Saving Rosa Parks from American Hypocrisy

author : Robert Oscar Lopez topic : Rosa Parks

by Robert Oscar Lopez

November 2, 2005 [Before the recent race riots in France began] - Who can argue with the honors paid to Rosa Parks, the woman described repeatedly as "the mother of the Civil Rights movement"? As the first woman ever to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda where, not too long ago, Ronald Reagan's corpse lay, she is the heroine nobody can find fault with. Fifty years ago, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. In this simple act, the story goes, the American civil rights movement was born.

I wish the story could end on that high note. Instead, a hagiography filled with hypocrisy is slowly turning Rosa Parks into a conservative weapon against the present generation of antiracist activists, who are already being contrasted against Park's "unassuming" and "modest" way of changing things, to quote Kyra Phillips on CNN. After celebrating Parks' diminutive size and "quiet" courage, Phillips asked Reverend Joseph Lowery, an African American civil rights advocate, how Parks' memory made him feel about all the current-day commentators who are "always on the TV set complaining and shouting." Phillips was convinced that Parks was "very different;" in fact, a few minutes earlier both Phillips and Lowery had agreed that Parks was an angel chosen by God. [1] Even Parks' defiance was assumed only by divine right, a right not likely to be conferred on any people of color who wish to continue fighting for equality today.

Skepticism at times like this borders on bad taste, but a small dose of skepticism is necessary to save Rosa Parks from some bad-faith hero worship poised to handicap the very struggle she contributed to. As Rev. Lowery retorted to Phillips, now is not the time to let people "praise Rosa Parks through one side of their mouths" and then from the other side, back Bush's reactionary pick for the Supreme Court. [2] A realigned Court could easily roll back affirmative action, and Alito's draconian record on prison rights would hurt the African American inmate population (which, among males at least, is still larger than the number of blacks in college).

The same trend occurred last year, upon the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. On one rhetorical level, spokespeople from all sides of the political spectrum sang odes to the progress made since the 1950s. Heartfelt recollections surfaced from countless famous black people, including both superstars and scholars, who spent their childhoods in the segregated South. On a hidden level, however, the discussion made it harder for younger minorities, who have no authenticating memories of pre-1960s segregation, to speak frankly about racial inequality today. And on the lowest level of the rhetoric, the vulgar discussion on talk shows and call-in programs stated what the saccharine speeches on the top level were implying but not saying directly: The struggle was over, because racism was a thing of the past. Unhappiness in the 21st century is a function of ingratitude and the cultural flaws of people of color themselves, over which white people have no power.

Between the Brown anniversary and Parks' death, Hurricane Katrina intervened, changing things. American racial tensions became as globally evident as they were in the Rodney King riots thirteen years earlier. I was hoping for a frank discussion of America's present racial problems; if any good could come out of the disastrous death toll in the Gulf states, at least we could take the opportunity to update our consciousness and abandon the trite clichés about racism existing fifty years ago "but not today." To our country's credit, some discussion did surface in the media. Prominent scholars were invited onto CNN, MSNBC, and others, to discuss the racial implications of Katrina. But we can always count on the smug white sanctimony of men like Lou Dobbs of CNN, who quickly poked at race scholars to ask, "haven't these black spokespeople had anything to say about the fact that New Orleans' mayor was black?"

Race sputtered as a topic for a little while and seemed, somehow, to be forgotten. And maybe people of color needed to forget it for a while, because the press was sending mixed messages and the discussion seemed to expose all of us to too much risk. At one moment, the viewer was asked to sympathize with black mothers whose infants were dehydrated at the Superdome; at the next moment, reporters shared the lurid stories about rape and people firing at the rescue workers who were trying to save them (there was no need to tag these monsters as black, since the streaming images created a bizarre epistemology that assured us that they were black before anyone needed to ask.) Rape and irrational violence are not exactly new stereotypes to affix to men of color, and the underlying threat in the press was simple: talk too much about racial inequality and we will Willie Hortonize the whole damn city.

"Le Rage des Oubliés," ran the headline of France's Liberation in the shameful days after Katrina struck. "The Rage of the Forgotten." The picture below the headline featured a lone black woman in tattered clothes, screaming at the top of her lungs on one of the battered streets of New Orleans, presumably one of the many African Americans left stranded without food or water. [3] The tragic truth in the French critique of American racism was its prophetic rather than descriptive quality: the angry ones were going to be forgotten, because they were angry. The American press knows two courses of action when dealing with angry minorities: crush them or erase them.

With extreme sadness, I see Rosa Parks slowly being marshaled in the latter course. "Unassuming," "humble," this "small-framed" "seamstress" "chosen by God" is the perfect antidote to the "Rage des Oubliés." Instead of discussing Rosa Parks' readiness for confrontation or how enraged she must have felt about the Montgomery law, the adjectives emphasize her sacrificial meekness. Kyra Phillips may have simply blurted the question that much of white America is thinking but refuses to ask: "now what do you think of all those commentators who keep complaining all the time on the television, when Rosa Parks' approach was so different?"

In death, she is brought into the Capitol Rotunda. The honor is not hers, I would argue, but the Rotunda's. In a sickening irony, she lies in the same spot that served to honor J. Edgar Hoover's corpse shortly after his death on May 4, 1972. [4] Hoover, the longest-lasting head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, worked indefatigably to destroy everything that Rosa Parks stood for. To place her coffin inside the Rotunda is a not-too-subtle act of ownership by the conservative Washington camp that follows in Hoover's footsteps, not Rosa Parks'. Her story will now belong to someone else, and this time, she cannot refuse to be placed where they want to place her. The story will now go something like this: racism once existed, but it does not anymore. It ended because God chose one small seamstress, and she defied the law, but she defied it meekly, quietly, unassumingly, without pride or aggression. If you are patient and quiet, you will be remembered. If you are angry or militant, you will be forgotten, just as the French headline says.

To his great credit, Reverend Joseph Lowery politely resisted Kyra Phillips' innuendoes on CNN. "It takes all approaches," Lowery said. "I do not condone violence, but I do condone militancy." Phillips, blonde and smiling, may or may not have understood that Lowery was telling her she was wrong. She did not say anything in response. But the endless photographs of Rosa Parks to follow simply reinforced everything Phillips had said: black-and-white pictures of a bygone era, the small "quiet angel" as Lowery called her, serenely defying her oppressors in a feminine, almost Christ-like sacrifice consciously differentiated from the black woman screaming at the top of her lungs in the wreckage of New Orleans.

Printed with permission. The full text of this article is available at http://buffaloreport.com. Robert Oscar Lopez also has a website at http://www.bronzepage.com .