Last week at a Greenwood Voters League meeting, Sen. David Jordan stood up before a crowd of people and told them that white people couldn't talk about the blues or civil rights because we hadn't lived it.
Lest I take anything out of context, the good senator (and president of the Greenwood City Council) said these things after Suzy Gordon Johnson, director of the Greenwood Convention and Visitors Bureau, talked about putting up historical markers to show visitors our heritage here in Leflore County.
We have quite a grasp on the blues end and the civil rights end. After all, Robert Johnson is alleged to have three graves here, and Stokely Carmichael first used the chant "Black power" here. We have lots of people to tell the stories - people of both races.
I respect Sen. Jordan for the position he holds. He has worked hard.
He has felt the scourge of sharecropping. He was educated and rose above humble beginnings.
However, the remark of the Voters League is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard him say.
Let's take the senator's argument to its logical conclusion.
African-American people should singularly be considered experts on the blues and civil rights history because they are black. They know more about these subjects because they have more pigmentation in their skin, and this makes them experts in these two subject areas.
On the other hand, white people have less pigmentation, so they can't understand because of their whiteness.
No? Ok. Let me try again.
White people oppressed black people from the 1600s up until black people gained political power, starting in the 1960s. White people don't know anything about struggle and pain; therefore, they can't talk as effectively about the blues and civil rights.
Following that reasoning, then one would have to have a Native American teach early American history prior to the arrival of Europeans. After all, white people don't know anything about oppression of red people, therefore, they can't teach about Native American matters.
I guess that means that as we advance in history, we'd have to have a Hispanic person come in and talk about the settling of Texas and California and that struggle. Oh, yeah, don't forget to call in a Chinese person to talk about the abuse of the Asians by the railroad magnates out in the West during the 19th century.
As we move on through history, we'd have to have someone from Ireland to talk about how the Irish who migrated to the United States during the Great Potato Famine were abused by Northern factory owners. Nobody really liked the Irish until John Kennedy became president. I suppose an Irishman would have to tell students about Kennedy's presidency.
Oh, and lest we forget, we'd have to have some Jewish folk to come in and talk to students about the Holocaust, because no Gentile could begin to understand the torture and humiliation of concentration camps in Germany and Austria during World War II.
By the time we had each group speaking for itself, our school districts, governments and other public bodies would have gone bankrupt getting the right people to tell their stories.
I spent most of my academic career studying civil rights history, African history and Latin American history. I felt like these three areas affected my background more than others.
I wanted to understand why white men in short-sleeved white dress shirts stood with loaded weapons on the corners in Grenada back in the 1960s. I wanted to know why my dad, a Baptist minister at one time, put men in the back of the church to keep black people out while we sang about how Jesus loved all the children of the world. I wanted to understand why my Hispanic friend in the third grade couldn't spend the night at my house and why I couldn't visit hers.
Teachers - black, white, red and yellow - taught me history. They didn't talk about who had the authority to talk about the subject; they taught.
And for a while, I taught students. In fact, I taught them about Stokely Carmichael and June Johnson, and Bob Moses and Medgar Evers and Lawrence Guyot. I also taught them about Santa Anna, Ek Balaam, Auschwitz, Napoleon and Richard Nixon. Nobody challenged my credentials because of my ethnic background.
The messenger doesn't matter. It's the message that sticks. Senator Jordan knows that.
