My Name Is Peacemaker

One thing that is widely misperceived is Dr. Martin Luther King’s point of view on nonviolence. We are taught in school that Dr. King, probably the most historic and historical icon of the black community, was a pacifist who eschewed violence in all its forms. He is famous for saying to the black community something along the lines of love your enemy and if your enemy punches you in the mouth then turn the other cheek. In other words, above all cost resist the impulse to resort to fighting.

It is true that Dr. King was a pacifist but Dr. King was also a very pragmatic man. People fail to realize that the thinking of Dr. King began to adapt to the conditions he and his family lived under. The constant barrage of threats against his person and that of his children began to weigh on his philosophy. Dr. King began to realize that when you’re in the wilderness you can’t simply love a pack of lions away that want to feed you to their children. I like to think that had Dr. King lived I’m sure he would’ve started packing or at least made sure he had a bodyguard or two or three or a dozen. As Dr. King’s heart began to harden against the white dominated American culture, Malcolm X’s philosophy began to realign itself as well and the two representatives of the civil rights movement with a history of divergent views began to see things eye to eye. For many people, there was an image of the pacifist lamb sleeping next to the belligerent lion on the horizon. The possibility of this image coming to fruition was far too much to bear for many people.

To this day the mutual understanding of the two leaders of the black community’s civil rights movement is either ignored or downplayed. If anything the only thing people remember about Dr King is that he preached nonviolence and made speeches about the benefits of racial integration. He’s really been simplified into a one dimensional, love everybody character. But if Dr. King was walking down the street with his daughter and someone jumped out of the shadows and tried to steal her away I doubt if he would let the abductor run away shouting wishes of love into the night. Dr. King would’ve been getting medieval on somebody’s ass real quick, nonviolence be damned. A man of peace is still a man of peace even when he’s using violence to defend something he considers precious and important.

The welfare of the black community is something that I feel is very important and worth every single black person fighting for. Unfortunately, there are many people, black, white, and other, who feel that the black community is doomed to suffer whatever obviously miserable fate that awaits it. But the problem is that the black community is under a seriously vicious and brutally relentless attack so skillfully constructed and executed that it is truly a masterpiece of the most sophisticated form of psychological warfare ever imagined. This form of manipulation is so complete and so thorough that the perpetrators, the majority of the public, don’t even realize or don’t even care that they’re having their strings pulled. Indeed, many, many people are more than happy to do their fair share and then some to keep black people in their proper place without much cajoling.

Take your choice of what excuse is needed to substantiate black subjugation. Black people are criminals so they deserve to be jacked by the police. Black people are lazy so they don’t deserve jobs. Black people aren’t intelligent so they don’t need education. Black people can’t be trusted so keep your purse close to your person when they’re in the vicinity. Black men want white women so white men must do whatever to protect their women from black men. Black women want white men so white men are justified doing whatever to get them from black men. Black women have children out of wedlock at the drop of a dime. Black men make babies without any intention of raising them. Black are shiftless so they can’t be trusted. Black people are irresponsible so anything that happens to them is a problem of their own making. Black people don’t deserve dignity. Black people don’t deserve protection of the law. Black women don’t deserve to be found when they’re kidnapped. Black men don’t deserve justice when cops kill them for identifying themselves. Black people don’t deserve health. Black people don’t deserve money. Black people don’t deserve this. Black people don’t deserve that. Black people don’t deserve god. Black people don’t deserve heaven. Black people have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Black people aren’t doing their fair share. Black people deserve their hell and there’s nothing anybody else has ever done to help them get there. And black people are supposed to just ignore all this deception, bend over, and take it up the rear. I don’t think so.

Yes black people have a part to play in their subjugation. Many of our brothers and sisters are quick to abandon us and absolve the perpetrators of this psychological warfare of their participation or they will join the perpetrators and make their own contribution to the spread the misinformation directed against the black community. Other members of the black community will happily and/or unwittingly assume the roles the dominant white community has identified as stereotypical behavior for the black community.

Other blacks simply duck their heads and tolerate the onslaught as best they can. These members of our community may or may not be aware of our predicament. But nevertheless, they feel that we are powerless to do anything against the great public, corporate, and government apparatus that has been unleashed against our welfare and gains strength with each and every passing day. Every time a black person is caught or accused or convicted of any crime or anything slightly perceivable as negative it gives credence to the entire anti-black propaganda machine. And the machine weighs heavy on the shoulders of these brothers and sisters who endure its every manifestation.

But there are other brothers and sisters who understand we are in a conflict for our lives and for the future of our children. Our ancestors have fought their fare share of the fight. They endured the middle passage, being enslaved, various Jim Crow laws, racist organizations such as the Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the Nazi Party, the struggle for civil rights for black people, the racist state governments like the ones in Mississippi and Alabama during the 1960s, racist federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations with J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Emergency Management Agency with heck of a job Brownie, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Governor Wallace, Governor Bush (Jeb and Dubya), Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and a host of other entities, agencies, policies, studies, bureaucracies, bureaucrats, uncle toms, politicians, corporations, situations, incarcerations, and anything else you may care to add to the formulation of this one sided equation.

The burden some people choose to carry on behalf of the black community is truly considerable. It feels like the black community’s struggle is against a juggernaut of truly mammoth proportions. But it isn’t our choice to fight this fight. Our choice is intended to only try to find some kind of peace or harmony for black people. Even a pacifist will fight to protect that which he or she believes in. Even a peace maker will fight if the conflict is honorable enough.