caveman DNA, and it is only the gradual grasp of Love, in your intellect and in actuality of the Love you express, that raises anyone above the primitive. When we evolve as individuals, and as a mass of humanity, to be able to reject fear as a way of life, the earth and its people tick closer to a world built on Love. This is a world where every child is born with its personal autonomy intact, where governments, corporations, religious hierarchies, or local custom do not rob us of mutual equality. This is the age of universal plurality, the only pathway to Peace, the only future that applies to all people.

Organized religion has done the most to retard this evolution away from the primitive. From the earliest shamans, humans have been exploited by greedy (and lazy) interlopers presuming to come between us and the reality of love, something we can actually feel flow into, through, and out of our own bodies.

To the extent that our successes or our happiness sits atop the exploitation of others, the love in our lives is an illusion, a mental appetizer only of what could be. Every decision we make is a personal moral question. There is no morality greater than one person, despite what religious hierarchies and others would have you believe. No decision is based on what others think or tell you because if you just quiet your mind for a moment you know exactly what each decision is and where it will lead. At that moment you know whether you are choosing love over hate, mutual support over exclusion, purpose over failure. It is not only our intellect or even our heart that guides us, although they are helpful. It is recognition of the underlying and inescapable ecology of Love, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Consciously or unconsciously we understand in our gut that love has a future and that hate dies on the vine, however long that might take.

The founders of Amerika, and everyone since, sprung from a white supremacist point of view. First up? The eradication of the non-white natives. Next? The ruthless exploitation of black people brought to this country against their will, permanently indentured to the whim of their white owners. Now? Closing our borders selectively because white people fear that we are fast becoming a blended brown nation.

Every white person, individually and collectively, knows they are consciously choosing hate or at least something short of Love, whenever and wherever they are unwilling to give up the systemic exploitation and enslavement of those they consider “other.”

The only future for white people in this country is to embrace Love of their fellows by silencing the haters. We have to call the haters out in capital letters, on a daily basis. The legacy of Michael Brown and his family is giving this country an ideal platform to recognize this country’s racists roots, and to make amends by finding ways to make things right.

“Not everything that is faced can be chaged;
but nothing can be changed until it is faced
James Baldwin (1924 – 1987)
American novelist, essayist, playwright,
poet, and social critic

Follow The Money To Ferguson

Light Brigading August 14, 2014 Flickr/creative commons

Light Brigading
August 14, 2014
Flickr/creative commons

No doubt I will have more to say about the events still unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri, because the underlying factors are key issues for VenusPlusX.

For now, we’re are pointing you to Mass Incarceration: Follow The Money (Part 1 and Part 2), a 2012 analysis and op-ed we produced following the publication of Michelle Alexander’s scholarly and myth-shattering book, The New Jim Crow, well worth a full read and understanding for anyone committed to systemic change in this country. It answers the question, “Why?”

Institutionalized racism, money, greed, and special interests are what makes brown and black young men primary targets and victims, and it is being financed by your hard-earned tax-dollars.

Alexander points out the undeniably connection between the action-reaction cycle: the end of slavery delivering Jim Crow laws, the voting and civil rights acts of the 60s giving rise to the political Southern Strategy meant to rile southern whites to support radical conservatives, and the election of our first black president leading to the Jim Crow 2.0 and mass incarceration of brown and black young men we have today.

This is not just about another black teenager being gunned down by a white policeman because this is a regular occurrence in America, nor is it the completely bungled response by the police and political leaders who continue to fail this heart-broken and understandably convulsing community, or the deployment of militarized SWAT.

The legacy of Michael Brown, the Ferguson teen shot this week, will be the commencement at last of a serious examination of the underlying issues that created the atmosphere for it to have happened in the first place. It is a significant turning point in our shared history because people all over the country are finally standing up to be heard, embracing their power they too often surrender.

More to come . . .

 

 

 

Getting Untied Is A Mistake

Some recent memes have left me wondering: Are certain leaders consciously uncoupling from some of our core beliefs that motivate our activism in the first place?

For example, it seems to me that it would be much better if the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) community fights for all of the objectives of the immigration movement, as we have done in the past. However clear it is that LGBT people suffer disproportionally in all matters of immigration, our advocacy must be inclusive of the suffering of all people, LGBT and straight conjoined, in order to attack directly the underlying causes of immigration problems in the first place, such as racism and radical nationalism. This is not a suggestion that our message regarding LGBT immigration issues disappear or be subsumed by the larger message of human rights but that the latter, larger message is always a preface to to our special plea for our LGBT-specific issues.

"Luminarium" Sculpture by Alan Parkinson, UN Geneva, Switzerland Flickr/creative commons

“Luminarium” Sculpture by Alan Parkinson, UN Geneva, Switzerland
Flickr/creative commons

Just as LGBT advances have followed gains in women’s rights, we should pause to consider that we are a part of a larger fabric of social and economic justice and global human rights. Segmentation of any issue weakens the voice of all.

There are several reasons to be as inclusive as possible, the least of which is that we uncover our best allies when working in coalition, people who will support us when we need it. We can point out the special circumstances causing LGBT folks more trouble but not so loudly that all people hear is that we care more about our own. We can’t forget that everybody is suffering. We risk our own progress when we sound like we are pitting something like uniting same sex spouses over the needs of motherless children on the southern border.

Those of us who lived through the 60s, 70s, and 80s know that identification with the whole of any issue reliably enhances our credulity. When we rally shoulder-to-shoulder with activists dedicated to their causes across the social and economic spectrum (immigration, environment, economic, education, race, politics, religion, etc.), we are speaking to the broadest constituency. All of these issues, including sexual and gender freedom, are a matter of human rights. We can get our issues heard by more people if we set them in a reliable context, so there needn’t ever be a disconnect in our objectives.

The underlying cause of all injustice is enslavement of the many by the few. Peace, prosperity, everything, is inhibited because civilization has gradually surrendered the power of the group, giving away to someone else the power of the people that resides within us. For centuries, organized religion modeled human behavior through the opportunistic entrepreneurs who declared the necessity of their intercession between you and your direct line to the power of love. Whether you call this power god or something else, we all feel it flowing through our senses, continually recycled among those we love. Priests, ministers, pastors, imams, and rabbis, having recognized this universal power of love, found a way to exploit it for their own gains (getting shelter, food, currency, and other societal benefits) by warning that bad luck is sure to come to you if you didn’t follow their particular doctrine. Organized religions were the first corporations, and they are thriving, especially now that the Surpreme Court has declared the persons who can legally discriminate against others based on a false interpretation of both personhood and religious freedom.

As we have said before, the new age of sexual freedom is synonymous with the end of racism (at its root sexual oppression) and the end of nationalism (at its root racism). Sexual freedom is the bedrock of all freedoms because it fully expresses our bodily guarantee of plurality, global equality, and world peace.

Working arm-and-arm at the intersections of all issues pertaining human rights is the most direct path towards reaching our goals, common and specific.

 

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Counting on what is good

By everyone’s estimation, last week was bad, in fact we are having many bad weeks piling up for sometime now. But, these horrible events distract us from all the good that is emerging at the same time. It’s not Pollyanna-like to see that this cauldron of world-wide strife is now bubbling over for all to see and evaluate and soundly reject. 

13208598245_b71e3e0fc5_bUniversal human rights, environmental protection, and self-determination, and all that they convey, will prevail, not just because of their rightness but because they represent survival. Science-denying, theocratic fundamentalists, here and abroad, simply have no future.

Previously I have asked the question, What would happen if there was an alien invasion? Whether the aliens were friendly or not, we as a planet would join together to respond irrespective of the nationalistic tendencies some hold dear. This nationalism (and the racism that underlies it) is a disease and is at the root of all of the world’s ills whether we are talking about America’s failed immigration policies or arms aggression across the globe.

Our manifesto written in connection with VenusPlusX’s relaunch in April offers more about how progress inevitably overcomes regress. Progress itself has its own natural ecology, although at times like this it takes a little thought to see it.

We’ve already talked about the right-wing theocracy destroying American democracy; their paper trail speaks for itself, but voters will ultimately reject the policies and laws wrought by these old, white, sexually sick hacks, from the Supreme Court to Congress to local school boards to seditious public officials calling for armed defense of their smallest ideas. Except for a dozen other countries, it’s mostly much worse in other places.

All together we have a relative small oligarchy enslaving us, and the more they do the more they hasten the inevitable populist revolution. They are anti-women, anti-voter, anti-gay, and anti-the-rest-of-everything. If nothing else, they will die, and their perverse ideas will die with them. Even if the hysteria about Obama should somehow lead for a time to more old, white theocrats, that will only force their insanity further out on display and, therefore, more rapidly diminished and dismissed.

Oligarchs like Putin, will be done in by their own recklessness. Right-wingnuts often do our work for us, fully repudiating their own ideas because they lack the connective tissue to make any sense at all.

Old, white men are pursuing an agenda of perversity touching hundreds of countries, not to make America the beacon of hope it once was, and can again, but instead to be ruler of the entire planet. Here’s one of the worst examples — there is a secret organization known as The Family (also know as The Fellowship) which sponsors anti-homosexuality campaigns abroad to establish christianists’ unholy stranglehold of entire populations with the sole purpose of seizing control of these countries’ natural resources. With the aid, complicity, and full participations of past and current senators, congressmen, attorneys general, military commanders, and just plain businessmen in it for a buck or two, The Family operates 10,000 cells worldwide, corporate white-collar terrorists who just pledge their loyalty to Jesus’s plan (their interpretation of it to be sure), and then do whatever the hell they want.

People won’t be able to stay silent much longer.

So the diffuse and asymmetrical bad is coming at a fast pace now, faster than in anytime in the future but we are comforted by all the good that is emerging just as fast. The transformation of the world may not take as long as you might think. And the populist revolution we so desperately need will not necessarily be cataclysmic in nature because we are making incremental but substantive progress everyday. But, like I said, it’s natural to focus on the negative and ignore the good.

So, off the top of my head today, I’m going to start an inventory of all the good that is happening, and hope you will send your own citations. We can look at this growing list every time we feel discouraged when face to face with our enslavers.

  • Just today, as the result of many boots on the ground, and a 10-person lawsuit joined by the National Action Network, Detroit has stopped cutting off water to poor customers.
  • Also, today, President Obama newly protected lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from being discriminated against by federal contractors. This affects over 25% of the American workforce, and sets the table for a fully equality bill in congress.
  • Last week, thanks to the leadership of Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, an agreement has been reached to apply drug-sentencing retroactively, giving more than 45,000 prisoners the right to petition for reduced sentences or release, saving taxpayers millions and giving these people and their families renewed hope.
  • Many institutions, including faith groups, are unloading investments of fossil fuels, and many other campaigns of divestment are taking place, all for the greater good of the world.
  • Transgender Actress and Activist, Laverne Cox hit the cover of Time magazine, and becomes first transgender actress to be nominated  for an Emmy award. The conversation about sexual and gender freedom has never been more active.
  • Colleges are leading the way in designating gender-neutral dorms and gender-neutral bathrooms on its campuses.
  • Even the Supreme Court occasionally does something good, like protecting the search of your smart phone.

These are all examples of what we discuss in our Manifesto for a New Age of Sexual Freedom, wherein we posit that Sexual Freedom is the bedrock of all freedoms because it conveys the full end of racism, nationalism, and oppression by the few. Our treatise revives a long-held concept of what is needed: the gradual, hopefully not cataclysmic, end of old, inhuman, coercive systems run by governments, corporations, and religious hierarchies, while preserving from this history that which is old but also good, and building new, human, and entirely voluntary associations. A good example of something that is old and also good is reprinted below. Another is the gradual shift to local farming and food supply to replace hard-hearted, pesticide-infused agribusiness.

Send us samples of good popping up in your community and country that we can share with each other.

Flickr/creative commons

Flickr/creative commons

 

 

 

why it says in the manifesto.

 

We shall overcome. We shall overcome.

Are you sleeping through a revolution?

Portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Chris Tank located in the MLK Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, DC Flickr/Creative Commons

Portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Chris Tank located in the MLK Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, DC
Flickr/Creative Commons

“One of the great liabilities of history is the fact that all too many people find themselves amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to achieve the new attitudes and the new mental outlook that the new situation demands.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Springfield College Commencement , June 14, 1964

It was empowering this week to re-read and reflect on an oft-overlooked commencement address by Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered 50 years ago at Springfield College.

Just days before the speech, King was arrested with a group of demonstrators attempting to eat at a restaurant and sent to St. Johns County Jail, an infamous building that housed many civil rights pioneers for non-violent demonstrations in and around St. Augustine, Florida. He wasn’t sure he would get out in time to go to Springfield, Massachusetts, for this commencement address, or to Yale University where he was scheduled to speak the following day.

Here are some excerpts from Springfield College address, but we urge you to read it in full.

The theme of this speech cautions all social change advocates and activists to make sure they are not “sleeping through a revolution” by not doing everything possible each day to make the world a better place. He urged his listeners first to adopt a world perspective to understand the breadth of our collective social ills. Next? Wipe out poverty. And, third, recognize the “urgency of the moment.”

As long as there is poverty in this world no one can be totally secure. Somehow we are all tied together in this great system of humanity. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be; and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: “No man is an island entire in itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” and then he goes on toward the end to say, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

When we recognize this, King goes on to say, and “are concerned about our brothers who are less fortunate, then we are remaining awake through a great revolution.”

[I]f we are to remain awake through this great revolution, we must work passionately and unrelentingly to remove the last vestiges of racial injustice from our nation and from the world.

In exposing the modern problem of failing to “recognize the urgency of the moment,” King’s words cross time, just as pertinent today as they were 50 years ago.

There are people all around who are saying, “Cool off.” There are individuals all around who are saying, “You are pushing things too fast.” And they are saying only time can solve the problem. The only answer that we can give to the myth of time is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation have used time much more effectively than the forces of good will. And I am absolutely convinced that the Wallace’s, the extreme rightists and the individuals committed to negative ends have used time much more effectively in our nation than the individuals committed to positive ends. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people who will bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time. Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals . . .time itself becomes an ally of the primitive and insurgent forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation.

 

The speech happens to elucidate the roots and foundations on which VenusPlusX stands, articulated in our recently release of our Manifesto for a New Age of Sexual Freedom, which begins: “The New Age of Sexual Freedom is synonymous with the end of sexism and racism (the greatest form of sexual oppression), and the end of nationalism for the purposes of war (the greatest form of racism), in the shortest amount of time (because we are killing each other).”

We hope social justice advocates everywhere will be inspired by this speech and more of King’s writings, and reflect on what more then can do, how many other people they can awaken to their cause, and how we can all avoid sleeping through the revolution.

Photo by Anne Adrian Flickr/Creative Commons

Photo by Anne Adrian
Flickr/Creative Commons

 

Eric Holder explains it all, now it’s your turn

Holder confronts racial issues in address as White House puts discrimination at the fore

8718692337_1026fd2f33_zAttorney General Eric Holder has withstood savage attacks from his detractors but he has hung on and has emerged as our explainer-in-chief when it comes to racism in this country, really racism everywhere. His recent commencement address at Morgan State University was his most bold and erudite attempt to educate the world, particularly America, on the insidious and subtle nature of racism.

Holder rightly points out that the recent high-profile episodes of racism often mask systematic prejudice and discrimination.

“These [recent] outbursts of bigotry, while deplorable, are not the true markers of the struggle that still must be waged, or the work that still needs to be done,” Holder said.

“The greatest threats,” he continued, “are more subtle. They cut deeper. And their terrible impact endures long after the headlines have faded and obvious, ignorant expressions of hatred have been marginalized.”

In 2009, during Black History Month, Holder began this dialog by calling us “a nation of cowards” without the stomach for an actual conversation about racism. Gradually, with loving care, he (and President Obama) have led us through an increasingly more overt and candid discussion about race, the substance of which will live on as guide to all of us who have the courage to listen, take to heart, and put into action, much like the lessons of Martin Luther King, Jr.

So the next time that the likes of Bundy or Sterling take over the news cycle, it is up to all of us to draw the distinction Holder illustrates to begin a conversation with someone, anyone, about the deep roots of racism that still have stranglehold over our society, and what we can do together to overcome.