Saturday, June 4, 2016

Contradiction

Snoop Dogg and Animal Dreams
History professor Kali Nicole Gross, in an editorial reprinted in today's Akron Beacon Journal, provides a thoughtful invitation to consider Snoop Dogg's recent critical comments about the remaking of the film Roots.

The author notes the importance of telling and retelling the story of our enslavement of our brothers and sisters of color, while also concluding that 
"Snoop's comments suggest that scholars may need to do a better job of showing how this history is important for dealing with racism and systematic inequalities today."
Read and discussing Michelle Alexander's brilliant book, New Jim Crow, would be one very good way to do this, perhaps pairing a book club like discussion of two texts: NJC and Roots.

As a white man and an educator I did not initially understand Snoop Dog's perspective, because as Gross put it:
"Some whites believe we use this history to shame and blame.  They find it hard to acknowledge the racism, savagery and greed of their ancestors.  And they do not want to delve too deeply into this history lest they be forced to acknowledge the ways that it has benefited them."
When I teach about politics, I am continually reminded of the importance--particularly for my white students--of reminding ourselves of the legacy today in white privilege and racial prejudice of the savagery of my white, Christian ancestors...our founding fathers.

I did not expect Snoop to say he was sick of shows "beating that shit into our head" about "abuse we took hundreds of years ago."  He then added: "Let's create our own shit based on today, how we live and how we inspire people today. Black is what's real.  Fuck that old shit."

Conservative commentators have picked up on Snoops' response to advance their goal of denying the importance of understanding racism or history because it prevents us from celebrating America as the land of opportunity.  That seems to distort the point here.

At the same time, as noted by Gross, Snoop has a point.  If we simply repeat the same old tropes about slavery and 'I have a dream' on holidays and in classrooms, these come to operate more as blinders obscuring our capacity to see the relevance of the lessons in these stories today.  

Lessons about continued subordination and systematic inequality and prejudice and race-hate that fundamentally challenge the platitudes about a land of opportunity and a meritocracy.

Kingsolver's Animal Dreams is one of my favorite novels.  It does not do it justice to simply note here that one central idea emerging from the stories in that book is that the path to the sweet dreams we all seek is to live a sweet life...

...to, as Gandhi put it, be the change we want to see in the world, to enact our dreams rather than use a ritualized focus on dreams as a tool to distract us from the fact that we fail, in our every day lives, to see the gap between how we live and treat others and the dreams we claim to define us.

So, thanks Snoop and Professor Gross for helping me see multiple dimensions to this current conflict I might otherwise have missed.  This is why we value freedom--because it allows us to learn from each other, to make diversity a strength, and to so a much better job of figuring shit out.  



Because neither history in general, nor our own history of racial subordination, are unrelated to the conflicts we face today.