[Libs-Or] When do we want it?

[Matthew Baiocchi]

It's been eight days of posting about systemic racism now. 8! A couple of years ago, had somebody else done this, I would have been, "Don't you think you're taking this a bit far? Maybe slow down a bit? Calm down. We'll get there."


Wrong. We have to make the effort now. Why? The longer white people wait, the more death and pain there is.


There's an extremely pertinent quote by James Baldwin, "I was born here more than 60 years ago. I'm not going to live another 60 years. You always told me that it's going to take time. It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces and my nephew's time. How much time do you want for your progress?"(1)


There's also many relevant quotes from Dr. King in his Letter from Birmingham Jail(2):

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate...who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."


"For years now I have heard the word 'wait.' It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This 'wait' has almost always meant 'never' ... We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that 'justice too long delayed is justice denied.' We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights ... I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say 'wait."


"Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was 'well timed' according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation."


"When you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodyness' -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.


"I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time. I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said, 'All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.' All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. "




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1 - James Baldwin, James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBFDdTIYZ6Q

2 - Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail,  https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf







Matthew Baiocchi
REFERENCE LIBRARIAN
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