“Peace to y’all.” seems an appropriate greeting to the those gathered on the early August morning at McGuffey Park in Charlottesville, VA.
We have just marched from the Jefferson School to the park, where there is a rally to make clear the plan for the day—stand against white supremacy. I was asked by one of the organizers to deliver some words. I have been recently appointed Assistant Professor of Hip-Hop at the University of Virginia, and my work speaks to issues like those of the day, so he thinks it makes sense that I say something.
The audience returns my greeting and welcomes me with applause as I try to rearticulate words I had delivered just months earlier in the presence of my dissertation committee and the capacity audience in front of which I defended the rap album and digital archive I had submitted to receive my PhD. I, first, echo the sentiments of Vice-Mayor, Dr. Wes Bellamy, who spoke before me and quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Somebody told a lie one day.” I want to speak about that lie how it might be related to the people who have descended upon Charlottesville as a way of mourning – “a death…of America, or an America they envision,” and how that poor vision they have is referred to in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
I read:
“[Y]ou’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist” [4]. The narrator continues, “You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back” [4]. He later states: “I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. I learned in time though that it is possible to carry on a fight against them without their realizing it” [5].
I go on to read more words from my dissertation – the quote from which James Baldwin takes the name of his book, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, / No more water, the fire next time” [278]. And then I read the poem, “Good Mourning, America,” which attempts to tie all the aforementioned thoughts together.
12 August 2017 will likely be remembered in this country because of the tragedy that unfolds in Charlottesville over the course of the day. The scenes surrounding the deaths and injuries ...