The clock just went from 02H00 to 03h00 on the East Coast of the USA. This of course happens every year around this time to fit the daylight saving times practice. Except that I stayed up to witness it and write this Post to better fit the memory of the events that occurred in Selma, Montgomery 50 years ago. Check the acronym in my title.
In late March 1865, Selma, a key point for the Confederate States with manufacturing of munitions, was the site of a battle with the Union Forces that did not end well. By daylight on April 3rd, the fallen town was found looted and under destruction by the victorious North. It became a symbol for the racist White Supremacist South and saw segregationist laws ( known as Jim Crow laws ) enacted roughly 15+ years later. As a result, a century after the battle, being Black in Selma could easily get you beaten up for forgetting you were not a citizen, not even a human.
In early March 1965, after a dismal year for negroes fighting for their rights and despite President Lyndon B. Johnson having enacted the Civil Rights act the year before, Alabama under the despicable Governor George Wallace was trying to hold on to its racist stance and laws so that thousands of activists had been beaten, arrested ( Dr. Martin Luther King amongst them ) or in some cases killed in the last month or so with only local Catholics providing White people backing. After which, about 600 marchers departed from Selma to walk to the state legislature in Montgomery, Alabama in protest. The date was the 7th, i.e. yesterday, but the day was Sunday, i.e. today, which is why I am writing in the dark, i.e. black. As they reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the local sheriff Jim Clark and his men ( he had ordered all white males to be deputized to fight off the event ), backed by State Troopers and assorted racists including the Ku Klux Klan were waiting for them and a scene of shame followed.
The world outside was struck by this image of Mrs Amelia Boynton Robinson, one of the “Courageous 8” group that had kept the movement going lying unconscious :
Click to read more about lady Amelia.
2 days later, Martin Luther King joined a repeat march, this time joined by White folks from across the country comprising a third of the group, 2, 500 people went up to the same bridge turning around before the racists charged. Although it disappointed quite a few participants, Dr King’s strategy was wise : that same evening, James Reeb, a White Unitarian minister came for the event, was beaten with 2 friends by segregationists and died 2 days later but also, the tide had begun to turn. Reeb’s name joined that of Black deacon Jimmie James Jackson that had been beaten and shoot in February by State Troopers, had succumbed to his wounds and inspired the initial march.
Click for link.
Click for link.
At last, the matter was not black vs white anymore but Black and White as the images of the time were and as society always should have been.
By the 15th, protests in Montgomery saw violence used that Dr King and most Black organizations had never condoned but also the introduction to Congress by the President of a Voting Act to complement his prior Civil Rights one with a speech using words similar to MLK’s own stating that America shall overcome bigotry and injustice, going where no other President before him had dared, not even Lincoln,
By the 17th, a federal judge backed the marchers rights by using the First Amendment.
By the 21st, a third march began that would go all the way. This time, the only color that predominated was that of the soul and it was not black as that of the racists. Rabbis joined nuns, priests and ministers. When singers comforted the marchers the night before reaching the state capital, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr and Nina Simone had Tony Bennett, Frankie Lane, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary by their side. By the following night, after King’s speech ( read here ), it was again a White person, Viola Liuzzo that was killed for helping the marchers get back home with her car. By March 26th, a boycott of companies supporting Alabama’s unjust policies had begun and by August 6th, Johnson’s bill was passed and signed. A hundred years after the Selma battle, the Civil War was coming to end.
And yet … and yet, we all know from events of 2014 and 2015 that the racial divide still exists in the minds of many. The numerous cases of shootings by police, best embodied in the recently disclosed Justice Department assessment of the Ferguson Police ( read here ), show that many still have a colorblind mind if not heart or soul.
For that reason and because I knew that to be my case too albeit in a different way, I posted something on my personal Facebook page that went unnoticed save by an old friend who also suffers from universalism of morals. It is this which I want to present to the reader to commemorate the Selma events, the marches of March 1965.
If you click the link below, you will land on the page of Harvard University site for Project Implicit.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
The aim of this research that has now gone international is dual. Apart from the collecting of data on how people really perceive things like race by opposition to how they think they do, hence the implicit, it can be used to teach or train diversity acceptance. On a personal level though, it could reveal to you that you are not as honest about yourself as you pretend to be … even alone and inside your mind!
I’ll use myself as an example. Normal people hide part of their true feelings at all times to conform to societal mores and fit in. This is standard in humans and all other gregarious species. It allows for smoother social interactions. I don’t. Which I wish was the case for others and yet do not recommend as it comes at high cost.
Being utterly frank will normal make people cringe back and avoid you. It does permit one to have a less biased view of the world and favors critical thought allowing for higher philosophical considerations but as shown throughout history ( and hopefully on this blog ), it sets one apart from the herd, makes them unbearable to most.
Autonomous thinkers are usually outcast and only become acceptable after their death. Diogenes of Sinope or Socrates , Beethoven or Alan Turing, Galileo Galilei or Giordano Bruno, Nietzsche or Cioran, even Jesus-Christ safe all revered but were shunned, isolated, condemned and killed or led to suicide. It seems that to shine posthumously, the glowing light of the sacrificial bonfire, real or metaphorical, is a pre-requisite. I would not recommend to attempt this if it is not deeply set in your natural being.
Still, one should in my opinion know of their internal chasm between true self and social image for honest appraisal of the soul and or to avoid long and costly psychoanalysis. At minima, it can help personal growth or whatever term you like to use to cover living with yourself. This is the self-examination part of our title that also relates to how a society, as in nation in the present case, perceives itself more or less honestly.
I took two of the tests before registering with the research to verify if it worked which as just explained may not be humble but remains true. It does.
When tested on the link between danger perception and race, I got this result :
When tested on racial preference alone however, I got this one :
[ The scale is 7 tier : Strong, moderate, slight, neutral, slight , moderate, strong. ]
The combination of the two is really who I am. I do not think that dangerousness is anything but individually inherent : people are violent or not and it has nothing to do with particulars. I do think that some subsets of a given society, that may be termed oppressed minorities, are as a group worth more attention or care than the well off ones.* In other words, I don’t judge a book by its cover and I fight injustice when I see it.
The point though is not how good I am but simply that, possessing this quirky peculiarity of buffer less auto-justification / self worth, etc ( which has me hate myself for my mistakes at times, i.e. part of the cost mentioned above ), I was able to verify the validity of the testing procedure offered by Project Implicit.
This in turn allows me to recommend the use of it. If you solely want to check upon your ways, you can use the tests as a guest; it will get you the knowledge of true self you’re after. I can’t vouch for what you’ll discover or infer from it however, just for the test itself as a valid tool to express your unconscious bias or absence of it.
As we turned the page on the half century since SELMA, I do think that if all Americans took these tests, it could reveal the extent of the march yet to be had on the way to true equality. And just has one should bring a map and compass on any outing, help establish a path towards it. It may be little for change even when aware of the necessity for it rarely comes easily. I am sorry that I cannot do more.
Then again being forbidden by the (im)material distanciation Internet provides from twisting the readers’ arms to get them to relent from racism is most likely in keeping with Martin Luther King and the other activists of the Selma era’s belief in non-violence. Having just admitted my staunch self-evaluation capacity, it is probably better that I cannot!!!
Good luck with all components presented herein, sincerely, Tay.
Peace out.
General link to Project Implicit : http://projectimplicit.net/index.html
If you want to help the research, registering will allow you to take all the available tests and provide feed-back to help them further the project.
* Or “nigger lover” to the bigots, I suppose, for if it wasn’t clear yet I’m “white”, whatever that may mean.
Definitive Lapse of Reason 