MLK Day

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Angela Davis, teacher and activist, was speaking on the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. celebrations at Duke University. Only a few years ago Duke didn’t recognize the holiday in any way. Now they have a former Black Panther speaking in honor of. It is a Go Figure kind of moment.

NPR reported that many are bothered that on this holiday King is primarily remembered as he was in 1963, rather the person he was in his last and later years when not only civil rights, but human rights more broadly, were occupying his activism and manifesting itself in his strong opposition to the Vietnam war.

Angela Davis picked up on this very sense, and like some Aesop’s fable drew out the current presidency as an example by which the connection between civil rights abuse, prisons, the death penalty, and global war finds itself embodied, and embodied in a way she can’t but imagine King would have responded to. Her thoughts, the recent news, and all other things considered bring forth disturbing patterns that don’t take a moral philosopher to find creepy.

But first: priorities. In a world where everything finds final worth in its price, by commodity or actuary, Davis noted:

This weekend's presidential inauguration will cost more than the 35 million dollars the Bush administration initially pledged to the tsunami disaster.

The final amount they pledged in tsumnami relief, upwards of 500 million dollars, is equivalent to the bill for 1.5 days of our war in Iraq.

If you are the president, this might not seem strange.
(In fact, a number of things may not seem strange to you in the least). Indeed, as Davis points out, why, for example, would anyone be bothered over the nomination of his long time friend and advisor, Alberto Gonzalez, to be the new Attorney General? It would beg the question in the first place of anything strange in the fact that while governor of Texas you oversaw 152 executions in your state, more than any ever in the history of the US. Your legal advisor at the time, Alberto Gonzalez, saw nothing wrong with this, nor that it included the execution of mentally retarded people.

It seems to me if the stories of people like Sister Prejean don’t convince one that such things are worth a second thought, the fact the US Supreme Court was considering the legality of such executions, and recently found them to be cruel, unusual, and unconstitutional, might make one wonder. Or one could take pause on the well known demonstrations of racial prejudice being characteristic of the US death penalty system. But these, it seems, are just maybes.

For Gonzalez as much as for Bush, if this doesn’t register concern, it is clearer why the Geneva conventions, which Gonzalez called “obsolete” and “quaint,” wouldn't. Could this attitude, a Congressional investigate panel recently asked, have contributed to the Abu Ghraib abuses? Charles Graner just yesterday was sentenced to ten years in prison for his role in the torture, and one could ask further questions after this. For he was a prison guard in Pennsylvania, and not only have US prison practices have been linked to torture practices of military detainees, but Graner himself was sued for going even further during his Penn. days -- for putting razor blades for prisoners’ food, for example.

How does this person get sent to be a prison guard in Iraq? Maybe that questions answers itself all too well. I’m not sure. But the fact this is a live question for us, and not for our president or soon-to-be Attorney General, is sobering a tap on the shoulder that more work is needed. I don’t know what work that is exactly for me, or us, or anyone necessarily. A thousand small-things-large, and daily, I imagine.
Oh, but only if voting were enough.

As for MLK and this day, what Angela Davis made clear in her talk is that these issues on penalty, prison and King’s broader human rights concerns are all one in the same question still urgently waiting to find answer. The fact I can hear this from her, a person formerly on the FBI Ten Most Wanted, speaks something to the nature of possibility that does exist.