Yeah, Listen To The Babies By Jasiri X-Black Lives Matter-Got It

Yeah, Listen To The Babies By Jasiri X-Black Lives Matter-Got It

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Sam Eaton turned about sixty shades of red when George Brent, a young friend of his and his old friend Ralph Morris from the anti-war and black liberation struggles of the past several years, told him to “pipe down” in his leading the chants at a Black Lives Matter support rally held in downtown Boston a few months back. That remark hit Sam hard. First because he had been a chant-master since the days back in the late 1960s when he had gotten “religion” on the anti-war issue during the Vietnam War after his boyhood friend, Jeff Mullins, from Carver had been killed in the Central Highlands of that benighted country and he had in letters back home to Sam begged him to tell the world (or the part the world that would listen) what a hell-hole the place was if he did not make it back.

That started the thing rolling and increased study about such issues and many conversations with his oldest political friend still standing Ralph had led to a life-time commitment as best he could to the “struggle.” And in the time honored task of giving spirit to various rallies, vigils, speak-outs and acts of civil disobedience he had with his droll voice cranked up the “troops’ with his sing-song chants from Bring the Troops Home to the current Hands Up, Don’t Shoot of the Black Lives  Matter. What was the matter with that. 

Now Sam had no problem with the fact that the BLM movement is being led, should be led, by the young, mostly black militants who have the most to lose, and gain. As an old white guy only getting older he had already faced that prospect when he attended his first such BLM rallies and noticed that the language of struggle among the young centered more on identity politics than the broader social struggle aspects that drove him and Ralph in their youths (not that the languages were naturally mutually exclusive but there was an emotive value to the difference in language that might turn out to be). But to be called to task by an old (younger) comrade closer in age to the young blacks organizing things these days seemed out of place. Particularly when some young black women militants enthusiastically helped him through a couple of chants when his voice faltered (not having had much occasion of late to chant for any purpose). So after some reflection he took George’s remarks with a certain amount of good grace at the time. Although in the back of his mind the question gnawed at him.

The question being mainly what role others had in the movement, whites, latinos, labor militants, Asians, women, the LGBTQ community, young and old in the burgeoning and ever-present BLM, especially his old white AARP guys in the movement. That question and how he (and Ralph) could impart whatever wisdom they had gathered over the years of struggle to pass on to the new politically awakened generation. Yeah, the kids would make their own mistakes just like he, Ralph and their generation of ’68 had done ignoring the older generations of their time but was it really necessary to re-invent the wheel every time a new generation rose up in arms against the same entrenched class and race enemies.    

Then one night Ralph and he were sitting in Jack’s a bar, an old-time radical hang-out over in Cambridge where Sam lives sipping high-shelf whiskeys and discussing how back in their respective working class youths in Troy, New York and Carver, Massachusetts they imbibed the racial attitudes of their time and white neighborhoods. Ralph confessed that he had stood shoulder to shoulder with his father, Ralph, Senior,  back then physically trying to keep black people from moving into the Tappan Street neighborhood where they lived (black people called the “n” word freely back then in that neighborhood without the ironic, desperate sense of today’s usage). Sam told Ralph that he had never even seen a black person in Carver and did not know a single black person until he went to work in Boston. So that night they began to sense something existed more than a generational gap between them and the youth of the BLM. A whole missing link about experiences.    

That new understanding came to a head when Ralph mentioned that he had heard on the radio one day a white woman talking on some talk show that she had been before Trayvon Martin, before Ferguson and Michael Brown, before Eric Garner clueless about the plight of black people in current time America, especially young black men. Ralph mentioned that she had said that she had lived in Barrington up in Podunk New Hampshire and so maybe she just did not get around enough. But her remarks got Ralph thinking that even with all their political experiences doing support work for the Black Panthers when they were under the guns of the state, the struggle to free Nelson Mandela in South Africa and support of the African National Congress they were probably now out of the loop about the black struggle.

Maybe Malcolm X was right that the gap between white and black experiences could not be bridged in this country together. Sobering thoughts, no question. Sobering too though that the BLM needed allies, many allies in this deeply bedrock racist slavery-born country. So they would study some more, get out more and try like hell to figure out what the words to The Babies above from YouTube really mean.