Kumbaya is Exactly What we Need in this Trump Presidency. But Not the Way You Think
When I say the word Kumbaya, what comes to mind for you? Like most people, I suspect you think of a multicutural commercial a la “We are the world” maybe. Or perhaps a moment in which everyone holds hands and sings around a campfire song of love, colorblindness and post-racial America, and make sure we throw in a few MLK quotes for good measure. That right there is what is etched in our collective consciousness as Kumbaya moments; it’s the reason why New Times bestseller Luvvie Ajayi when warning against the whitewashing of MLK’s legacy, said “ when he was assassinated, it wasn’t because he was the Kumbaya King”.
Like most of us, what Luvvie might not have realized is that much like the legacy of Dr. King, Kumbaya has been sanitized and stripped of its ties to the dark times of the civil right movement. What is now generally accepted as an innocuous nursery rhyme is a song which once upon a time, was the soundtrack to a people risking their lives standing up against injustice, and mourning the lives of their fallen brothers murdered by the KKK. Kumbaya was a song of determination juxtaposed with weariness, of a search for miracles yet not counting on them either, of a call to solidarity steeped in speaking truth to power, not pretending that silence would save us.
In his interview with NPR’s Krista Tippet, Civil rights activist Vincent Harding recalls a different visual of what Kumbaya when he tells the story of 3 young men, lives lost on a Mississipi summer. The day is June 21st 1964, when a black boy James Chaney, and two white men, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24 were arrested for their work in voter registration. They were released later in the day in the hands of KKK members, who then proceeded to beat them to death. Vincent Harding recalls finding out the news, as told in the NPR excerpt below.
Whenever somebody jokes about “Kum Bah Ya,” my mind goes back to the Mississippi summer experience where the movement folks in Mississippi were inviting co-workers to come from all over the country, especially student types, to come and help in the process of voter registration, and Freedom School teaching, and taking great risks on behalf of the transformation of that state and of this nation. There were two weeks of orientation. The first week was the week in which Schwerner and Goodman and their beloved brother Jimmy were there. And it was during the time that they had left the campus that they were first arrested, then released, and then murdered. The word came back to us at the orientation that the three of them had not been heard from.
Bob Moses, the magnificent leader of so much of the work in Mississippi, got up and told these hundreds of predominantly white young people that, if any of them felt that at this point they needed to return home or to their schools, we would not think less of them at all, but would be grateful to them for how far they had come. But he said let’s take a couple of hours just for people to spend time talking on the phone with parents or whoever to try to make this decision and make it now. What I found as I moved around among the small groups that began to gather together to help each other was that, in group after group, people were singing “Kum Bah Ya.” “Come by here, my Lord, somebody’s missing, Lord, come by here. We all need you, Lord, come by here.” I could never laugh at “Kum Bah Ya” moments after that because I saw then that almost no one went home from there.
The kumbaya of today, much like the Martin Luther King Jr. of today, looks nothing like what it really was during the civil rights movement. Both legacies have been reduced to harmless ambassadors of peace and brotherhood devoid of the labor both emotional and physical that comes from true solidarity. Because oneness and togetherness are hardly the pretty Hallmark moments that we’ve come to believe they are. True solidarity is costly, is difficult, is painful, unapologetic about disrupting the status quo. It requires that we recognize our destinies are inevitably tied and that any injustice in the world is our collective burden to carry. Not only do we need to put work in dismantling systemic oppression, we have to continuously put in work in examining the ways in which we are complicit in an oppressive system, and be ready to lose a lot in this quest for justice.
Kumbaya moments are not for the fainthearted. Because singing around a campfire celebrating a post-racial America, requires labor and sacrifices that many of us aren’t willing to give. That’s why we are so in love with vintage injustices or even foreign ones. We’re quick to clutch our pearls and gasp in horror at slavery, lynching of the Jim crow era, the holocaust, and comtemporary horrors in the middle east or sexism of the Muslim world. It’s cool and edgy to be horrified by atrocities of racism past, because it allows you to outsource the ugliness that exists within. The blood is never on your hands, if only exists in black and white museum pictures and CNN headlines.
Kumbaya moments are not moments in which one should shy away from injustice in favor of colorblindness.
Kumbaya moments are not moments in which we bury our tweets in the fiber optic sand, in favor of hashtag post-racial America.
Kumbaya is a cri de guerre.
Kumbaya is a call to roll up your sleeves.
Kumbaya is risking your life.
Kumbaya is relentlessly disrupting the status quo
More than ever, we need kumbaya. Because in the era of a Trump residency, we have to look around this campfire and quickly figure out whose lives are being left off the songs of victory. As you seek to only be judged by the content of your character, ask yourself how does this character hold up in the face of injustice?
