Put
Martin Luther King on the Twenty Dollar bill
“Whatever you think of policy, the mere fact of electing a black man president, sending him to live in the nation's most iconic, so far whites-only house, would puncture holes through the myth of black inferiority, violating America's racial narrative so fundamentally as to forever change the way this country thinks of blacks, and the way blacks think of this country—and themselves." – Thomas Chatterton Williams in Culture 11, 2008
I
am no particular fan of Barack Obama. Indeed, I'm betting that his
tenure will be adjudged to have set back black “progress” more
than any single event since the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
in 1968.
After
Obama, all black people will be left with is not even a kind of
Jackie Robinson first-ism pride,
for Robinson's efforts, his sacrifices, were made with the full
knowledge that he was preparing a path for others.
Not
Obama. His weak-kneed but eager conciliatory compromises with
outright racists, “movement” and Tea Party Republicans, “Blue
Dog” Democrats, and above all, the donor class of capitalists have
reduced any potential value his presidency once may have contained
down to an empty symbolism, empty of any real significance for black
people beyond the now historical fact that he is indeed America's
“first black president.”
Symbols
matter, yes. But the symbolism of Obama as a member of a downtrodden
people, as a “black” man, as a representative of of those
people, has been missing in him apparently his entire life. (Please
don't tell me that Obama is president of all
Americans as though I do not understand what “president” means.
What those critics do not understand is that blacks
are Americans, too).
I
suggest, therefore, Obama extend his symbolic presence to its logical
conclusion. That is, Obama should get behind a
change.org petition
which seeks to replace the slave
trading 7th
president Andrew Jackson's countenance on the $20 bill with that of
Martin Luther King. This should be a no-brainer for a man who loves
symbols as much as Obama does.
President
Jackson's “Indian Removal” policy, in direct violation of Supreme
Court fiat, involved the naked theft of millions of square miles of
Indian lands specifically so that they could be reduced to the
cultivation of cotton by millions of black slaves whose very lives,
like the land, had been stolen.
Jackson's
racism was extreme even for the thoroughly racist epoch in which he
lived. The forced march of Native Americans (Trail of Tears) from
the fertile lands of the southeast to barren and rocky western
“reservations” stood unsurpassed in brutality and death until the
various forced marches of World War II.
In
1838, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Jackson's
"removal" policies that they were “… a crime that
really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country, for how
could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our
government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying
imprecations our country any more?"
Of
course, contemporary Native American communities' problems and issues
are anything but “symbolic.” Sitting Bull's, Red Cloud's or Crazy
Horse's (imaginary) face appearing on a bill will not materially
change their condition any more than Dr. King's or Frederick
Douglass' or Harriet Tubman's would for black people. Without citing
the dreary statistics for either group, suffice it to say that
Jackson’s visage on the $20 would only mean something materially if
both groups could actually accumulate not a few bank vaults stuffed
with those new bills. Still, this drive may not be merely symbolic. Symbolism often has a symbiotic relationship with real and practical, if not always progressive, change. The current fight to change the Washington, D.C. NFL team's name is at first blush a symbolic fight. After all, that's what mascots and team logos are, right – symbols? Symbols represent an idea, feeling, intention, historical or current event. And in the case of the “Redskins,” the name harkens back to Jackson's ethnic cleansing of one group and racist enslavement of another. This is the legacy of the man whose visage we carry on our persons every single day, a man whose “policies” continue to affect marginalized communities today.
And for those who are shocked at even the mention of changing the currency, recall that it was just in 2010 when H.R. Bill 4705 called for Ronald Reagan to replace Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill. Or how about in 2003 when the “Ronald Reagan Dime Act” tried to finally overthrow one of the last vestiges of the New Deal by kicking FDR off the dime and installing Regan...again. Indeed Republicans and conservatives are hellbent on getting Reagan on everything, especially money. There have been at least two attempts other than these.
But if America really wants to go “colorblind,” if it wants to get its racist past behind it, it could start by kicking a documented champion of genocide off its currency. (To get rid of all slaveholders would require a revamping of the entire economic system – not a bad idea actually).
Martin
Luther King Jr. is a universally revered icon who led perhaps the
most important and effective struggle for freedom and justice in this
nation-state's history. A Gallup
Poll has King as the “most admired American” of the 20th
century and second in the world only to Mother Teresa.
And,
speaking of symbols, surely MLK is a more deserving symbol for the
Twenty than Old Hickory. King's face, like Obama's presence in the
heretofore lily White House, would end the run of all-white
currency, which is a shameful and unavoidable reminder of the now
broken legacy of “whites only allowed” in positions of power.
And
for the reverse side of the new MLK Twenty?
For
my money, and again as a symbol of the civil rights era, how about a
picture of the Bus in which Rosa Parks was arrested when she kicked
off the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956. The bus would follow a
timeline hitting key points in the movement – and then stop at the
election of Barack Obama in 2008.
References
https://www.change.org/p/secretary-of-the-treasury-jacob-j-lew-and-u-s-bureau-of-engraving-and-printing-please-replace-former-president-andrew-jackson-with-rev-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-on-the-twenty-dollar-bill
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/03/andrew_jackson_should_be_kicked_off_the_20_bill_he_ordered_a_genocide.html
