You're Hopeful or You're the Problem

Mainly I went to the Siegel Center because hope is power.

Tonight, as part of VCU's Common Book program, "Just Mercy" author Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative was in the house talking about increasing justice in our country. Mac and I walked over to join the hundreds of others who wanted to hear this lawyer who works with death row inmates talk about how we can possibly hope to create a post-race world.

This is a man who has made his life's work beating the drum of justice.

Along with scores of students, some busier looking at their phones and laptops than paying attention to Stevenson, there were plenty of adults like us interested in hearing from this man who's dedicated his life to working with marginalized populations.

The middle-aged woman sitting next to me could barely contain her excitement at hearing him speak. "He's like a rock star, a real rock star to me!" she gushed. I only wish the students - whom he characterized as "more woke" than our generation, although I have my doubts - who began drifting out midway through his talk had realized that.

Mac and I had picked up his book when we'd seen the film "Thirteenth" about that amendment and the subsequent institutionalization of mass incarceration - which included Stevenson as one of the savviest talking heads - and decided then that we needed to hear this man speak.

A big part of his appeal is that he's not all doom and gloom despite a vast knowledge of all the disturbing history that would justify such a stance so rather than focus on that history, he instead offered solutions the country and especially young people could use going forward.

He talked about the power of proximity and how necessary it is for white people to position themselves near communities and people in crisis. With passion he explained the need for changing narratives that sustain oppression, things like the existing narratives of death row, of childhood, of race.

Referring to the U.S. as a post-genocide society, he showed how our forefathers denigrated those they wanted to control, calling Native Americans "savages" (while keeping Indian names for rivers and settlements) and using the misplaced notion of white supremacy to justify slavery.

Pointing out that our culture has gotten "too celebratory about the Civil Rights movement," he spoke truth to power to the audience. "You shouldn't live in Richmond and not know where the slave auction sites were." I admit, I only know a couple, but I intend to change that.

Stay hopeful, he told us, because you can't change the world if you lose hope. Pessimists and pragmatists, take note. It's particularly important in a world where trucks still proudly wave the Confederate flag and it's still possible to see a bumper sticker - as Stevenson did - that reads, "If I'd known it was going to turn out like this, I'd have picked my own cotton."

His final advice was to be willing to do uncomfortable or inconvenient things, which is just another way of saying, "Lean in when it gets uncomfortable," advice far too many white people are unwilling to take because, as a species, we are instinctively attracted to what's comfortable and easy.

Race relations are neither.

After the Q & A, we picked up the Equal Justice Initiative's 2017 calendar, as much for its iconic photographs (both vintage and modern) as for its 365 days of racial injustice history dates, every single one of which is positively heartbreaking.

On my birthday, for example, in 1796, President George Washington offered a $10 reward for the return of Oney Judge, an enslaved black woman who fled after learning that Martha planned to give her away as a wedding present.

That's right, a First Lady using human beings as gifts. Lest people think that things got better with time, how about June 16, 1944 when a 90-pound 14-year old black boy is wrongly accused of rape and murder and electrocuted in South Carolina, becoming the youngest person executed in the 20th century? Our country's history is strewn with such mortifying facts.

Calendars in arms, we walked over to 821 Cafe, to discuss what we'd heard and share an order of black bean nachos. When our affable server spotted our calendars with their haunting black and white photographs, he wanted to know where we'd been and from whence the calendars had come, afterward acknowledging that he had some important reading and film-watching to do.

When he came back to clear the table and found the platter all but licked clean, he was suitably impressed. "Not too many people can finish the whole thing," he said with awe. Hell, Mac and her main squeeze had tried recently and hadn't been able to. "Good job!"

Technically, the "good job" accolades go to VCU for assigning a compelling common book and bringing the rock star author to Richmond to share his vision of a better future with Mac, me and the masses.

With racial inequity as with most other things, the two of us have no intention of being part of the problem.

Lean In When It Gets Uncomfortable

If Martians were to drop in on Richmond lately, they could be forgiven for thinking of our film scene as diverse.

Never in my life can I recall so many films by and about the black experience. Just in the past couple of months, I've seen "Moonlight," "Fences," and "Hidden Figures" and I added two more over the past 48 hours.

For an overview of the country's racial conversation, Saturday Mac and I went to see Ava DuVernay's "13th," which VCU was screening as part of their Common Book program that has the entire campus reading and discussing the same book, Bryan Stevenson's "Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption."

Everyone was instructed to take a copy of the book, but Mac and I decided to take just one and share, a good call because she's already halfway though it.

She'd conveniently shown up with a small copy of the Constitution, which we used to clarify what we knew about the 13th amendment.

"Notice anything wrong with that?" she asked. Um, yea. Basically, slavery was abolished for everyone except criminals, making the mass incarceration that followed effectively the new Jim Crow.

Besides horrific and telling statistics - 1 in 3 black men will go to jail, while only 1 in 17 white men will - the documentary made the case for how every President since Nixon has furthered an agenda that involves mass incarceration of blacks. How that happened was laid out for us.

We've got 5% of the world's population but 25% of its prisoners.

If that isn't enough to get your blood boiling, how about this? Before "Birth of a Nation," burning crosses had never been part of the KKK's M.O., but when director D.W. Griffith used it for its striking cinematic value, the KKK adopted it as part of their insanity.

Oh, and just to add insult to injury in the film, the evil black man who eyes the young woman with bad intentions was played by a white man in blackface.

One of the documentary's strength was the well-chosen talking heads from author Bryan Stevenson to Angela Davis to Newt Gingrich to Henry Louis Gates, with one of the most compelling being author Michelle Alexander, who wrote "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the age of Colorblindness," a reality that began with convict leasing after emancipation.

Laying out the case for how capitalism factors into this (companies like Verizon and Aramark make ridiculous amounts of money by servicing prisons), as does politics (look up ALEC to find out how politicians and corporations are in bed writing legislative bills that perpetuate the prison industrial complex) and, let's be real, racism.

It was impossible not to cry during a segment about a young man who was wrongly accused of a crime and deliberately chose not to take a plea because he wasn't guilty and wanted to make a stand. He spent three years in prison enduring beatings before being released due to lack of evidence.

On camera, he looked sweet and shaken by what he'd endured, all of it unnecessary. But it's when the voice-over says that a couple years later, he committed suicide that tears and sniffles began in the auditorium. Absolutely heartbreaking and not even all that unusual.

Mac and I walked out of there shaken and disturbed, as we should have been, by what we'd seen.  So naturally, tonight we headed to Criterion to see "I Am Not Your Negro," a look at race relations by way of one of the most literate black men of the 20th century on the subject.

Using the first 30 pages of a book playwright, poet, novelist and social critic James Baldwin began and didn't finish before he died, the film uses words from that manuscript read by Samuel L. Jackson to frame a look at race relations using TV and film footage from the Civil Rights era, along with footage of Baldwin on Dick Cavett's TV show and at lectures and debates at various universities.

Listening to him make a case for how the races were portrayed by Hollywood (black men like Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte were not allowed to appear sexy so as not to offend white sensibilities), in government films, ads and training films while watching such things was both revelatory and upsetting.

What was striking was how Baldwin's words transcended time and sound just as applicable to today's race conversation as they did then. "The world was never white," he says, reminding me of a cartoon I'd seen on Facebook earlier.

A white man and a Native American are listening as the radio announces that for the first time, non-white baby births have exceeded white baby births in the U.S. "Second time," the Native American says. Boom.

Tonight's film ended with Baldwin making the case that as a nation, we'll never get our act together until we deal with race and inequality, a fact of life that's not going to go away until we have hard talk and changed behavior.

Over Garnett's coconut cake with chocolate frosting, Mac and I agreed that between Baldwin's words and Haitian director Raoul Peck's chosen visuals, it was too much to process in one viewing.

That's undoubtedly a good thing because it provides incentive to experience it again and reconsider the talking points Baldwin so eloquently stated throughout the film.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Truth in a time when we couldn't need it more.