Jalylah Burrell

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Seattle-bred, Brooklyn-based cultural critic Jalylah Burrell riffs on anything and everything.

The King & I: Notes on the Civil Rights Martyr and My Body Politics

Posted 04/04/2008 at 9:49 AM | Comment?

So just a few minutes ago, I arrived at my office building on Fifth Avenue in the Union Square Area. I stood in front of the third bank awaiting an elevator. Seconds later, the third bank opened and as I was standing directly in front of it, I stepped in, only to be cut off by a South Asian women to my right, who blithely bumped me hard and entered first.

A few months ago, I washed my hands in the office restroom just after arriving at the office as I had held firmly onto the subway pole on my way in and God knows all the germs nasty Gothamites deposit on them each day. I turned to leave, opened and half stepped through the door when a white Hispanic office mate, a few paces away, blithely strode through the door blocking me out of my own exit.

A few weeks ago in Battery Park I was blithely bowled over by a white guy on the southern sky bridge connecting the World Financial Center to Church Street.

In all instances, no excuses, apologies or acknowledgments of my existence were proffered. I intervened calmly but firmly. I called attention to my corporeality and the incongruity of what had transpired before inviting dialogue. The elevator woman said, "some people have issues," and laughed with the white elevator riders when I exited. The bathroom women giggled nervously, returned to her cubicle and complimented my brightly colored ensembles in each and every future encounter. The sky bridge man bristled and barked, "What's your problem?!" while the mostly white tourists nearby stared at me like I was stone crazy.

I am not a elevator attendant. I am not a door woman. I am not pavement. I am a person.

This morning as I got ready for work, I charged myself to blog the fortieth anniversary of the cowardly assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. but I did not anticipate that my fellow Americans would provide a suitable although sad point of entry. White or Black or Asian or any or all of the above and Hispanic, most of the world's people operate out of a willful blindness to those they imagine to be lower on the totem pole on which whites generally reign supreme and you'll be hard pressed to name folks more precariously positioned than Black women. Ralph Ellison wrote about racial blindness in his opus, and that novel persists as my favorite book. I felt a kinship with the unnamed protagonist in the early nineties when I first read it in a small class populated with a few scions of left coast industry (to be fair to my informed parents, it has always been in my home bookshelf but it took a course for me to finally pick it up), I wrote about it in the college essay that gained me admission and full scholarships to my first and second choice schools and it remained as relevant as ever this morning as a cacophony of ill-intended laughter spilled out from my office building elevator and soundtracked the morning search for my card key. Bill Moyers recently dedicated an episode of his journal to a rehashing of conditions in communities surveyed in the 1968 Kerner Report,

Convened by President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of 1967's riots among inner-city blacks in Detroit and dozens of other cities, the Kerner Commission sought to learn what had happened, why the riots had occurred, and what could be done to prevent similar events from happening again. The resulting (and immediately controversial) 1968 Kerner Report concluded that the riots emerged from severe poverty and limited opportunity in America's urban ghettos, for which the Report blamed institutional racism.

Well, as you should watch/listen for yourself. Not much has changed and in many cases communities are more decimated, Black folks are more hopeless. It is a hard row to hoe, some of you know, some of you need to to finally understand. Every day is a challenge to not just be but to maintain enough self-esteem, confidence, presence of mind, dispassion to be assertive in your goals despite those who are too indifferent to spite you and those who care enough to behave the very worst. The struggle continues...

Image credit: Camptown Ladies, Kara Walker, 1998. Cut paper and adhesive on wall. Overall size 9 x 67 feet.

Tags: Black Women, Jr., Martin Luther King, Race

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