Pain and the Displacement of African Americans
Thulani Davis, in “Unbearable Crime on the Mississippi” at BlackCommentator.com, 9/8/05, draws on Jesse Jackson’s witness to the devastation as looking into the bottom of a slave ship. The importance of his metaphor–and other poetry that conveys the loss of one’s family along side the recognition that help is not coming–is for white people to feel generations of this pain, to feel the enormity of history, the depth of our responsibility. It is a call for us to feel far beyond pity into loss. Such poetry makes it possible for “black pain” to become intolerable to us. And attempting to live with such loss, responsibility, and pain becomes its own call to action, against the very forces that contributed to the wreckage and are hard at work reconsolidating power and ownership. Davis writes:
“I think that really goes to why all the rest of us watching are so traumatized. And I think it is necessary to repeat what Jesse Jackson has said about how the people in this country have a high tolerance for viewing “black pain.” Yes, while we are asking the unheard question as to why a third of New Orleans’ population is poor and all black, everyone from the president on down is comfortable with these realities of our ongoing unemployment, overcrowding, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, neighborhood crime and despair.
We are witnessing in a matter of days a dislocation one-fifth the size of Middle Passage – which took place over more than 200 years. And all those conveniences of modern social organization which would mitigate its effects for most of us – phone, internet, cars, gasoline, and family with ample housing – do not apply to this country’s poor. For them, getting lost may mean not being found any more easily than in 1865 when people went on foot and in wagons following word of mouth leads to find where family members may have been sent.”