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It was a revelation to read about how, as undergraduates, King and Betty Moitz, a white student, fell madly in love. I used to marvel at how, with all he’d faced and withstood, Martin Luther King not only expected whites to do the right thing but himself managed somehow not to hate the guts of every white person who ever lived.
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And that’s what makes this slight work so counterintuitive. This gets us back to the book’s beginning. Doing so, both seem to be forgetting that like the concept of mental illness, handicaps or retardation, the malady of racism is so awful compared with the alternative, no matter what it’s called, that term is sure to be seen as hateful.Įnding, Lemon muses of how he and Tim speak of race, sometimes disagreeing but always finding their way home to the love they share. He concedes the usefulness of Wilkerson’s way of removing the paralyzing sting of blame, recriminations and shame from racism, with caste. “Racism is a cancer that has been metastasizing throughout the land ever since Columbus showed up,” he states, making an excellent argument for replacing all memorials to Columbus with tributes to Frank Sinatra.Įlucidating on the extent to which the wealth and might of America was derived from land appropriated from Native Americans and labor coerced from red, brown and especially enslaved Black Americans, he notes that even enterprises not directly involved in slavery benefited from the exploitative system.Įager for the resolution of a normal life, Lemon is more trusting than some, less certain of the dark motives of the white clerk who denied him admittance “due to Covid” but then welcomed a white woman inside his store. He warns of the omnipresence of patriarchal white supremacy, the west’s original sin.
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It is a preamble to a plea to learn all one can about the past.
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Explaining the killing of George Floyd, Lemon deliberately imitates a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew in 1963. From a mere Black pundit he was transformed into a tested, un-cowed combatant in the struggle for civil rights.īeginning with a cautionary letter to his nephews and nieces with his white fiance, Tim Malone, Lemon purposefully emulates his hero, James Baldwin. Trump’s recurring slur of “stupid”, alternating with, “the stupidest!”, was consistently met with good-natured laughter and ever more incisive analysis. Certainly the threat the former president posed helped to radicalize someone who often seems happiest finding and presenting both sides. The change of Lemon’s disappointing trajectory began before Trump. Out of the blue, he was hectoring Black youth on air to “ pull up their pants!” Denouncing a rebel fashion which endures on account of its effectiveness at pissing off old people, particularly old white authority figures? One wondered, was he embracing Bill Cosby’s “respectability” political stand? Admonishing youth about the importance of being married before starting a family, even endorsing the value of New York’s discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing, many reasoned Lemon must be trolling for ratings from the enemy. And then, around 2014, he seemed to change. You’ll never be a newscaster.”īut he was, and he took off. He overcame all of this but one media instructor later told him: “I don’t know why you’re here. But he realized he was a “double negative” – gay and Black – living in the south, undoubtedly confused by childhood sexual assaults at the hands of a friend of his mother. His family were loving and even his relationship with his stepfather was good. His dad died when Lemon was nine and his divorced mom remarried. His mother, working for his dad as a legal secretary, was married to another man, his father to another woman. Affectingly, he appeals to a growing fanbase by relating that success notwithstanding, his was a life as troubled as their own.įor one thing, his parents hadn’t been legally wed. But his nightly broadcasts as the only African American anchor in prime time, his Zoom chats and podcast on racism have been calculated towards his rise. He revealed three sensational secrets in a 2011 memoir, Transparent, and seemed destined to become a media star akin to Oprah Winfrey. He has taken a circuitous route to ardent Black activism. Lemon was initially a Republican, he tells us, from a time in his Louisiana homeland when Republicans were still pro-civil rights. How then, without seeming arrogant or pompous, does he place his life and his experience beside the best-known champions from the pantheon of Black freedom fighters? Invoking the zeal and courage of Dr King and Sojourner Truth, portraying even the proscribed accomplishments of Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen in the same light of heroic survival, his is a voice as essential for our time as Ta-Nehisi Coates and as compelling as Caroline Randall Williams. Relatively young, a short 20 years ago, the CNN anchor was almost unknown.