The Heart of the Matter: The Current Great Awakening

By James Preston Allen, Publisher

It’s Valentine’s Day and the roses and boxes of chocolates are all overpriced and selling fast. No one is complaining about this inflation at the supermarket or the grocery store of political debate. V-Day, as the new feminists are now calling it, and “wokeness” are being attacked as a ritual by Republican presidential hopeful Gov. Ron DeSantis and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as we celebrate Black History Month. Is this the second McCarthyism resurrected from the ashes of the 1950s? (If you aren’t old enough to remember McCarthyism or your history teachers just forgot that part, look it up on Wikipedia.) This is like a retread of tired old history. It’s neo-fascism by any other name and the censoring of AP African American Studies curricula nationally is an exemplar of it. What’s this got to do with your local high school?

It’s been nearly 70 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Separate but Equal Doctrine put forth in the earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson, was unconstitutional. In the intervening years, integrated schools helped reduce racial achievement gaps and encourage critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity. Further, attending a diverse school also helps reduce racial bias and counter stereotypes, and makes students more likely to seek out integrated settings later in life.

By equalizing higher education, there has been an increase in Black academics studying race and racism in America and there is now a vast body of work, including the dreaded Critical Race Theory, that even DeSantis and McCarthy misunderstand and attack as “wokism.” (See Paul Rosenberg’s article this issue, “African American Studies Are American Studies — Nothing Proves It More Than the Backlash.”)

The recent “great awakening” occurred after the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020. You’ll recall there were a series of both peaceful protests and riots against police brutality and racism that began as his murder was recorded by a bystander whose video was shared on social media where it went viral. What happened next, unlike with the Watts Riots or the Rodney King uprising, is that a multi-ethnic, multi-generational set of protests exploded nationwide and internationally. This time was different.

What is at contention between the socalled woke academics and the DeSantis- es of America is the idea that Black history is American history and that the history of Black and white America are interlocked in some very integral ways that don’t get talked about at the dinner table or at the chamber of commerce cocktail mixer. Hell, when I was in high school, there weren’t any Black kids there, and second, when African American studies became a subject, I believed it was only for African Americans, not me. The intervening years have changed all of this and through my own life experiences and readings I have come to believe that the critical parts of the American story that must be taught, includes slavery, the American Civil War, the postwar Reconstruction era, Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It is about the juncture of freedom and liberty and justice, and what these ideas actually mean.

We are not the first generation in this nation to wrestle with this conflict and probably won’t be the last, but what I gleaned from the six-part series The 1619 Project on Hulu by Nikole Hannah-Jones, was that the struggle for freedom by Black Americans has taught the entire country “how to be free,” or perhaps how to fight for it. And this, perhaps more than anything else, is what concerns the rightwingers like McCarthy, DeSantis and even Donald Trump, for it changes the entire narrative. God forbid if we have the following generations of high school children being taught that “liberty and justice for all” is just a phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance and not expressly written in the Constitution. Then there might have to be significant changes!

So this is the heart of the issue: not one packaged up for V-Day and sold next to the roses at Vons. This current episode of the “culture war” debate wears the echoes of the past like a noose around its neck.

Second Thoughts On San Pedro

I don’t think people yet perceive what is about to happen to San Pedro — the civic leaders and the chamber of commerce types are all marching in lock step to gentrify this place; eliminating the undesirables, the bums, bohemians, the artists, the homeless and insane. They believe, like the generation of civic types before —who tore down old Beacon Street and left it vacant for 30 years that this is progress. Change is not necessarily progress. In fact, it’s mostly a restless desire to address current conditions by erasing the past without any historical perspective.

Publisher/Executive Editor James Preston Allen james@randomlengthsnews.com

Assoc. Publisher/Production Coordinator Suzanne Matsumiya

“A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.”

—Mark Twain Vol. XLIIII : No. 4

Random Lengths News is a publication of Beacon Light Press, LLC

Published every two weeks for the Harbor Area communities of San Pedro, RPV, Lomita, Harbor City, Wilmington, Carson and Long Beach.