Harris-Perry speaks on realities of struggle in MLK Lecture

Harris-Perry
Robert Barker/University Photography
Author, scholar and political commentator Melissa Harris-Perry delivers the 2015 Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture, "We Can’t Breathe: The Continuing Consequences of Inequality" Feb. 23 in Sage Chapel.

“To live in a democracy is to have the right to govern, not simply to be governed,” said MSNBC television host, scholar and author Melissa Harris-Perry, commencing the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture, Feb. 23 in Sage Chapel.

One of the most important aspects of democracy, she contended, is that you have the right to speak, even if you have lost; or to be silent if you choose to do so.

“It is important to be silent sometimes. Choosing to listen, to be quiet, to wait until you have something to contribute is a powerful act. Being silenced is having someone take your voice,” said Harris-Perry, a professor of politics and international affairs at Wake Forest University.

However, she maintained that we must be conscious of the contradictions between America’s founding philosophies and our lived history. Securing the ideals outlined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – has required struggle.

“We have a particular instantiation of ideals around self-evident human equality,” she said. “In order to get there, we have empowered a certain kind of struggle and one important part of that struggle has been breaking bodies.”

Using a series of black-and-white images, Harris-Perry demonstrated how this principle has held true over the course of the African-American experience – suffering through slavery in pursuit of freedom, and Jim Crow laws in pursuit of citizenship; “separate, but equal” doctrines in pursuit of meritocracy and countless other paradoxes of American history, Harris-Perry said, exemplify the long tradition of “bodies being broken in the service of this country.”

“We break bodies to try to get to some place where the democratic values and ideals of who we are can have some living meaning,” she said. “They are big ideals and philosophical precepts, but to get there we actually break bodies and not just in some sepia-toned past.”

Casting a critique about the way we engage history during Black History Month, Harris-Perry said that “viewing history through a window of black-and-white images” creates a distorted perception of distance between past and present realities. In recognizing this, she said, we must force ourselves to contend with the complex realities of American history and contemporary society.

“Yes, you get to live during the moment of the first black president, and also when we shot Tamir Rice,” she said.

Harris-Perry then explained the phrase in the title of her lecture, “We Can’t Breathe,” to be a statement of outrage against a whole range of disparaging realities weighing inequitably on black lives in America, and a rallying cry to remember that “we have not simply overcome.”

“The stories of struggle that we tell our children are incomplete,” she said. “We think of [Dr. Martin Luther] King as the one great voice. We remember him as solitary, when in actuality he was fundamentally collaborative.”

Harris-Perry emphasized that King did not simply “emerge from a rock or from the divine; King emerged from a movement of many broken bodies and the voices of men and women” demanding change.

The professor explained how King wrestled in 1967 with the question: “Where do we go from here?” She advocated that now we must consider what we need to do to further dismantle injustice in our society.

“We must become artists,” said Harris-Perry. “An artist respects no arbitrary boundaries. They use their bodies to paint a possibility of what a different world will look like…We will have to become artists with our Black bodies, because artists refuse to be silenced.”

The event was hosted by organized by the King Commemoration Committee, and co-sponsored by the Division of Student and Academic Services, Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives, African Study and Research Center, Cornell United Religious Work, and the alpha chapter of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Robert Johnson ’17 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.

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