It’s interesting how a person becomes an emblem and an icon. It’s also interesting how people impose their views of what that means on the person, and how sure they are that this – and sometimes only this in this specific way – is what he or she would be doing today. Truth is we don’t know. Martin King lived in a time when ‘his people’ meant black Americans in a specific way: black Americans – then negro was the polite term – were citizens but were not legally allowed to live as full citizens. This was mostly true as you went south but it was also true in the north with regards to housing and employment. At this point, it’s necessary to be careful, and for that I want to refer to a skit on Saturday Night Live in which super talented Keenan Ivory Wayans comes into an ATM behind guest host Sam Rockwell and they have a conversation about Sam viewing Keenan as a threat because he’s a fairly large black guy, including a joking ‘robbery’ bit. That was OK but what made the skit was what happened next: Sam holds the door open for a bunch of black guys as Keenan freaks out because now he’s afraid he’s going to get robbed. Which happens and the skit ends with Sam in a car as you see Keenan being beaten through the glass. My point is that it’s actually very hard to know motives once you get past legal impediments like racial deed covenants and ‘literacy tests’ applied to black people and specific actions taken by elected or appointed officials to maintain segregation. An example is that as part of their series on race in the Boston area, the Globe did the typical testing of rental and job applications. The findings are always the same: white sounding names – and voices – get better results. That’s a racial result but that doesn’t get at the motive, as the skit I described shows: it could be a simple guess, rational to the individual, that this person is a bigger risk. That risk is evaluated racially and generally not too well, but then people aren’t good at evaluating much of anything particularly well. That’s my point: people do the best they can in their individual circumstances and all you need to do is look around to see it’s pretty obvious people don’t do that well in general.
[Added: I can clarify better what I mean this way: assume there are two groups, call them B and W, and these two groups approach two connections rooms, call one R and the other C. One group approaches C to R, while the other group approaches R to C. Substitute in race and class for R and C, and white for White and black for B. Assume W goes through the rooms by starting with race and ending with Class while B goes through the rooms starting with class and ending with race. Same rooms with different perspectives. Now imagine there are hundreds of W and of B and send all those through the rooms. Do this over and over in different ways, from 1 clump to 1 by 1 at regular intervals. Unless you presume, there is no feedback, then what happens with each iteration reflects something back. Now you have to presume that information has no meaning beyond the fact of its reflection, which is nonsense because reflected information illuminates both what reflected it and what it shines on. That is another way of saying everything occurs in a context. This is true all the way up to the largest possible context: when you define the largest possible context, that actually defines both the ways context fractures into pieces and the way it accretes.
Go back to W and B: refine it further, so they go through the rooms in the same way, both R to C or C to R, to the extent they share the same approach. This means some of W and B go through the same way and some not. Now it starts to get complex: can you say these pieces of W and B go through in the same phase, meaning not only in the same perspectives but in a way that minimizes the effect of ordering? It’s not possible mathematically for a couple of reasons. First, if you build toward minimization from greater complexity, the signals vary – simple Fourier analysis – meaning the process by which minimization occurs has patterns within it and these aren’t going to be the same. Second, if you are measuring a result, that result is only stable, meaning it reaches a maximum of invariance, only when meaning is lost, meaning when the interpretability disappears. This means stability requires the lack of discernability, which is an impossibility because you’re constantly testing what is discernible or not and that is not stable outside the notion that there is a line of discernability. That line may appear stable but i isn’t stable invariantly, as I just described. This gets at the root issues with variant and invariant frames.
People with the same rooms to examine may have radically different experiences. People may have radically different intents and the interpretations of them may differ radically. There’s math behind this assertion that it is very difficult to accurately guess intent when there is more than one room to go through. And there’s always more than one room to go through. Note: I said I’d clarify. I didn’t say I’d make it easier to read. I’ve been clarifying a highly simplified interaction model. I can simplify it more to show that complexity enters at the first step when you presume or just plain accept the existence of more than one thing. One way to think of that is using tree charts: imagine your family in the center and on your left are your ancestors and on the right all your descendants. Now flip sides so on your ancestors are on your right. I said family so you imagine more than 1 descendant. Even with just you in the middle, you can trace from a descendant up to an ancestor or to another ancestor and down from an ancestor to one descendant or another. As you expand the chart, you can trace paths that include or don’t include you. Now use R and C instead of ancestor and descendant. You’re complicated so parts of you start by thinking of C and part by R. Get it? People get hung up on stuff without realizing that a) there is no perfect solution and b) part of the ‘problem’ is due to simple math.]
This asks why Mordechai Anielewicz. Mordechai was a 23 year old living in Warsaw as the Germans started to murder people as part of the process by which they would kill everyone. As commander of the resistance – the ZOB or Jewish Fighting Organization – he issued The Call to Fight. There is a kibbutz in Israel named for him called Yad Mordechai. He died fighting. From that letter: ‘It is no great art to live when life is given to you willingly! But there is an art to life just when they are trying to rob you of this life.’ That speaks to Martin King: negro Americans were being robbed of the rights of citizens, robbed of the life that white Americans generally had as citizens. Martin recognized – along with Ralph Abernathy and many others – that the best way to achieve the basic rights of American citizens was to show white Americans – at least those with open minds – that negro Americans wanted these rights and they demanded them as citizens. That is not rebellion but protest, not violence but non-violence, because only through non-violence do you demonstrate exactly what you want, which then was to be treated equally by the governments of this country as citizens of this country. Mordechai had no such option. He wrote: ‘Today we must understand that the Nazi murderers have let us live only because they want to make use of our capacity to work to our last drop of blood and sweat, to our last breath. We are slaves. And when the slaves are no longer profitable, they are killed.’ Sometimes you have to fight even though you’re going to die. Because at least you died fighting.
[Added: one of the most amazing things about the Warsaw battle was that Jews argued amongst themselves if ‘this’ was going to pass, if this was just a trial to see how much they could put up with and that eventually their tormentors would wise up, maybe recognize that Jews are valuable, or maybe the idiots would fail miserably and someone else would come in who would restore humanity. It took the realization they were being murdered, each and every one murdered for them to give up hoping for a solution that didn’t require this. Not many cultures can say they reserve violence for self-preservation when no hint for help remains. That is the meaning of ‘Never Again’ and it is the source of Israeli strength: never wait until it is too late but instead make absolutely sure you will not be placed at the mercy of evil again. That is the power of actual victimization, not self-victimization.]
jomi: playing with perception 