In popular parlance the vogue phrase, ‘keep it 100’ is equivalent to telling the unvarnished truth.
President Obama was the keynote speaker this past weekend, at the graduation ceremonies held at HBCU Howard University, in my hometown of Washington, DC. On a variation of the oral meme of not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, President Obama carried this theme to its logical conclusion. The President told the young and old graduates of Howard that you can’t get anywhere in life without compromise, “even if you are 100 percent right.” For the idealistic, this must have sounded anathema to utopia.
In 1971, I participated in a march to 16th and Euclid Sts. to rename Meridian Hill Park in NW Washington DC, Malcolm X Park. I was fifteen years old and my knowledge of Malcolm X was basically borne of his legendary status among young Black men in America. Later in my life, I researched the man, read his autobiography (which was just short of required reading in my community) and became even more enamored with his life and his life’s work. Had I held onto the utopia of perfection, I would not have been a fan of Malcolm X, why, because he was not perfect. His early failures to compromise his lust for money, drugs and misplaced dignity ate up many years of his potential and realized promise.
For years his story was seen as just an African American story but it’s far from that, it is an American story. I have never understood how movies, books and entertainment that has dominant Black themes are separated from the American experience. Am I less American because I preferred James Brown to James Taylor? Many Americans of all stripes liked them both and still do. The difference was the perception, one was considered universal and for years the other a purveyor of “race music.”
This diatribe is just my way of saying that compromise and reasonable thought is not selling out, it is just another path. I have friends who tell me Mr. Obama has not been strong enough, or did not do enough, has not made his case the way they wouldhave. It is true he has not pounded the table, or held secret obstructionist meetings like the Republicans. He worked the system and compromised his way to significant victories, all the precise reasons I voted for him, TWICE. This idea that militancy is some inbred trait of Black men and women is foolish and dangerous. African Americans have promulgated this illusion as protection and Whites as a method to prove their stereotyping. When Malcom X used the phrase, “by any means necessary” it became a clarion call for law enforcement in America to be ready for armed insurrection, when in reality he just wanted to protect himself and his family. When the Cliven Bundy clan called for actual armed insurrection the response was month long negotiation. Some even went so far as to claim that taking up arms against your government was the American Way. Was Malcolm any less American?
Fortunately for all Bundy followers and Nevada, compromise reared it beautiful head and many lives were spared. Feeling empowered and through the wonders of white privilege, the Bundy sons, Ammon and Ryan, next stop of defiance was seizing and holding a wildlife refuge in Oregon. In 1985 the Philadelphia Police Department literally dropped a bomb on the home of the MOVE ( NPR’s All Things Considered with Jeanette Woods, Philadelphia Marks 30th Anniversary of MOVE Bombing)www.npr.org/...,) organization leader John Africa, located on Osage Avenue, that killed 11 people including 5 children. This action by the police was not the end result of a month long negotiation. Sixty-five homes of innocent people and two blocks of real estate were destroyed. Thirty-one years later the area is still in the infancy of recovery.
MOVE members wanted utopia, the city wanted destruction and no one wanted compromise.
Vote 2016.