Vox Felicitas IX — No Better Than Adversity
On last week’s episode of Vox Felicitas, I finished the last segment of a two-parter describing my holiday in Latvia two years ago, complete with what might well be the lamest bilingual pun ever conceived (I regret nothing). This week I cover a slightly more sombre matter that has wracked the world in recent times. As you can probably tell by now, I’m about to wade into the ongoing protests on both sides of the pond regarding the death of George Floyd in police custody, for weal or woe…
To start off with, I considered not writing this for a number of reasons. First off is the reason I created Vox Felicitas to begin with: I devised the blog as a means of using my writing talent to create articles intended to inspire people, to make them laugh, and overall to promote happiness. To discuss as divisive a topic as this one may go contrary to that all-important ethos. Second, as a white British writer living in Cornwall, I can’t possibly pretend to know the plight of black people as intimately as they do, so is my voice the best one to throw into the debate?
But the reason I decided to make this week’s episode of VF about the ongoing crisis set off by the killing of Floyd is twofold. As a historian, I believe it is not a matter of whimsy, but one of duty, to try and make sense of a snapshot in history with the terrifying potential to spark a chain of events that leads up to the permanent sundering of American society. And in doing so, I managed to find a quotation by one El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz — some of you will know him better as Malcolm X — that goes as follows:
“There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.”
I dwelled for a little while on this quote. At first glance, it’s clear what he was saying: learn the lessons of history to create a better, brighter future. But do people learn those lessons? After all, using the First World War as an example, did people learn from the supposed ‘war to end all wars’ and the horrors it caused? The answer to that is in history itself —merely twenty years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, a certain Adolf was already making headway towards kicking off a second great war, one that had a far greater human cost than the first.
At this moment in time, the United States is in a similarly precarious position. Two score and seventeen years after Martin Luther King made his legendary ‘I Have A Dream’ speech in Washington, D.C, there are still sizeable populations in the US that maintain exactly the same attitude towards black people as their colonial forebears did. These diasporas share the same supernatural trepidation of these dark-skinned strangers from Africa who came over in chains to work the cotton plantations.
And as dangerous as it is to argue that Donald Trump is a racist, his populist appeal to the far-right has given those who espouse prejudice a potent voice in the highest office of the United States. His big campaign pledge in 2016 was to build a wall to segregate the US and Mexico as a defence against illegal immigration. He spent much of his campaign in 2012 seeking to root out then-President Barack Obama — the first black POTUS, I might add — as a non-American. And to top off the list of reasons why black people in the US might feel more disenfranchised than ever, Trump didn’t even win the election based on the number of votes: he won because of electoral college.
Hitherto the far-right have had little reason to feel threatened. In recent years — and I’m probably going to get a bit of flak for saying this — protests against killings, not just of black people, have been truly impotent. For example, mass shootings in America haven’t been met with serious efforts towards reforming civilian ownership of military arms. They are met with mere thoughts and prayers. The gun lobby has been a big part of preventing such reform, that much is apparent, but so too has the feeling of utter pessimism towards making any real change in politics. Many people simply didn’t believe there was any point in trying to challenge the entrenched right-wing establishment.
But now the death of George Floyd has potentially up-ended the entire paradigm. Growing wealth gaps, distrust of the establishment, the resurgence of the far-right, and the looming terror of coronavirus have all been boiling beneath the fabric of American society, waiting to blow like a stratovolcano. This latest chapter in a sad chronicle of police brutality could well be the final straw that sets off a deadly chain of events that sends the US steamrolling headlong into a second American Civil War. As alarmist as it sounds, I as a historian, who has studied in intimate detail how the most terrible conflicts to have blighted this Earth come to fruition, believe it to be not just theoretical any more, but entirely possible. And if America doesn’t collectively learn that all lives matter in the grand scheme of things, it is inevitable.
I will end this rather lugubrious piece on a positive note, as is the way of Vox Felicitas. Just as people have the potential for burning hatred and blind ignorance, so too are we capable of love and enlightenment. We may be a long way from both, but the great advances made by emancipators throughout American history — Martin Luther King, Jane Roe and Rosa Parks, to name but three—show that there is a bright light at the end of the conceptual tunnel.
Just as the murder of George Floyd could unleash a hideous evil that may rip the land of the free to pieces, so too is there potential for a new MLK to rise and knit the wounds that have been slashed into its fabric in recent years back together. It is my sincere belief that the intensity of the Black Lives Matter protests will precipitate change for the better. If and when it does, then it will vindicate not only Malcolm X’s remark about adversity, as is the title of this blog post, but restore the very essence of America as a land of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Thank you for reading, and I will see you all again next week.
~ Harry