Anticipating not just Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Palestine and the hellish horror chambers of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, he notes that the war “has torn up the Geneva Accords . . . impaired the United Nations, . . . exacerbated hatred between continents and worst still between races”. Thus, he said, it has only benefited and “strengthened the military-industrial complex” and “left our country politically and morally isolated in the world, where our only friends happen to be puppet nations . . . .”

King rightfully identifies the hypocrisy of today which peddles hope while depriving us of a basis on which it could be founded and flourish. He states “What hypocrisy it is to talk of saving the new generation to make it a generation of hope-while consigning it to unemployment and provoking it to violent alternatives”. He speaks of a need for a total initiative for giving youth hope against the deterioration into self-destruction, i.e., education, employment, housing beyond hovels and a massive national initiative to accomplish this. And almost as if he were anticipating a Katrina-like disaster, he noted that the country has the power to solve its problems, but seemingly not the will and so “the administration and Congress tinker with trivial proposals to limit cost in an extravagant gamble with disaster” (emphasis mine).

There is, King said, an urgent need “to create a wholesome Black unity and a sense of peoplehood while the process of integration proceeds”. Here let me rush to say what King has said many times elsewhere that he is talking about integration in a structural sense of shared wealth and power. Moreover, a wholesome Black unity and an equally wholesome sense of peoplehood are indispensable to any and everything we do. And this, if I read King rightly, depends on our honoring our social justice tradition and struggle constantly to bring good into the world.

In this speech and several other places, King reminds me of Fanon in his belief in the beneficial effects of righteous struggle not only on our life-conditions and life-chances, but also on our conception of ourselves and the world. He notes that Black people have, thru struggle, “become aware of the deeper causes for the crudity and cruelty that govern White society’s responses to their needs”, and that our oppression was “not a consequence of superficial prejudice, but was systemic”. In a word, it was not just a question of how we loved, but especially how we lived. Moreover, King noted that struggle frees us from illusions and teaches us truth. He says “the slashing blows of backlash and frontlash have hurt (Blacks), but they have also awakened (them) and revealed the nature of the oppressor”. For “to lose illusions is to gain truth”. And as our ancestors assure us, that truth, rooted in and rising out of our commitment and struggle for justice, will indeed set us free and open up a new horizon of history.

Dr. Maulana Karenga n is the Professor of Black Studies, California State University-Long Beach, Chair of The Organization Us, Creator of Kwanzaa, and author of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture, [www.Us-Organization.org and www.OfficialKwanzaaWebsite.org].

Last update: 04-03-2008 00:34

Published in : Op-Ed, Dr. Maulana Karenga

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