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“Rosa Parks didn’t do nothin’ but sit her black ass down.”
- Cedric the Entertainer Barber Shop
We like our (raced) activists sacrificial, unassuming, demure.
Consider the following activists: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harvey Milk.
What the general public knows, or thinks it knows, is that Rosa Parks was a meek, married woman with tired feet. Little referenced is the fact that she was the secretary of her chapter for the NAACP and had studied nonviolent social change.
Her refusal to give up her seat to a white man was the third documented event of its kind. Not, say, Claudette Colvin, who did the same as Parks, but as a 15 year-old girl nine months prior in 1955. It was Parks, however, that took the spotlight.
Instead, we like to think of our raced activists as people who are non-violent folks, “just wanting to be equal to the white man.” Note MLK’s “I have a dream speech” in which only black and whites are mentioned, leaving out everybody else.
Note also the tragic misunderstanding of Malcolm X as a violent monster, in retaliation for his affirmations that blacks should be treated as people. He spoke in favor of self-defense. For that, lost his chance at having a day named after him, like his peaceful “don’t-fight-back” counterpart.
Whites on the other hand, can be go-getters. Harvey Milk, for example, was ambitious and driven. He became an icon, and the greater public is getting around to loving him for it. At least in the movies, anyway. Not once in his cinematic depiction was “greatness thrust upon him” the same way people like to think Parks did.
What does this mean?
