By Michael Tyler, EJS Poet-in-Residence
The Game 7 finale of the NBA Championship took place on Sunday, June 22nd, with the Oklahoma City Thunder winning its first ever Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy. Just the day before, I was fortunate and privileged to have attended and participated in the Juneteenth Art Exhibit Benefit for the Equal Justice Society, in South Los Angeles. While there is seemingly no connection between these events, they will be forever intertwined in my memory. Why? Because the literal and metaphorical examples, meanings and impact of one word intersected, due to the back-to-back timing of these events. Achilles.
The post season of the NBA, as well as the regular season, was dramatically affected by key players suffering ruptures to their Achilles tendons. Prior to Tyrese Haliburton going down for the Indiana Pacers, a similar injury happened in 2019 to Kevin Durant, when he played for the Golden State Warriors, which definitely created a more favorable outcome for the Toronto Raptors in winning their first ever title. For perspective, throughout the 79-year history of the NBA, roughly 10% of its players have been fortunate to win a championship. Though the opportunity is annual, the achievement is incredibly rare. A ruptured Achilles tendon could cost players and teams the only chance in their careers and in franchise history, to hoist the trophy and wear the ring. It can also forestall the capital valuation of the organization by hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s the impact.
While I was at the benefit, Lisa Holder, President of the Equal Justice Society, delivered an address during which she said, “Our democracy has an Achilles heel and that is the racial pathology in America.” For perspective, at the end of the Civil War, 13% of the nation’s population was Black (free and enslaved). When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, that ratio was 10%. Today, 14.4%. Though the opportunity for this nation to live up to its creeds is annual, if not daily, hourly and minute by minute, the reality that it has and does occur is sordidly sporadic and dishonorably rare. In fact, throughout the 249-year history of the United States, there has never been a single moment in which the nation fully, intentionally, truthfully, uniformly and equally lived up to the stated principles and ideals written in the documents that chartered and established the legal infrastructure for the rule of law, and the prescribed justice that undergirds our democracy. Not one single minute, hour, day, week, month or year. We have had nearly a quarter of a millennium of pestilential, racial pathology as the prevailing and dictating directive of our society.
The tendon that connects the heel of our proven intention to the corpus of our promised virtue has always been our moral integrity, which has been ruptured since transatlantic expatriates engaged in a genocidal land plunder; prohibited half the population from being equal citizens by disqualification of gender; and imported and enslaved people by the millions for centuries, as a free labor source to build the Avalon of a manifest destiny for rebellious, European immigrants. Our Founding Fathers founding principles were founding crimes. Consequently, the United States has never held a trophy for an impartial, unconditional, truly inclusive democracy because our every step towards perfecting the Union has been crippled by the conscientious affliction Holder spoke of. Team America is still seeking to present its first championship “to the republic for which it stands”, in the franchise history of the nation. Moreover, the larcenous refusal and negation of wage compensation, overdue reparations and lost wealth creation for African Americans has resulted in an equity devaluation that numbers in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars. That’s the impact.
Days after I watched the final game between the Thunder and the Pacers, I remembered how Holder’s comment kept surfacing in my thoughts. I recalled thinking that she had added the Achilles symbolism to the iconography of bigotry that has been present throughout my life. Greek mythology aside, shackles, chains, Confederate flags, white hoods, burning crucifixes, prohibitive signs, blasting hoses and biting dogs still dominate the summoned thoughts of most Americans, when the imagery of our deplorable disease is called to mind. On a more personal note, nothing is more symbolic and evocative of the infamy and the horrors of our nation’s racism than the noose. Fetters, flags, hoods, crosses, posted notices and police tactics, no matter how threatening, brutal and repellent they were and are, didn’t and don’t mean certain death. The noose did and does, and in that most of its victims have been Black men, and I being one, a rope tied with the hangman’s knot is the most lethal logo of White supremacy I can consider.
The metaphorical implication and application of its asphyxiating outcomes has led to the ruination of millions more lives, than the reported thousands that have died as strange fruit on trees across the country. While the fiber of immoral bias braids the rope from the -isms in its twine, White identity ideology has always been the hand that wrapped the loop and tied the knot.
The noose, more in its metaphorical morphing into the systemic tether around the neck of American idealism, remains the necktie for an identity politics so distorted and corrupted by the rage of malignant self-consciousness as to deem equality, empathy, rationality, heterogeneity and humanitarianism as diseased conditions of thought and conduct that threaten its material existence and status preservation. This was postulated by President Lyndon Johnson, when he opined, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Even more cautionary is the insight provided by Zachary Price, the grandson of Leon Forrest, author of the epic tome Divine Days. In the Preface for the reissued book, Price said of his grandfather, “He regarded with skepticism and clarity the temptation to make racial identity the foundation of our humanity.” To do so is to radicalize identity, in order to socially engineer a caste.
One of the hazards of doing this is a deduction that can be extracted from something James Baldwin once noted, “No man is a devil in his own mind.” Therein lies the reason that racializing identity — or racism has always been able to hypocritically reconcile its own egregious incongruity, and why racists have always been able to exonerate their own overt evil. It is also the reason many White Americans can’t, don’t or won’t reflectively grasp the social, cultural and political malignancy of White Supremacy. Because the identity dogma of “whiteness” self-administers the morally numbing placebo of its own mythology, rather than heal from the maladies of bigotry with a full-strength inoculation of a comprehensive, unredacted and inclusive truth about what this country has been and what it continues to be; about who we have been as a people and who we still are.
The radicalization of identity, to institutionalize the superiority complex of White supremacy, has even perverted and polluted the contradicting teachings of its self-claimed theology, in order to claim and enforce a God-sanctioned orthodoxy of entitlement to its self-characterization. If Jesus had a lawyer, he would be suing for libel and slander. Christian nationalism has all but vanquished Christian fundamentalism to the dungeon of its evangelical calling. The nihilistic front of our politics has mercilessly strung up the democratic principles of fellowship in the Christian messiah’s teachings, from the highest branch of its duplicity.
Racial pathology. Holder rightly diagnosed it. Supremacy is a virulent disease of character caused by a gangrenous insecurity. Throughout history, in societies the world over, it has been weaponized as a contagion of conscience and disseminated via a doctrine of identity extremism. Its infection leads to the sclerosis of judgment, the cancerization of humanitarianism, and the necrosis of a nation’s soul. Every society it contaminates becomes sickened with the chronic belief of social divisions; suffers the widespread famine of compassion; is stricken with a paralysis of principles; faces repeated outbreaks of atrocities; and eventually succumbs to the death of its decency.
My fellow Americans, hate has never made any nation great. Authoritarianism has never ensured the preservation of humanity. Rage has always become a self-destructive identity. Truth erosion has always resulted in the downfall of societies. The otherism of people has always evidenced unspeakable violations. The concentration of wealth has never forged domestic cohesion. The implementation of internment camps has never signaled the dawning of the right side of history. And belligerent ignorance will always place a chokehold on the throat of accountability.
As citizens of the United States, we are only unified by one simple thing: our mutual consent to a common constitution. Therein lies the main trait of the identity that is real patriotism. Our country is only going to be as good as we, the People, want it to be, or as bad as we allow it to be. We must come together around a coherent set of principles that represents a common aspiration for perfecting a society based upon recognizing, acknowledging, protecting and ensuring the value, rights and unfettered access to the nation’s equities, established equitably for all people. This is the only intervention, for the resuscitation of a shared identity, that will save us from the last-gasp suffocation of our nation. We must unloose the noose of White supremacy, so that we might save ourselves from the lynching of our democracy.