As I spent some time over the weekend in Moss Point tending to my mom and enjoying family, the horrific images out of Chicago intruded. My emotions ran the gamut: from shock to rage to despair. So much is happening around us, and it is happening all at once. I kept thinking to myself that the country is fundamentally broken – the soul of America has been corrupted – and it will take revolutionary action to fix it. Maybe the fact that I am teaching about the Black Power era colored my thoughts. No matter. I do know, given what is happening and what I see and feel in my gut, that we cannot tinker around the edges of this. What is being revealed is a rot at the heart of America, U.S.A.
This thought about revolution led me to reach for my book, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. There I wrote about the need for revolution of value. Here is what I said:
If we are committed to American democracy, and by some twisted fate I must be, we have to work for something more transformative. A revolution of value upends the belief that white people are more valued than others. And that goes beyond a mere statement of our commitment to racial equality. We have to break the racial habits that give life to the value gap, and that starts with changes in our social and political arrangements. Most habits come to us in the context of our living in social worlds not of our own making—in our neighborhoods and broader communities. Without question, habits move us about until something gets in the way and interrupts the usual order of things. When they are no longer taken for granted, habits can change, because we notice they are out of sync with the task before us, with the moment we live in, or with the person we hope to be.
In my more hopeful moments, I believe that the little boy who played Tonka trucks with me in Moss Point—now old enough to have his own son or daughter—doesn’t think of black children as niggers like his father did. Times have changed, and the blatant signs of white supremacy have been dismantled. But I am less optimistic about whether he believes that poor black children need a social safety net or decent schools or that those children’s parents deserve an equal opportunity to earn a living wage and to own a home without a subprime loan. Or that they deserve to grow up in neighborhoods where they aren’t always under suspicion or under surveillance, where jails or prisons or premature death do not cut short any reason for them to dream. Given that, I suppose I still believe he thinks, like his dad that I am a nigger. For what else does the word mean? It is just shorthand for a life less valued.
Remaking American democracy is going to require a revolution of value to transform our habits. This isn’t a call, as President Obama made during the press conference after the George Zimmerman trial, “to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our communities.” Something more expansive has to happen. It has to occur at many levels: in government, in communities, among individuals. Besides, calls to “widen circles of compassion and understanding” only reinforce the belief that durable racial inequality is, at its root, a problem of racial reconciliation: that if we could all just get along, our racial problems would disappear.
This is one dimension of the illusion that protects American innocence. “Getting along” does not measure up to a more fundamental concern about racial justice at how we are all complicit in racial injustice. The illusion hides the rot.
A revolution of value would seek to uproot those ways of seeing and living that allow Americans to support racial inequality [to stand by in relative silence and watch what ICE is doing] and yet live in ways that suggest they believe otherwise. It is a revolution to close, once and for all the value gap—to finally rid the country of “niggers.” It involves three basic components: (1) a change in how we view government; (2) a change in how we view Black people; and (3) a change in how we view what ultimately matters to us as Americans.
These shifts are not abstract considerations. They get to the marrow of what blocks the way to real change in this country, and they will require political mobilization and massive disruption of the status quo.
Dr. King urged the nation to undergo a revolution of values. The United States needed to shift, he said, from a “thing-oriented society” to “a person-oriented society,” to see that the gap between the rich and the poor reflected an economic order that stripped millions of people of their ability to even imagine a decent living, and to understand that war puts us on the road to “spiritual death.” As he put it, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the great triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Americans have to live together, in the deepest sense of the phrase—to make a life together that affords everyone (and I mean everyone) a real chance. This can happen only when we experience genuine connectedness, when the well-being of African Americans is bound up with any consideration of the well-being of the nation. When we are not asked to disappear and, instead, have the space to reach for our best selves.
Unfortunately, the value gap and our racial habits stand in the way of any major shift in the cultural and political life of this country. Too many Americans remain committed to the idea of white superiority and are willing to defend that idea at whatever cost. They refuse to give up the idea that white lives matter more than others.
That refusal, with all of its damning effects, requires a radical response.
A Revolution of Value is ALL of everything in four words…thank you for always investing in the TRUTH❤️
Dr. King was pointing at things the way I've come to see them: racism and racial inequality under the law all stem from greed and materialism and the consequent diminishment of our moral and spiritual senses. To say we need a revolution is true, but perhaps we also need a more precise and less shopworn phrase to describe it. It must start by the rising and binding of enough of us under a banner of FELT passion for justice, and what's more common sense. It is commonsensical to deem all the passion, the talent, the intelligence, the wisdom and the beauty of people of color who are so obviously the equals and in some cases and instances the superiors of us white folk? You either see it or you don't. So the people who 'see the light' need to assume power in sufficient numbers to prevent enacting racist idiocy into policy and law. I think it's happening--perhaps too slowly for those who do see--but happening. I comfort myself with the thought that the worst racists among us have been identified as a small minority, who have unfortunatley been weaponized to shore up the top 1% against our rise. I hope I live long enough to see this 'forever' default system of rule by a deliberately cruel and uncaring minority. It has been the way of the world throughout written history, so however the revolution ultimately comes, it will have to be a matter of root, branch, flower and fruit. I am ready to die trying for this chance, but meanwhile, let's keep trying to articulate all this in a way that resonates with the reachable, inspiring them to corral the rest while we remake this tired old world. Sorry for any and all grammatical errors, typos, etc. When I am feeling stripped bare of pretense and defense, that can happen.