aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, June 15, 2007

It’s time for a new, re-imagined Civil Rights movement

I have to agree with Jimmy Carter that race played a role in Genarlow Wilson’s prosecution. “There is some statistical evidence reported by various non-profit agencies in Georgia, leading me to believe that white minor defendants in the same circumstances as Mr. Wilson’s receive far lesser forms of punishment.”

Meanwhile, The Newsmax crowd got the quote it wanted from their favorite Martin Luther King Jr. family member. Former Georgia House representative and Coretta Scott King foe Alveda King said of Genarlow (and Paris Hilton), “I wouldn’t presume to comment on the details or merits...[but] a generation’s having grown up with legal abortion is a big reason for the consequence-free mindset that plagues our young”

With that repetition of our same-old same-old truths from, even, the same-old same-old players, I realize that it’s time for a new, re-imagined Civil Rights movement.

So what would a re-imagined Civil Rights movement look like? I don’t know, but the place I’ve heard the issue framed most articulately was in an interview with Melissa Harris-Lacewell on Bill Moyers’ Journal. I came away from it smitten; she said many things we all should listen to, but my favorite of her observations is that you can’t use a hammer on a nail:

“What I’m suggesting is we are experiencing a new form of racial inequality. We could think of Jim Crow as a nail. And the protest against Jim Crow were a hammer. And a hammer is an extremely effective tool when you’re dealing with a nail. Contemporary racial inequality is structural. It’s undercover. It is connected with also with sort of black achievement which is also going on at the same time. Contemporary racial inequality is a screw, and if you take a hammer and start pounding on a screw, you just end up with a mess which means we have to live with the fact that a new generation is going to have to innovate a screwdriver to deal with the new problem. And that screwdriver might not look anything like the hammer. And we can’t keep yelling at them to use a hammer for a new problem.”

Watch.

RELATED: In response to Tom Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie, I call on Big ‘D’ Democrats to redouble their efforts in the South.

LATER: Please don’t anyone think that this is what I’m talking about. Hutchins just looks like more of the same-old same-old to me.