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| MLK mural at the MLK Day Parade and March, Chattanooga, TN (Jan. 16, 2023) |
Today has been another Martin Luther King, Jr. Day here in the United States. In the past I've written posts including "MLK Day 2020: Labor, Love, and Community" and "So You're Going to Quote MLK?" I thought of the former post a few weeks ago when Republican Congressman Chip Roy quoted King during one of the tragicomic votes for US House Speaker.
This year I attended the 2023 MLK Day Parade and March here in Chattanooga, Tennessee with my union, United Campus Workers. (See photo above).
I wasn't sure if I could find anything new to say for a post. While I was thinking about it, I read a great post over at the Indian Philosophy Blog by my colleague Amod Lele called "King's Improvement on Gandhi." I really recommend it if you'd like to think a bit more about King's engagement with Gandhi (and a bit on classical traditions of India including the Bhagavad Gītā and Jainism).
This post set me thinking about the importance of understanding historical context (in that case how King took up traditions from India, and in turn how Gandhi took up traditions before him). And then I remembered that I had yet to write a review of the new FX/Hulu series Kindred, which is an adaptation of Octavia Butler's novel of the same name. And this seemed like a great way to connect philosophy and science fiction, which is of course what this blog is supposed to be about (well, most of the time, anyway).
I've read Butler's novel several times, and I've even assigned it in my pop culture and philosophy course. It tells the story of a Black woman in a post-Civil Rights era America (circa 1976) who is mysteriously brought back in time to Maryland in the early 19th century. The time travel is never fully explained, which makes some people wonder if it's really science fiction, and there's a lot of what I'd call horror in the sheer horror of the history of American slavery.
Whatever you call Kindred, it's an engaging read. Few authors can make you feel the kind of dread that Butler can, and even fewer can do so with such sharp prose. One of the many lessons of the novel is that history is still with us. This is dramatized in a somewhat literal way in the novel (and that ending--oh my God), but it's only slightly less literal in the reality of America today. From mass incarceration and police brutality to disparities in things like generational wealth and maternal mortality, America is living with the historical legacies of slavery and its aftermath.
I think FX/Hulu's Kindred is the first major adaptation of Butler's work to come to the screen, which is surprising to me as Butler (who died in 2006) was one of the best science fiction authors around and her work has been having a bit of a renaissance in recent years. Other adaptations (like Parable of the Sower) may be coming soon. I think Butler's work will be relevant for a long time, with or without the adaptations (although they help to reach a larger audience, of course!).
So how is the Kindred show? I thought it did an excellent job capturing the tension and dread of the main character's experience. There were some major changes in the book. Updating Dana (the main character portrayed by Mallori Johnson) to the present day rather than 1976 made a lot of sense. Some of the other changes (like making her relationship with Kevin totally new instead of being married to him already), I was less sure about. There was one major change that I'm still not sure what I thought about, but it would be a big spoiler, so I'll leave it at that.
But overall, I thought it was a great adaptation, and I hope to have more time to decide what to think in season 2 (season 1 only covers part of the events of the novel).
Like the novel, it involves the idea that history is still with us, especially as Dana discovers (mild spoiler alert) that she has traveled to a plantation where some of her ancestors lived 200 years ago. While Dana doesn't experience the sheer horror of slavery in the present day, in the series she has meddling white neighbors and some complicated experiences with law enforcement and medicine.
But the deeper point is that history is part of our DNA (literally in Dana's case). We may try to put it behind us, but history has a way of catching up with us.
This is something that Martin Luther King, Jr. understood as well, while many people, like the aforementioned Rep. Chip Roy, do not. Roy riffed on one of King's most quotable lines about judging people by the content of their character. Which is great in itself.
The problem is a lack of historical context and understanding. King's point was never that we should ignore history and its continuing effects on this country, as if we will magically move beyond the past by refusing to acknowledge it. If you don't believe me, read some of his works. Follow his children on social media (Bernice King and MLK III have a lot to say).
Rep. Roy is free to quote King all he likes, but I wonder what King would think about Roy's vote against anti-lynching legislation or the increasingly frequent conservative calls to restrict children and college students from even discussing the racial history of the US (I'm reminded of the backlash against Reconstruction in the 1870's, and I wonder what students are going to learn about that if some of these conservatives have their way).
I'm currently delving further into the Indian Buddhist concept of non-dualism, which is basically the idea that once you realize there's no self, there is also no fundamental distinction between you and the universe. Rather, each one of us is a little node of causal histories coming together. It's not that we all smoosh together into some homogenous paste of being, but rather that each of us is always in causal contact with the rest of existence--simultaneously influencing and being influenced by other people, animals, plants, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe ... whoa.
It sounds like ivory tower philosopher talk. And it is. But it's also a mind-bending insight that I think could transform how we view ourselves, each other, and the universe. Or so I hope to explore further in the next several months.
It's also an insight I think King had in some sense in one of his famous paragraphs from "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.
Just as none of us are unrelated to each other, so are all of us related to the past. Whether we're talking about the ties between post-Civil Rights era America and the history of American slavery in Kindred, the link from the Jim Crow era to King's Civil Rights era, or the "inescapable network of mutuality" that holds between all of us as individuals and between humanity and the entire universe, history is still with us, just as our present will be with the future someday.
I'm still not sure you need the cosmic elaboration that my favorite Buddhist philosophers and I like or even Kindred's historical/science fictional thought experiment to get to King's more socially grounded point, but it's hard for me to shake the idea that the "Beloved Community" and "revolution of values" that King often talked about may only be possible if we radically rethink how we think about ourselves and each other.
Happy MLK Day!
PS: Check out this interview with Kindred show creator Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on Black Girl Nerds.
PPS: Enjoy Stevie Wonder's "Happy Birthday."
PPPS: Here are my cats wishing you a Happy MLK Day!
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