Valpo U Martin Luther King Day

 “The point of Black Lives Matter is that all lives matter.” Molefi Kete Assante

When I heard that Valparaiso University professors Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette were hosting a zoom session during the belated Martin Luther King Day commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Welcome Project, I obtained a link to the day’s events, which included a round table on diversity in the workplace and a keynote by distinguished scholar Molefi Kete Asante. The day’s theme was “Lessons from the Movement.”

Leading off was a Welcome from President Jose D. Padilla, who noted that his grandfather received dirty looks when he entered a Texas restaurant because of his Mexican heritage, his mother’s family were migrant workers and that his father quit school, later earned a GED, and finished his career as a high school principal. He noted that he was a beneficiary of affirmative action, which allowed him to obtain a law degree from the University of Michigan. He mentioned that Inez Parker (class of 1951) was the first African-American VU graduate and that VU faculty were an integral part of the movement during the late 1960s desegregate what had been, in effect, a “Sundown City” banning Blacks after dark.

Padilla introduced taped excerpts from a 1967 speech by Martin Luther King, where he talked about the early phase of the civil rights movement emphasizing basic decency issues such as the right to be served at a lunch counter or exercise the vote and that the struggle had shifted to a struggle for true equality, including economic opportunity. He concluded that most whites were content to work for “equality on the installment plan” and that there was vacillation and ambivalence about true equality. The white backlash civil rights activist was facing in the North was nothing new, he declared, and had precedents in American history, including after the Civil War.

Prior to the keynote speech, I learned that 78-year-old Molefi Kete Asante was a leading proponent of Afrocentricity (a word he evidently coined), the author or editor of over 70 books and 400 articles, and was chair of Temple University’s Department of Africology and African-American Studies. I half-expected Asante to be an ideologue and critic of King’s integrationist philosophy. Instead, he was scholarly, nondoctrinaire, and truly impressive, talking apparently without notes, beginning with a personal history. Born Arthur Lee Smith, Jr., one of 16 children, he grew up in Valdosta, Georgia, in a family of cotton and tobacco pickers. Encouraged to read by an aunt, he was able to attend Nashville Christian Institute and in 1960 was involved in sit-ins that took place in 1960, organized by Fisk University Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activists such as Diane Nash and John Lewis. He graduated from Oklahoma Christian College in 1964 and earned a PhD from UCLA in 1968.

Calling himself a child of the 1960s, Asante noted that the murder of Emmett Smith traumatized him and that in 19 years of schooling he learned practically nothing about the history of Africa or African-American history and culture. For instance, he grew up learning the poetry of Langston Hughes but found none of his work in literature anthologies. He speculated that for Inez Parker, VU’s first Black graduate, the situation was similar. After helping launch a Black Studies program at UCLA, he was hired as a full professor at SUNY Buffalo. Around this time, he decided to replace his so-called slave name with an African tribal name meaning “One who gives and keeps the traditions.”

Asante’s main purpose was to discuss race within the framework of hierarchy and patriarchy. He asserted that social scientists are in agreement that race is a social construction, that biologically, there is only one race, homo sapiens, that emerged in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago. For most of that time, all human beings, adapting well to their environment, lived in Africa and were hunters and gatherers. In time many different cultures emerged but not difference in intelligence. Race was a social construct and, thus, hierarchy based on race was a human control used as a means of social control. What is necessary to live up to the ideal of equality is to get out of the racial paradigm. Therefore, difference should be embraced but without ranking. In fact, like Dr. King, Asante advocated embracing a common quest for pluralism.

Three days later, Saturday Evening Club (SEC) speaker John Crayton, a psychiatrist, ably summarized Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” as well as a January 29, 2021 New York Times column by the author entitled “The Coup We Are Not Talking About.” He began with a frustrating personal experience as organizer of a Michigan City classical musical program scheduled for YouTube due to the pandemic. Sony Records claimed copyright infringement after a bot erroneously tagged their effort. Crayton asserted that big tech companies are surreptitiously collecting data from electronic devices such as smart phones, Alexa speakers, Google, Facebook, and even rectal thermometers. Listing ominous consequences of “rogue capitalists” monitoring our activities, one that resonated with me was “a splintered shared authority,” the result of extremist sites being the sole source of “news” for increasing segments of the population.

Many of the 16 SEC members tuned in via zoom expressed their uneasiness over the methods of tech companies. The situation reminded financial adviser Doug Watkins of George Orwell’s “1984.” Hugh McGuigan, former director of VU’s international studies program, recalled working for a secret government agency as a Russian linguist during the Cold War and noted that there was an uptick of governmental surveillance in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Someone had a grandchild nicknamed Alexa and joked that he needed to turn off his device whenever she visited. Stewart McMillan, CEO of Task Force Tips, a company that designs and manufactures firefighting equipment, thought it hypocritical for people to bemoan the potential harm of the very devices that they use daily. No one if forced to use a smart phone or join Facebook, he said, concluding, “If you don’t like it, just tune out.”

I thanked Crayton for a provocative talk and, tongue in cheek, for warning me about smart rectal thermometers. I acknowledge the many benefits of Google, Facebook, and other modern devices and admitted I didn’t find their intrusive nature especially worrisome. What would alarm me is if the government-controlled tech companies and controlled their output or used their data to repress dissent. Since my remarks were brief and most members were Valpo residents, I praised VU’s Martin Luther King Day events, which included autobiographical remarks by Mexican-American president Jose Padilla, a documentary (“From Sunrise to Sunset”) about efforts to end segregation in Valparaiso, and a keynote by Molefi Kete Asante, an proponent of Afrocentricity. As one who participated in sit-ins and demonstrations during the 1960s, I’m certain that, like Martin Luther King himself, Asante came under FBI surveillance. I did, too, for protesting the Vietnam War. I’d hate to see a return to those days of government officials snooping into people’s private lives for evidence of disloyalty. I found it comforting that the FBI and other intelligence gathering agencies didn’t kowtow to Trump’s efforts to politicize them. Still, citizens cannot be complacent. Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel “Brave new World” is a reminder that we must remain vigilant.