January: Let’s Talk About History
In January I realized that history without context is meaningless, and history with the wrong context is manipulative. I spent my whole life thinking I didn’t like history, but now I can see what didn’t sit well previously was the context being provided by people I trust—people whose perspectives weren’t as informed as I had believed.
Context is the mental soil that nourishes seeds of new ideas until they take root in your heart and flower new perspectives that beautify the landscape of your mind. When it comes to learning about history, the context that was provided— in public school classrooms, at Sunday school, on TV—wasn’t enriched enough to yield healthy food for thought.
People will talk and behave with the utmost confidence as if today’s society is a complete reflection of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” address without realizing they’ve never even heard the full speech. Black History Month has long felt like America’s way of saying that the work started by the Civil Rights Greats of yesteryear has been completed, but the now-cliché references to King’s “Dream” juxtaposed with my experiences with today’s racism prevents that belief from taking hold.
This year in recognition of MLK’s birthday, I was fortunate enough to attend a viewing of the entire speech in a workshop facilitated by a Black professor who cared deeply about the seeds of thought he was planting. The context he provided was literal food for my soul. And Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy has nourished my thoughts, my life, more in the few days since that workshop than the prior +30 years of my life.
People are quick to tell me how long change takes when I say I’m an activist and challenge how big an impact one person can have. Perspectives like this are reasonable until you learn that the “I Have a Dream” speech—the single most influential speech ever given — is only 17 minutes long.
People who aren’t familiar with being “othered” struggle to talk about issues like racism without using numbers—like dates, statistics, costs, percentages—to decide what they believe. Similarly, fellow activist oftentimes discount their own proposals for how to create change when they can’t articulate numbers like the “return on investment” or their “chances of success”. But in the single-most effective speech ever given regarding racial equality in America, Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t use a single number. Instead, he relied on the shared experience of being human to carry his point into the hearts and minds of the world.
Conversations about social change tend to use fancy words and reference special strategies as if humanity is a foreign subject that only experts can understand. But the “I Have a Dream” speech is more a poem than a literary work, using language that a middle school student could digest. And while not everyone can deliver a speech like MLK, hearing the simplicity of his language makes it easier to believe the words floating in my mind could create change in the world.
Towards the end of the speech, he references several very specific geological features— from “the curvaceous slopes of California” to “Lookout Mountain of Tennessee” to the “heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania”. This shift from expounding on his beliefs to recanting very specific details about regions of the country that only locals would recognize was his way of saying, “I am educated AF, but I can create positive change by allowing my humanity to speak louder than my degrees.”
When taught in bits and pieces, King’s legacy has such grandeur that it was hard to believe anyone could ever hope to carry his torch. But after listening to the speech in its entirety, having experienced its simplicity and having witnessed its poetic flow it is easier to believe that my simple words could someday change the world.
When I realized that new context had given life to history that had long been dead to me, I shifted from not seeing the value in studying the events of the past to understanding that the value of a story depends on the context in which it is told. And since every story has the potential to empower me, I need to be intentional about seeking the context that benefits me instead of simply accepting the details that are volunteered.