Little Arnesta ends up with a limp for the rest of her life. As Jackson explains, "whatever space she entered, whatever path she took, she was marked by an imprint of racial violence". Jackson learns from this story she inherits from her familial ancestors. She learns about white supremacy, its true nature, its presence even in another human being he is charged not to do harm!
White supremacy can be summed up, she understands, by these two diabolical options: live a life in bondage, or refuse and limp. To be black in America is to limp.
Refusal, she adds, is nothing short of "a forceful no".
Then there is Angela Davis. The longtime educator and activist found herself being asked numerous times about violence. Malcolm, before her, was often questioned about violence. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was "police brutality and racial profiling", writes Jackson. Davis' best friend was one of the four little girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. A planned and cruel violence because the perpetrators of the bombing knew children would be attending Sunday School. They didn't care! Yet, Davis is asked about violence.
Davis, Jackson points out, "found it appalling and incredible because it meant that the person asking the question had no idea 'what black people have experienced in this country from the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa'".
Finally, in 1984, Bishop Desmond Tutu, in an interviewed conducted my NPR's Terry Gross, was asked about violence. Tutu let her know that he supported nonviolence but "he was not a pacifist", Jackson writes. He was "'deeply committed to peace'". However, as Tutu informed Gross, "'the primary violence [was] the violence of the apartheid system'".
Bishop Tutu turns Gross' attention to the educational system that mis-educates black children. Black children become either pawns, the foot soldiers or caretakers in the machine, or they become pawns, the restored free labor force within the prison industrial complex.
Look, he asks, at family life where children in the household are starving because migrant parents are asked to slave away, without receiving decent wages.
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