Just. Juice. Prejudice.
These are three things that come to mind when I think of the word
“justice”
because they look similar in my mind, not because they have anything really to do with the word itself.
Just Jot It January, #JusJoJan
Okay, well, maybe justice and prejudice are related, but really I say this now because I am delaying the moment when I have to write about serious things.
Today hasn’t shaped up the way I was expecting it would. I was trying to figure out how to write something about Martin Luther King Jr. and then Dolores O’Riordan died.
Well, that’s not really a topic of justice. It only adds to my blue mood on Blue Monday as it stands.
I relate to the fight for racial justice, in that I can take my disability and think how discrimination manifests. Still, the subject is a sensitive one, as it should be.
It’s like the reconciliation discussion I learn about, with Indigenous Peoples, daily, here in Canada and in other places, all over the world. I am just sad, sad we haven’t come far enough and in some cases, have slid backwards with time.
This is the type of writing that evolves and changes throughout a day. I started this (mid month Monday) thinking about how to address MLK Day.
I’ve spent most of today lamenting the death of a one-of-a-kind voice in music, and I’m ending it by watching a documentary I have known about for months about writer James Baldwin, being shown on PBS.
I haven’t read his stuff and I know very little about him to be honest. I do know that these issues of rights, of where privilege lies, and on how to fight oppression and for justice, are bound to be found throughout Baldwin’s doc, in his own words, years before I was born.
He watched the young girl try to attend school and be spit on, chiding himself for not being there to help her.
Disgust and anger. How to move past this and into making it all better?
Baldwin didn’t miss America while he was in Paris. He didn’t miss it, but he did miss his family and his culture.
MLK knew he wasn’t likely to live long to see any sort of change.
It is painful for James to return, though he is home again.
James Baldwin said: The line between a witness and an actor is a fine one.
This feels so intensely true right now.
So poignant all these years later.
All about class and culture and race and so many other classifications I cannot seem to parse.
James did not stay, as witness. He was free “to write the story and get it out.”
He saw Martin and Malcolm X both go and he wrote about it.
Malcolm, Martin, martyrs both. Baldwin was the writer.
He writes: I Am Not Your Negro
How to reconcile any of this?
And so goes the clicking of the typewriter’s keys.
If you get the chance, watch I Am Not Your Negro.
Things sure have changed, since last century, but we writers still will write.
The story of America,” Baldwin said, “is not a pretty story.” “Aimless hostility.”
“This is not the land of the free.”
—James Baldwin
Her Headache 