Why We Need to Represent

 By G. S. Norwood

On his last full day in office, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted that multiculturalism “is not who America is.” 

He is wrong, of course. America has always been a multicultural nation. Our music, literature, art, and beautifully varied forms of worship make that clear. They're all informed by the people who stepped forward to represent their cultures. They shared their experiences of growing up African, Asian, Latinx, Native, gay, bi, or transgendered.

(American Libraries Magazine/photo by Elena Seibert)

The day after Pompeo made his ridiculous statement, Justice Sonia Sotomayor—the first Latina on the Supreme Court—swore in Kamala Devi Harris as the 49^th Vice President of the United States. As Vice President, Harris will represent a whole new realm of possibilities for Black women, Asian women, women who are the children of immigrants, and just simply WOMEN of any color or background.

A woman who has frequently been told it “wasn’t the right time” for her to reach for a new career achievement, Harris simply says, “I eat ‘no’ for breakfast.” 

(AFP, via WION)

What does it mean to represent?

Harris represents opportunities at the highest levels of government.  But, if you look around, you’ll see that it’s important for people to represent themselves and their cultures at every level of society and in every field of endeavor.

Take Omar Thomas, for instance.

Thomas is a contemporary American composer who writes for symphonic and wind ensembles.  Equally grounded in classical music and jazz, he has been lauded for bringing a fresh new voice to the stuffy and inbred symphony world.

Omar Thomas (L-R © 2017 Omar Thomas Music; WASBE)

If you want to meditate on the holy spirit, listen to the first movement of Thomas’ work, Come Sunday.  If you want to stand up and dance, listen to Come Sunday’s second movement.  Thomas dedicated the work, “To all the black musicians in wind ensemble who were given opportunity after opportunity to celebrate everyone else’s music but our own - I see you and I am you. This one’s for the culture!”

Thomas is far from the first Black American composer, but his impact on classical music caused conductors to re-evaluate music by earlier Black composers. So, for instance, Col. Jason K. Fettig, who conducts the United States Marine Band, slid Black composer Adolphus Hailstork’s Fanfare on Amazing Grace in among the Sousa marches and patriotic standards at the Biden/Harris inaugural ceremony.

When the US Marine Band played at the 2021 Inauguration, Col. Jason K. Fettig included music by Adolphus Hailstork in the performance. (L-R: USMC photo by Staff Sgt. Chase Baran via Daily Hampshire Gazette; Adolphus Hailstork photo courtesy of Africlassical).

Being the First

But what do you do if you are the first? 

In 2007, a skinny sixteen-year-old London-born Indian kid had a ferocious argument with his mother.  She wanted to take him to an open audition for a new teen drama on British TV.  He argued it was pointless because there were no brown faces like his on British TV. 

She dragged him to the audition anyway.  After that, there was at least one brown face on the telly: his face.

A year later he snagged the lead role in a little indie film everybody thought was going straight to video release. But the movie got great word-of-mouth buzz.  By the time he was eighteen, Slumdog Millionaire had ten Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. And Dev Patel’s brown face was plastered across busses and billboards all around the world.

(MovieKoop)

Today, Patel has an ardent fan base throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia.  He has begun to break out of the “exceptional Asian” roles. Now he turns up in what he calls “regular dude,” parts. You can catch him in TV shows like The Newsroom, and Modern Love.  In 2018 he snagged the classically British role of David Copperfield, in Armando Iannucci’s new film, The Personal History of David Copperfield.

Dev Patel stars in the film The Personal History of David Copperfield. ©Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Searchlight Pictures (via the New York Times. Photo by Dean Rogers).

Perspective from Dev Patel

Patel is acutely aware of his responsibility to open the way for other non-White actors. “When you get to a place of privilege or success,” he says, “Make sure you send the elevator back down for your friends.”

Because, no matter what Mike Pompeo thinks, we are a multicultural nation. We are a multicultural world.

“We’re talking about humanity," Patel says. "It’s a story about love. It’s a story about unification and diversity. There is room for stories like that.”

Gratitude for Those Who Represent

We should all be grateful for the Kamalas and Sonias, the Omars and the Devs, who step up to represent their realities.  And if you don’t see yourself represented?  Maybe it’s time you stepped up, too.

Dev Patel and Octavia Spencer talk about representing their communities with Variety. This delightful interview with two outstanding actors is available in both video and article format. (Art Streiber for Variety)

IMAGE CREDITS:

Many thanks to AFP and WION for the photo of Vice President Kamala Harris’ swearing-in. We appreciate American Libraries Magazine and photographer Elena Seibert for the photo of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. We also thank Omar Thomas Music and WASBE for the photos of Omar Thomas.

Many thanks—for their service, their music, and their photo—to the United States Marine Corps Band, and photographer Staff Sgt. Chase Baran. Also, thanks to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, for the photo of the USMC Band. We also thank Africlassical for the photo of Adolphus Hailstork.

We thank MovieKoop for the Slumdog Millionaire movie banner. Thanks to Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Searchlight Pictures, the New York Times, and photographer Dean Rogers for the photo of Dev Patel as David Copperfield. And finally, thanks to Variety, as well as to YouTube for the video, and to photographer Art Streiber for the photo, of Dev Patel and Octavia Spencer.

What might Dr. King say to us today?

Gecko & Fly

 In the wake of the holiday that honors him, I’ve been wondering “what might Dr. King say to us today?” The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a man whom many of us consider a moral beacon for the ages. His life ended more than fifty years ago, but we value moral beacons because their guidance transcends their own times.

We certainly could use a moral beacon right now. We’ve just lived through a year of historic tumult and upheaval. The pandemic has disrupted our lives on every imaginable level. We lived through a long summer of mass popular demonstrations against systemic racism. An incredibly divisive political season has so far crescendoed (at the time of this writing) into the spectacle of a thank-God-failed insurrection/coup d’état.

What might Dr. King say about all of this? It’s impossible (unless you believe in séances) to ask him directly. But some of the things he wrote and said point us toward his probable reading of some of today’s major recent events. If I tried to address all of today’s issues with his thoughts, this would be a very long post. Instead, I’ll focus on two top headlines of today.

What might Dr. King say about the insurrection at the Capitol?

Dr. King loved his country. Even though he opposed white supremacists in positions of power, he still could write, “the goal of America is freedom.” In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) he cited “the American dream,” and the goal of “bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

The white supremacist mob that stormed the Capitol would have looked all too familiar to him. Their (literal and spiritual) parents and grandparents created the Jim Crow South where he focused his resistance work. Of their racist laws, he wrote, “All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”

The insurrectionists attacked this police officer with a crutch, a night stick, fists, and assorted poles—including a pole attached to an American flag. (WUSA9)

He also would have condemned their violence. King decried “hate filled policemen [who] curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters,” but his whole life was devoted to nonviolence. He would have unequivocally decried assaults such as the one pictured above.

“Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating many more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace,” he wrote. Moreover, “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”

What might Dr. King say about the impact of the pandemic?

I think he would have been most outraged by the stark, enduring, inequalities the pandemic laid bare. The scourge of poverty, and the systemic racism he sought to dismantle all his life, roared into vivid prominence when COVID-19 pervaded the nation.

This chart captures a snapshot of data from May 5, 2020 that demonstrates the uneven impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on different racial groups (Todd Trumbull/San Francisco Chronicle)

Unequal access to health care, environmental pollution in poor neighborhoods, and inadequate access to healthy nutrition in “food deserts” had already afflicted communities of color with higher rates of diseases and health conditions that made residents of these communities more vulnerable to the disease and its most virulent manifestations.

In this case, we don’t have to ask, “what might Dr. King say?” because we know he said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We know he advocated for “the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”

In 2020, we outgassed a lot of platitudes about the value of “essential workers,” many of whom are Black, Latinx, or Asian. But although they can’t work remotely and therefore court death each day they go to work, they often still don’t have adequate health coverage, and they weren’t in the earliest cohort of vaccine recipients, even though they were supposed to be near the front of the line.

A hallmark of capitalist systems is tiers of access, a hierarchy of who gets how much, of what quality, and when. As King put it, capitalism “has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he said, “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

What might Dr. King say about where we go from here?

I think he’s left us plenty of guidance on that question, too. “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools,” he warned. He also said, “We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.”

“If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight,” he wrote from the Birmingham jail.

Native Americans of the Navajo Nation people, pick up supplies from a food bank set up at the Navajo Nation town of Casamero Lake in New Mexico on May 20, 2020. (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images and ABC News)

On a different occasion, he warned, “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there "is" such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”

Let’s not be too late. After all, “The time is always right, to do what's right.”

IMAGE and QUOTATIONS CREDITS:

IMAGES: Many thanks to Gecko & Fly, for the header image. Many thanks also to WUSA 9, for the horrifying photo of the police officer being beaten by the insurrectionist mob at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I’m grateful to graphic artist Todd Trumbull of the San Francisco Chronicle for the “Racial Disparities in COVID-19” chart from May 5, 2020. I also want to thank Mark Ralston of AFP via Getty Images and ABC News, for the May 20, 2020 photo of the relief station in the Navajo Nation.

QUOTES: Many of these resources supplied overlapping quotes, while others offered new insights. For a deep dive into the wisdom and sayings of Dr. King, I appreciate Christian Animal Ethics, The African Studies Center of the University of Pennsylvania (complete text of Letter from a Birmingham Jail), Gecko & Fly, Food for the Hungry, In These Times, and Common Dreams.

The Riot at the US Capitol

 So much for 2021 being a quieter year than 2020! “Weird Sisters” Jan S. Gephardt and G. S. Norwood both posted pleasant, hopeful blog posts early in the day on January 6, 2021.

Romolo Tavani/123rf

They went live before the treasonous terrorist riot at the US Capitol. But this week we couldn’t go on as if nothing had happened. The riot at the US Capitol might not have had the same death toll as 9/11, but we will always remember that day.

Eventually, you’ll see the posts we originally planned to run this week. But this week we need to speak out—especially after we posted so often on First Amendment issues through the summer of 2020.

G. S. Norwood on the Riot at the US Capitol

Man, did that blog post become obsolete in a big hurry!

I had no sooner posted a sweet little blog entry last Wednesday—all about New Year’s traditions and starting off on the right foot—than angry mobs of far-right extremists were sacking the US Capitol building and trying to overthrow our democracy. Congressional Representatives and Senators were terrorized, art and historical artifacts were damaged or destroyed, blood and other bodily substances were smeared around those hallowed halls . . . And five people died.

Insurgents overrun the Capitol: Clockwise from upper left, the traitorous mob pushes past police barricades (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/for The Washington Post); “Q Shaman” and others maraud through the halls (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock, via The Washington Post); rioters stop for selfies in the Rotunda (Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney @simoncoveney on Twitter, via Irish Times); and mill down a hallway in a cloud of tear gas (Saul Loeb/AFP, via Irish Times).

In case I have to spell it out, a seditious uprising is NOT the right way to start the new year.

The shock is still wearing off for me. Yes, I know there are dangerous white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and just flat whacko groups out there. I wrote about some of them back in October, when they marched on the Weatherford, Texas, square. I know that a lot of people refused to accept the results of the November 3 presidential election, and were fighting it tooth and claw through the legal channels of the courts.

Worst losers ever

I also understand that President Trump is a monumentally poor loser who will probably still be insisting that he won by a landslide 100 years after he’s dead. The disembodied voice will whine up from his grave on the nights of the full moon.

But never in a million years did I expect to see a mob of armed rebels storm the halls of the Capitol. Never. Not in a million years.

So much for my powers of prognostication.

Barbarians storm the gates: Clockwise from upper left, the Trumpist mob jams the stairs outside the Capitol (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post); Congressional staffers don gas masks against the tear gas (Andrew Harnik/AP, via The Washington Post); other staffers use heavy furniture to bar the door as they shelter in place (Amanda Voisard/for The Washington Post); Members of the House of Representatives and their staffers hunker down behind whatever they can in fear for their lives (Andrew Harnik/AP, via The Washington Post).

Fantasy, meet Reality

Here’s the bottom line for me: I may write urban fantasy, but I believe in reality. I particularly believe in reality-based political action. Any party that spins fantasies to justify policies to hurt real people in the real world has lost my vote. We have a lot of problems to deal with in our pluralistic society, but deciding the winner of the November 3, 2020, election isn’t one of them.

Residents of Baltimore City line up to cast their votes in the U.S. Presidential and local congressional elections at Carver Vocational Technical School on November 03, 2020 in Baltimore, Maryland. (Photo by J. Countess/Getty Images, via Pew Research Center).

The election was held as outlined in our Constitution. It’s done. It’s over. Every precinct, every county, every state across our nation certified that the elections they oversaw were secure and the results were accurate. State officials—Republican and Democratic—accepted those results. Local, state, and federal courts accepted those results. All the Constitutional requirements have been met. The Electoral College voted and, now, those votes have been accepted by the joint Congress of the United States.

We cannot allow lies and whining and temper tantrums—even oft-repeated ones; even from the highest elected officials of the land—to overrule our laws. Keep repeating that. We are a nation of laws, and everybody—even the whiners, the pouters, the arrogant asses, and the violent malcontents—must abide by the law or suffer the consequences.

Jan S. Gephardt on the Riot at the US Capitol

Were you surprised by the events of January 6, 2021 and the riot at the Capitol, as Senator Pat Toomey said he was, on Meet the Press the Sunday after? Some were, apparently. Such as—allegedly—the Capitol Police.

Compare the responses. The difference is glaring (WUSA 9 photo montage)

I don’t know what planet they live on, because we were warned. We were warned in a hundred ways, large and small. “very fine people on both sides” warned us. The plot to kidnap Governor Widmer warned us. “Stand back and stand by” warned us. The “Biden bus incident” warned us.

Every single Trump rally warned us, or should have. Breaking norms (“Lock her up!” for political adversaries). Ignoring common decency (Disability met with mockery). Ignoring Constitutional limits (Journalists threatened). Flouting science (mask-less super-spreader events).

Death by a thousand cuts

Bit by bit, we grew inured. Jaded. Immune to being shocked. I know many of us tried to hold onto our sense of “What is normal?” in the face of so. Much. Contrarian. Intransigence.

Politically incorrect was suddenly correct, and a badge of “original thinking” (as if falling into clichés was ever original). Up is down, green is red, and right is wrong in Trump World (Michael Cohen calls it “MAGAstan.”)

Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, FL. (Getty Images, via Town & Country).

Lies—Trump has told well north of 20,000 lies, in the course of his presidency, according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker. He was averaging 50 false or misleading claims per day, by last October. This is a political tactic. It even has a name: Bury them in Bullsh**t.

Somewhere in the massive loads of bullsh**t, we and the truth got buried.

Lie by lie by lie, the Truth dies, and all we have left are “alternative facts.” At which point, sure! Why not? A cannibalistic child-porn ring can hold orgies in the basement of a pizza parlor without a basement, and the most secure election in US history can spawn virulent, persistent claims of voter fraud.

What’s ahead?

If we manage to get through the week or so until the Inauguration without further bloodshed, it will be a miracle.

That’s not just my opinion—many in law enforcement agree. At the FBI’s January 12 press conference about the riot at the Capitol, they stressed they have already started more than 100 investigations.  In the weeks and months ahead they anticipate hundreds—even thousands—more. And we're already getting warnings of new threats.

Because bit by bit, lie by lie, unseemly thing by unseemly thing, thousands of Americans have come to believe the crazy. That autocracy is better than democracy. That white supremacy is a virtuous cause. And that they have the right to “take back” what never was theirs in the first place.

It’s up to the rest of us, in solidarity, to show them how wrong they are.

IMAGE CREDITS:

Oh, wow, do we ever have a lot of people to thank this time. We appreciate Romolo Tavani of 123rf, for the greeting to 2021. Many, many thanks to The Washington Post, as well as Amanda Andrade-Rhoades, Jim Lo Scalzo, EPA-EFE, Shutterstock, Ricky Carioti, Andrew Harnik/AP, and Amanda Voisard, as well as Irish Times, Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney (@simoncoveney on Twitter), and Saul Loeb/AFP for the photos in the two montages from the riot at the US Capital.

We also thank Jemal Countess, Getty Images, and the Pew Research Center, for the photo of people in line to vote in Baltimore; WUSA 9, for the graphic comparing the responses in June 2020 and January 2021; and Getty Images, via Town & Country, for the photo of Mar-a-Lago.