Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

King’s Dream in the Black Working Class

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/kings-dream-in-the-black-working-class-3d46a2eec95a

Dates are essential. In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry, three years before M.L. King, depicts in rather raw terms the dream of a hard-working black working-class family who wants to climb a couple of rungs on the social ladder. The Father of the first generation dies at work and gets some small compensation for the accident. His daughter wants to become a doctor but she is lured by Africa and goes back there after marrying a Nigerian man she met on campus.

They are all living in a too-small apartment, what’s more not exactly in good condition, three generations packed in a two-bedroom apartment with the bathroom shared with neighbors on the landing. The son, who is married to Ruth, wants to quit his chauffeurdom and buy a liquor store. He is the fool of the family and to rush up the licensing process, he uses a white go-between that gets the money and runs away. That’s when this scam is not completely folded up, that the grandmother buys a house in an exclusively white neighborhood. The residents of this neighborhood contact the Younger family and suggest the Younger family accept to sell the house to them, with a profit. The menace is some violence if they do not accept it. Segregational blackmailing. But when the money the son, Walter Lee, has wasted in his foolish dealing is gone, he changes his mind and decides not to yield and to move into the new house.

In 1959, that was practically impossible and it would have ended up with a bomb and the whole family cremated in the house. The author is thus producing in 1959 a dreamlike play that is sweet and sour like life, but a life that did not exist yet for the Blacks. What can be the meaning of this play being reproduced on Broadway in 2022 or 2023? To pacify the white audience: you see things have changed a lot. To patronize the blacks: you see things are getting better. And you can then think of George Floyd: Things are really getting better since a few of the killers are convicted and sent to prison for some time. Can you hear the grandfather, killed at work, rummaging in his tomb? Me, Yes I Can! But I ain’t Black.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:17 PM 0 comments

Unburied Psychopomps

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/unburied-psychopomps-f5a456ab8273

In the USA, right now, today and tonight, there cannot be any justice for the Blacks. They die earlier than anyone else, their health deficit can reach in certain areas years of life and 10, 20, or even 30% as compared to the same for the whites. In education, the chance they have to get a Black teacher is in no way at the statistical level of the share these Black students represent in society or in the classes they attend.

 And police brutality is the rule, and the only constant rule. It is not because a few cops in some hyper-popular cases have been convicted of murder and will spend quite some time in prison that things have changed. It is one drop of water in an ocean of unpunished violence. We even saw one policewoman shooting one Black young man dead and she pretended she had mixed up her gun for her tazer. An idiotic defense that pretends the person is dumb, unqualified, badly trained, and even so stressed in any situation that she can pass water in her pants and her senses become so fuzzy that she is “confused,” so confused that she mixes up gun and tazer but she kept her eyesight perfectly clear and to the point so that she shot the Black young man on the spot dead, irremediably dead.

And some good citizens who know their First and Second Amendments by heart can start running after a Black jogger in the street. Running? You’re kidding. They used their own truck, SUV, or car to make sure he won’t escape, and then, the three of them shoot him down dead. And such facts happen day after day and the vast majority of the perpetrators, police or civilians, go through justice, if ever, with a slap on the left hand so that their right hand will not in any way be unable to write, or simply button up and down their pants and shirts.

 Jesmyn Ward offers us a classic novel on racism, discrimination and sadistic violence against the Blacks in the USA right now, both as a common present practice, and as the century-long recollection of what it used to be a long time ago and still is. ML King's dream is far from even getting close to being true in reality. It is a dream and will be a dream for quite a few dozen years, if not half a century more. At Least.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com 2023

Violence,  *  Death,  *  Race and Racism,  *  History of Slavery,  *  Prisons

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:56 PM 0 comments