Don't Call Me Perfect

American cities are on fire. Police have arrested and injured members of the Free Press for doing their jobs. The man in the White House has called the protesters THUGS, while praising and encouraging anti-stay-at-home protesters to LIBERATE their respective states. “When the looting starts,” he tweeted, “the shooting stars.”

As I was wrapping up my latest novel, The Woman in 3B, I had planned on writing a blog post about the inspiration behind the novel’s title—it’s an homage to the book The Girls in 3-B, by Valerie Taylor, one of the more prolific authors during the Golden Age of lesbian pulp fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. I still do plan on writing that blog sometime this month, but I just can’t get my brain to currently cooperate.

Forgive me this indulgence. Writing this post is probably more for my mental health than anything else.

Winter Jacket and Don’t Call Me Hero, unequivocally my most popular books, take place in Minnesota. That’s not an accident. I grew up in northern Michigan, I went to college in Wisconsin, and I did my graduate work in Chicago. I lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for about a decade or so after that. And during that time, I always considered Minnesota, especially the Twin Cities, as a midwestern utopia. They’d figured out marriage equality far earlier than the places where I lived. The state has historically been a haven for displaced populations like the Hmong or Somalis. Since 1976, the state has voted Blue in presidential elections. Natural beauty. Progressive politics. An education system that’s one of the best in the country. And last, but certainly not least, they’re Minnesota Nice.

I used to observe the goings on in that state and wonder to myself, how does Minnesota get it right all the time when the rest of the upper midwest was getting it so wrong?

And now…well…I guess nobody’s perfect.

Social media has become saturated in recent days with memes of famous Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes, between those who claim “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that” or conversely, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

But Dr. King also said this: “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

And this:  “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Just before his assassination in 1968, Dr. King spoke to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee where he told the assembled audience, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger.”

The FBI doesn’t collect a dossier on a non-controversial figure.

Popular history tends to whitewash the civil rights movement, and Dr. King in particular. We see black and white photographs of middle-class black men and women in their Sunday best, holding hands and singing the old gospel song, “We Shall Overcome.” But so much gets lost in this limited view. Dr. King wasn’t the only game in town. Let’s not forget El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X), Stokely Carmichael, or even the Black Panthers. The civil rights movement was far more radical than your high school US history textbook (or any number of Facebook memes) would have you believe.

The future Congressman, and one of my personal heroes, John Lewis, was one of the keynote speakers at the March on Washington in 1963. In his original prepared remarks, he wrote this: “We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way [General William Tecumseh] Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ‘scorched earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy. We will make the action of the past few months look petty. And I say to you, WAKE UP AMERICA!”

But even if we consider Dr. King’s civil rights strategy of nonviolence, lost to history is the rest of that phrase: nonviolent direct action. Civil rights protesters didn’t just peacefully march. They put themselves in harm’s way. They openly defied Jim Crow laws. They knew they would get arrested. They knew they would be beaten. They even trained for that. And it was the violent backlash they endured, doled out by police and counter-protesters, that finally woke up middle (white) America. It forced the country-at-large to question if they had more in common with the fellow citizens asking for basic civil rights (please stop killing me) or with the violent segregationists.

And don’t even get me started on the history of the Chicano Movement, or Native American Rights, or even Queer Liberation. They don’t call it the Stonewall Riot for nothing (although I prefer the language of rebellion).

History is about change over time, but it’s also about continuity. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Stay safe, my friends. And let’s collectively wake up.

Eliza