This Week ::: OUR COMMON GROUND
“The Glitch in the Matrix”
This Week on OUR COMMON GROUND
“The Glitch in the Matrix”
OPEN MIC
Saturday,September 11, 2021 ::: 10 pm ET
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In the arc of American history, Donald Trump’s election as the president of the United States is no shock. The functional preamble remains that all white men are created superior and those who subscribe to it are periodically compelled to stick it in the face of Black folks — and now brown and Muslim folks, too — even if it comes at considerable cost to the nation and world standing.
It did not matter that under Obama the unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent from the 10 percent he inherited from Bush. Under Obama’s Affordable Care Act insured millions more Americans than under Bush. It did not matter that many of Obama’s policies put money in the pockets of the working class, such as dramatically raising the federal salary threshold to collect overtime pay, or the Lilly Ledbetter Act for fair pay based on gender. Despite that he was so much like all Presidents before him. He was like them. The same kind of occupant of the WH, as Bush, Clinton, Kennedy. But, ultimately, they would elect an obnoxious, underachieving, corny, egomaniac conman to ensure that an Obama would never again usher shadows into their sacred places.
Since none of that mattered, all of Trump’s rhetoric about everything in America being a “disaster” was a smokescreen for the consolidation of crude white power. The majority of white Americans, a century and a half after the end of slavery, still spectacularly preferred economic uncertainty in exchange for returning Black people to their place and now sending brown immigrants and Muslims “back home.”
Early in the Trump candidacy an opinion columnist wrote in The Boston Globe that his “hateful nonsense, meant for white people who still think the country is theirs, is a death rattle for the most crude forms of white privilege.” I was hoping that his election would be as a death rattle for the snake, not for those whom the snake struck. Finally, and most disturbing of all, there was the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump last November, despite his record of governing incompetence – crystallized by the COVID-19 debacle – and toxic, divide-and-conquer political, to say nothing that he literally ran a global criminal enterprise out of the White House and throughout the government.
In the “The Matrix”, the film describes a future in which reality perceived by humans is actually the Matrix, a simulated reality created by sentient Machines in order to pacify and subdue the human population while their bodies’ heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. In Matrix parlance, red pills are those who are aware of the Matrix construct while blue pills are not. An often used admonishment to Black people to be realistic, clear about the political nuances of our citizenship.
The Matrix represents a system of control that operates completely in the mind. As a complex, machine-driven program, it appropriates any personal, political, or ideological leanings and renders them wholly false. It allows illusions but no action. The problem with the matrix that most people of control and power depend upon has a glitch. That is that Black people don’t believe in things, as Stevie Wonder reminded us in his awesome song, “Superstition, ” When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer. . . “ The matrix which encapsulates America is built on the superstition of American exceptionalism- a superstition of massive import. Black people have taught this country the potential value and power of its own rhetoric around democracy. We have also taught them the lessons of its hypocrisy and fragility. Uncovering, exposing, and revealing. Demonstrating time after time that “we” are not who “we” say that we are. So many Americans are beginning to understand more and moving beyond the energy field of the matrix. The glitch in the matrix ? Black people. We discuss it at OUR COMMON GROUND tonight.
Janice
The coalition Democrats brought together in 2020 was enough to beat Trump—but it’s insufficient for the long-term fights ahead. If 2020 was, as Biden put it, a fight “for the soul of the nation,” the next task for the progressives is even harder: build a multiracial working-class majority big enough to win a transformative agenda that lifts America out of 2020s roiling crises and truly transform people’s lives. That’s how progressives win for the next generation.
ABOUT Professor Legette
Professor James Lance Taylor is the Chair of the Department of Politics at the University of San Francisco and is from Glen Cove, Long Island. He is the author of the book “Black Nationalism in the United States: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama”, which earned 2012 “Outstanding Academic Title” – Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. (Ranked top 2 percent of 25,000 books submitted and top 8 percent of 7,300 actually accepted for review by the American Library Association). Rated “Best of the Best.” The hardback version sold out in the U.S. and the paperback version was published in 2014.
Dr. Whitaker is the seventh child of Eddie and Charlie Mae Jackson from Waycross, Georgia. Dr. Whitaker attended Clark Atlanta University completing a BS degree with honors in Biology. She attended Yale University School of Medicine-Department of Public Health and obtained her medical degree form Emory University School of Medicine, the only female African American in her class. A kidney specialist by trade, an artist trained under Leonard Baskin, and a healer by passion, her Ashes to Ashes project was developed to provide hope for a better American future, one in which races of varying color and heritage can understand the importance of each other’s American history, empathize with each other’s sacrifices and tragedies, realize the legacy of impacts from suffered injustices and accept that healing is a process as much a cure, and recognize and lay to rest the 4,000 victims of vigilante justice perpetrated against a predominantly black population for simply desiring the most basic of American rights of obtaining an education, ownership of land, fair competition in commerce, the uniquely American right of voting for our governing institutions and for an equal stake in the American experience. She is currently working on the second phase of A2A: The Noose: Tread of Hate and Resilience. This will center on American history through the lens of lynching and will include an International Speak My Name Day to speak the names of the lynched.
Mr. Rembert grew up in rural Georgia, in a farm laborer’s house and later in the small town of Cuthbert. Raised by his great-aunt, Rembert worked with her in the cotton fields during much of his childhood, and received little formal education. As a teenager he got involved in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Jailed for fleeing for his life in a stolen car, nearly lynched and then cut down to serve as an example to others, Rembert was sentenced to 27 years in the Georgia Penal System. Despite the cruel prison circumstances, Rembert learned to read and write and managed to meet and write letters to his would-be wife Patsy as well as to congressmen, with the hope of gaining early release. He also learned the craft of hand-tooling leather from a fellow-prisoner. After seven years, most of which was spent on chain gangs, Rembert was released from prison, but it wasn’t until 1997, at the age of 51, that he began to work more seriously with leather as his artistic medium, creating tooled and dyed canvases that tell the stories of his life. His paintings have been exhibited at galleries across the country—including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Adelson Galleries New York, and the Hudson River Museum—and have been profiled in The New York Times and elsewhere. Rembert is the recipient of a 2017 USA Fellowship, and in 2015 was an honoree of Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative. Rembert’s full-color memoir, Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2021.
OCG 