The nationwide protests affirm that Black Lives Matter. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, each taken alone, and all taken together, are devastating. Three lives lost for absolutely no reason. Slavery ravaged the United States of America, leaving many landmine-like legacies, including systemic injustice and a long history of hatred and dehumanization. The city of Chicago, where the Office of Modern Composition is located and from which we draw so much energy and inspiration, is rife with many racist legacies — our segregated neighborhoods, the way resources and infrastructure are distributed, and the culture (which we hope are changing) of the police department.
This post isn’t about solutions to such intractable-seeming problems.
I teach English 201 at National Louis University. The class is about how to engage in civic society, how to harness language to advance your values and beliefs in the world. In class last Monday, my students and I were exactly where we were supposed to be. True, it wasn’t ideal to be having conversations of this nature in a Zoom Room. But my students were there for each other, thinking through the relationship between individual agency and systemic change.
It was a long, wide-ranging conversation, but I was mostly struck by the prescience of the English faculty who had designed the course. Here are three of the texts that my class read and discussed long before these murders that ignited nationwide protests:
1) Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” — a short story about two girls (one black, one white) who are briefly roommates in a youth reform house. Their lives criss-cross several times until one day they find themselves on the opposite sides of a school busing protest.
2) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech, “The Drum Major Instinct” — a defense, some might say, of ambition. He normalizes the desire to lead and be out of front, claiming that if harnessed, it can be a powerful force for civic change. But he also warns of its destructive capabilities.
3) Graham Greene’s “The Destructors” — a short story about a gang of boys in post-war Britain. For no clear reason, following their charismatic leader’s orders, they systematically destroy a 200-year-old home.
Each of these readings resonated in our conversation, forming a shared vocabulary, deepening our ability to connect with each other. In some ways, it’s tragic that these themes remain so pertinent. But as a writer, I felt this as a call-to-action.
Toni Morrison. Graham Greene. Dr. King. They didn’t know Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. But they knew human beings. They knew their own values. They wrote what was relevant to them and to their times. Relevance is seasonal. It comes and goes. Often, as a writer, I feel that sense of “who cares?” But the people whose lives will be changed by our words may not yet be born.
The text that I shared with my students, that I use to try and make sense of the devastation I feel in the wake of these murders, is 396 years old:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
“No Man Is An Island” — John Donne
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