History and the Future at a Crossroads: Milton Brown
Like many of you, I have been glued to the television screen witnessing in biblical fashion the moral unraveling of U.S. American cultural mythology. The graphic and telling images of human carnage have forever shredded the socially constructed masks of Christian and Constitutional fealty to a belief in the sanctity of all human beings we have worn since 1776. We stand naked now without the rhetorical makeup of “one nation under God,” “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” and justice for all. We have “flipped the script” on the political illusions of First, Second, and Third World self-serving international rankings. Maybe Tom Friedman is right after all about the world being flat, but for the wrong reason. The fiasco in New Orleans has made it clear to all that there are no more superpowers—real or imagined.
Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is not a New Orleans and Gulf Coast tragedy alone, it is a uniquely U.S. American one. In fact, Hurricane Katrina is not the real tragedy at all. The lack of what bell hooks calls a “caring community” stewarded by truly compassionate leadership is what defines the source of the real tragedy. That old communist nemesis, Fidel Castro, just a few years ago provided such immediate and effective leadership in the face of a category five hurricane that he evacuated over 1.3 million Cuban citizens without losing a single life. All Cubans were Castro’s people, no matter their color, age, infirmity, or political disposition. In the wealthiest, resource-rich country on the face of the earth we allowed hundreds of thousands of our people to suffer the most egregious human indignities and what may ultimately be thousands to die needlessly. George Bush, a christianist conservative failed to save a single person. Hurricane Katrina victims survived in spite of him and others of both political parties and at all levels of government who failed them and the rest of the U.S. American people. The contrast could not be more telling.
For far too many Americans, only certain human beings stand at the top of the cosmological pyramid, individualized and sustained by God’s grace. That those human beings of power and privilege are more often than not self-identified as having been made in God’s New Testament, Reformational image—white, male, heterosexual, Christian, and of propertied and monetary means—is the asili, or motivating force, for the human denigration and social disgrace that has occurred recently in New Orleans. That those who deem themselves to be superior—and their racial and gendered surrogates—believed their own delusional hype and acted accordingly is the cultural fabric of the real tragedy in all of this.
My truth is that they just didn’t care! They didn’t care about the poor, differently abled, and elderly people of all colors who they knew for decades would be subject to the direst of human circumstances if a hurricane of sufficient force ever crossed their path. I believe they cared even less knowing that most of those who would suffer the brunt of the devastation were not only poor but Black. As Jesse Jackson so profoundly stated in rejoinder to a reporter’s query about the role of race in the unconscionably slow federal rescue and recovery response “Americans have an infinite capacity for Black pain.” Jesse’s comment, while prophetic, was too narrow in scope. The historical and contemporary evidence is clear that those made in God’s New Testament, Reformational image have an infinite capacity for anyone’s pain who is different from them. While they are not alone in their indifference to human and social injustice, they stand alone, at least momentarily, at the pinnacle of universal moral and spiritual shame for all the world to see..
It should be obvious that I do not speak here of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, et al, alone. To focus on them to the exclusion of the U.S. American social/political ideology of a “will to power,” a Manifest Destiny, if you will, that encompasses us all—republican and democrat, womyn and man, Jew and gentile, Black, white, and all other racial designations—is to skew our perception and focus and to inexorably chain us to the culturally socialized patterns of scapegoating and moral obfuscation. We, the American people, elected Bush and Cheney and with conscious acceptance embraced their henchmen of draconian politics and practices. We, the American people, excused their absurd misdirection of truth that propelled us into accepting their predetermined plan to invade Iraq. We, the American people, swallowed whole their lies about Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We, the American people, even continue to misguidedly embrace Colin Powell who sold his soul to a corrupt political ideal rather than fulfill his moral duty of allegiance to the U.S. American people. We, the American people, countenanced it all in the name and spirit of the U.S. American way—republicanism as democracy; illusion as reality; racism as history. Where are you, H.L. Mencken, when we need you most?
O.J., Michael Jackson, Minister Louis Farrakhan, young Black men in urban centers, and even liberals—who by definition must be white since Blacks are almost always only Black—are momentarily shelved as the coded images of colorblind racism and other forms of social injustice. The “God’s image boys” have taken their rightful place alongside Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Trent Lott and Bill Frist, whose collectively muted and temporary retreat gives even greater emphasis to the magnitude of their shameful pretense. Robertson’s call to have one of U.S. America’s perceived political enemies assassinated seems to have been answered. In an ironic twist, he and the “God’s Image Boys” became the target when the sinister union of whiteness, maleness, privilege, power, and Christianist fundamentalism, camouflaged in conservative Republican ideology, was exposed to national and international observers. Jesus, my Sephardic Jewish brother of color and poverty, must finally be smiling. After five hundred years, he just might get his religion back.
In light of the U.S. Americaness of the tragedy continuing in New Orleans today, we cannot continue to be above it all at our “old alma mater on the hill.” We cannot merely take in a few discarded souls, feel good about ourselves, and continue to do what we have always done. The social masks of indifference have come off us as well. We, too, stand naked and ultimately accountable to a mission statement of high ideals that require and demand sufficient will and resources to make it real.
The under-reinforced levees of cultural competence and social consciousness at BU are no more sufficient than the physical ones along Lake Ponchartrain to hold back the surging waters of insidious racial ignorance and historical social indifference. Bellarmine, in some striking ways, is like the French Quarter and the Garden District in New Orleans—a cultural respite for far too many educational tourists habitually oblivious to “human suffering in the world” that exists around almost every corner they so arduously choose not to turn. Caps, gowns, and degrees, momentos to be cherished as unfortunate reminders of a time unfettered by a clarion call to consciousness, speak poignantly to a mere symbolism of educational excellence and the inevitable exploitation of race and class privilege. The Princeton Review’s ranking of BU as the eleventh least politically active university in the nation should be less a cause for dismay than a call to reality, conscious reflection, and purposeful action.
Hopefulness lies in the fact that more of my colleagues at BU than I can recall at any other institution where I have been, from the President all the way across the campus, are truly committed to the noble ideal of social justice. Though their voices are most often muted by institutional culture and tradition as well as by the deafening silence of others for whom social difference and social justice may be less compelling ideals, these conscious activists are a testament to the inordinate possibilities of hope and dream. From the most senior member of the Board of Trustees to the youngest freshmyn, we must galvanize our resources in a struggle to transgress the debilitating push of fear of that which we think we know about the unknown (not the unknown itself) and the tranquilizing pull of the socially reproduced status quo. We must resist excessive institutional politics of propriety (e.g., Bellarmine’s traditional image) and boldly sail from our “safe harbors” toward a new reality, toward a new Bellarmine. It is not that the old Bellarmine is not good enough; it is that the old Bellarmine is not nearly enough.
If we are to shore up the cultural levees within Bellarmine as we most certainly must do in more geographical ways around New Orleans, then it must be done with the most critical and comprehensive thought and planning possible. Bellarmine’s Strategic Plan for 2006-2111 cannot be like the myriad studies done for decades before Hurricane Katrina visited the Gulf Coast—a well-crafted document that lacks the will of leadership at all levels to provide the funds and human resources needed to ensure that the life-centering and life-sustaining provisions within the plan be fully implemented. An unfunded and under-resourced mandate is no mandate at all. To do so would be to render those different from the dominant group at BU to an experience of marginalized indifference of Katrina-like proportions. If that happens, it will be on our watch and on our consciences.
It is our duty to bring soul to BU. Not the racially trite notions of soul that limit our spirituality to stylistic rhythmic expression, but the kind of soul that flows from a union of institutional mind, body, and spirit. The kind that inspired that six-year old boy in hurricane-ravaged and government-neglected New Orleans to, with blind faith, lead five other children, all younger than him and some who were even strangers, toward an unknown destiny. His innocent courage speaks eloquently to that which is possible if we seek our own salvational innocence and moral courage by just letting go. The door of hope and possibility has been opened for us. We have no choice but to walk through it with conscious determination and unrepentent resolve. If not, then we have no one to blame but ourselves for what Cornell West warns “awaits us in the 21st Century.”
Milton Brown is an adjunct faculty member of the School of Education at Bellarmine University and Chair of the Multicultural(ism) Task Force
Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is not a New Orleans and Gulf Coast tragedy alone, it is a uniquely U.S. American one. In fact, Hurricane Katrina is not the real tragedy at all. The lack of what bell hooks calls a “caring community” stewarded by truly compassionate leadership is what defines the source of the real tragedy. That old communist nemesis, Fidel Castro, just a few years ago provided such immediate and effective leadership in the face of a category five hurricane that he evacuated over 1.3 million Cuban citizens without losing a single life. All Cubans were Castro’s people, no matter their color, age, infirmity, or political disposition. In the wealthiest, resource-rich country on the face of the earth we allowed hundreds of thousands of our people to suffer the most egregious human indignities and what may ultimately be thousands to die needlessly. George Bush, a christianist conservative failed to save a single person. Hurricane Katrina victims survived in spite of him and others of both political parties and at all levels of government who failed them and the rest of the U.S. American people. The contrast could not be more telling.
For far too many Americans, only certain human beings stand at the top of the cosmological pyramid, individualized and sustained by God’s grace. That those human beings of power and privilege are more often than not self-identified as having been made in God’s New Testament, Reformational image—white, male, heterosexual, Christian, and of propertied and monetary means—is the asili, or motivating force, for the human denigration and social disgrace that has occurred recently in New Orleans. That those who deem themselves to be superior—and their racial and gendered surrogates—believed their own delusional hype and acted accordingly is the cultural fabric of the real tragedy in all of this.
My truth is that they just didn’t care! They didn’t care about the poor, differently abled, and elderly people of all colors who they knew for decades would be subject to the direst of human circumstances if a hurricane of sufficient force ever crossed their path. I believe they cared even less knowing that most of those who would suffer the brunt of the devastation were not only poor but Black. As Jesse Jackson so profoundly stated in rejoinder to a reporter’s query about the role of race in the unconscionably slow federal rescue and recovery response “Americans have an infinite capacity for Black pain.” Jesse’s comment, while prophetic, was too narrow in scope. The historical and contemporary evidence is clear that those made in God’s New Testament, Reformational image have an infinite capacity for anyone’s pain who is different from them. While they are not alone in their indifference to human and social injustice, they stand alone, at least momentarily, at the pinnacle of universal moral and spiritual shame for all the world to see..
It should be obvious that I do not speak here of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, et al, alone. To focus on them to the exclusion of the U.S. American social/political ideology of a “will to power,” a Manifest Destiny, if you will, that encompasses us all—republican and democrat, womyn and man, Jew and gentile, Black, white, and all other racial designations—is to skew our perception and focus and to inexorably chain us to the culturally socialized patterns of scapegoating and moral obfuscation. We, the American people, elected Bush and Cheney and with conscious acceptance embraced their henchmen of draconian politics and practices. We, the American people, excused their absurd misdirection of truth that propelled us into accepting their predetermined plan to invade Iraq. We, the American people, swallowed whole their lies about Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We, the American people, even continue to misguidedly embrace Colin Powell who sold his soul to a corrupt political ideal rather than fulfill his moral duty of allegiance to the U.S. American people. We, the American people, countenanced it all in the name and spirit of the U.S. American way—republicanism as democracy; illusion as reality; racism as history. Where are you, H.L. Mencken, when we need you most?
O.J., Michael Jackson, Minister Louis Farrakhan, young Black men in urban centers, and even liberals—who by definition must be white since Blacks are almost always only Black—are momentarily shelved as the coded images of colorblind racism and other forms of social injustice. The “God’s image boys” have taken their rightful place alongside Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Trent Lott and Bill Frist, whose collectively muted and temporary retreat gives even greater emphasis to the magnitude of their shameful pretense. Robertson’s call to have one of U.S. America’s perceived political enemies assassinated seems to have been answered. In an ironic twist, he and the “God’s Image Boys” became the target when the sinister union of whiteness, maleness, privilege, power, and Christianist fundamentalism, camouflaged in conservative Republican ideology, was exposed to national and international observers. Jesus, my Sephardic Jewish brother of color and poverty, must finally be smiling. After five hundred years, he just might get his religion back.
In light of the U.S. Americaness of the tragedy continuing in New Orleans today, we cannot continue to be above it all at our “old alma mater on the hill.” We cannot merely take in a few discarded souls, feel good about ourselves, and continue to do what we have always done. The social masks of indifference have come off us as well. We, too, stand naked and ultimately accountable to a mission statement of high ideals that require and demand sufficient will and resources to make it real.
The under-reinforced levees of cultural competence and social consciousness at BU are no more sufficient than the physical ones along Lake Ponchartrain to hold back the surging waters of insidious racial ignorance and historical social indifference. Bellarmine, in some striking ways, is like the French Quarter and the Garden District in New Orleans—a cultural respite for far too many educational tourists habitually oblivious to “human suffering in the world” that exists around almost every corner they so arduously choose not to turn. Caps, gowns, and degrees, momentos to be cherished as unfortunate reminders of a time unfettered by a clarion call to consciousness, speak poignantly to a mere symbolism of educational excellence and the inevitable exploitation of race and class privilege. The Princeton Review’s ranking of BU as the eleventh least politically active university in the nation should be less a cause for dismay than a call to reality, conscious reflection, and purposeful action.
Hopefulness lies in the fact that more of my colleagues at BU than I can recall at any other institution where I have been, from the President all the way across the campus, are truly committed to the noble ideal of social justice. Though their voices are most often muted by institutional culture and tradition as well as by the deafening silence of others for whom social difference and social justice may be less compelling ideals, these conscious activists are a testament to the inordinate possibilities of hope and dream. From the most senior member of the Board of Trustees to the youngest freshmyn, we must galvanize our resources in a struggle to transgress the debilitating push of fear of that which we think we know about the unknown (not the unknown itself) and the tranquilizing pull of the socially reproduced status quo. We must resist excessive institutional politics of propriety (e.g., Bellarmine’s traditional image) and boldly sail from our “safe harbors” toward a new reality, toward a new Bellarmine. It is not that the old Bellarmine is not good enough; it is that the old Bellarmine is not nearly enough.
If we are to shore up the cultural levees within Bellarmine as we most certainly must do in more geographical ways around New Orleans, then it must be done with the most critical and comprehensive thought and planning possible. Bellarmine’s Strategic Plan for 2006-2111 cannot be like the myriad studies done for decades before Hurricane Katrina visited the Gulf Coast—a well-crafted document that lacks the will of leadership at all levels to provide the funds and human resources needed to ensure that the life-centering and life-sustaining provisions within the plan be fully implemented. An unfunded and under-resourced mandate is no mandate at all. To do so would be to render those different from the dominant group at BU to an experience of marginalized indifference of Katrina-like proportions. If that happens, it will be on our watch and on our consciences.
It is our duty to bring soul to BU. Not the racially trite notions of soul that limit our spirituality to stylistic rhythmic expression, but the kind of soul that flows from a union of institutional mind, body, and spirit. The kind that inspired that six-year old boy in hurricane-ravaged and government-neglected New Orleans to, with blind faith, lead five other children, all younger than him and some who were even strangers, toward an unknown destiny. His innocent courage speaks eloquently to that which is possible if we seek our own salvational innocence and moral courage by just letting go. The door of hope and possibility has been opened for us. We have no choice but to walk through it with conscious determination and unrepentent resolve. If not, then we have no one to blame but ourselves for what Cornell West warns “awaits us in the 21st Century.”
Milton Brown is an adjunct faculty member of the School of Education at Bellarmine University and Chair of the Multicultural(ism) Task Force
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