This is just a follow up to our little spat – or to be more accurate the one Sean and I had with those three guys a few weeks ago. After some deep reflection, I banned all three from the PLC. As I look back, I know I made the right decision, a decision against stink and for clean air.
We’re all busy and we don’t need to be distracted. We have work to do. We can’t waste time. We have our loved ones, our professional responsibilities, and enough wood to chop without getting into stupid arguments with people who, as Sean said below, need more help than we can give them.
I also feel that it is most important to revisit the true core issues from time to time. That’s the purpose of this post – to make sure that we don’t forget, and to keep hammering away at the nail that Ida B. Wells, Claudette Colvin, Ruby Bridges, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Sojourner Truth and others started driving into the wooden noggins of the people around them so long ago, but at an expense most people couldn’t handle if you were to read about just one of those heroes’ lives.
I love even just writing those names down. And I would say them aloud with the same reverence I say names like MLK and Abraham Lincoln and Richard Loving. SAY THEIR NAMES!
In my next life I want to teach U.S. History, but like a real version of it. I hope I get born here again. I’m invested. We’re all invested. Maybe I’ll write a new American History book about it. The actual history, not the one they made up! I’m good at writing books….
Funny though, for the sublime stature of those women listed above, one would think that I would have learned more about them at Culver Military Academy in Indiana when I was in high school. Hmmm. I must’ve been absent that day.
In a comment in one of the posts written at the time we had our little tiff, when we had to read stuff by those guys along the lines of “White lives matter too!”, Sean’s words represent the whole thing best, and provide the best response:
…this is a unique time, in the movement after Floyd’s murder, where we are choosing to disassociate ourselves from people we were friendly with before but can’t be anymore because their views on race are hurtful. I’d much rather spend my time with people ready and willing to build bridges. That’s the only way the bridge is going to be built. With people like Jake, Ben, and Shem, we’re busying ourselves standing on opposite sides of the river throwing water on each other. No bridge is being built. They need more help than we can provide ….
N’est-ce pas…!