22 minute read
the bombing of Hiroshima
SOUTHERN, BLACK AND RURAL—SELLERS discusses his family’s experiences in communities that have dwindled, struggled and persevered over decades. From the June 9, 2020, Inforum MICHAEL MCAFEE: I wanted to start really with a deep sense of gratitude for your voice—your voice around justice, your voice around reminding folks that race still matters. online program “Bakari Sellers: A Vanishing Country.” As you say in the book, using empathy as a BAKARI SELLERS Former Member, South Carolina House of Representatives balm for suffering. (2006–2014); Democratic Nominee, South Carolina Lt. Governor (2014); I wanted to start, after the thanks are out Author, My Vanishing Country: A Memoir of the way, with just a simple question: How are you feeling? Dr. MICHAEL MCAFEE, President and CEO, PolicyLink—Moderator BAKARI SELLERS: You can’t pull off your
BAKARI SELLERS
best Don Lemon impersonation and not let SELLERS: And today is a weirdly “thank you,” because they’re not nearly said me give some thanks back. [Laughter.] So let emotional day. We get to have this enough. So I have to say thank you to The me say thank you. Brother, it’s a privilege to conversation as George Floyd’s body is Commonwealth Club, I have to say thank be here with you. I wish that I was in San finally hitting the dirt and he’s being buried you to you, everyone watching. Francisco. I wish that I was traveling. I’m as we speak in Houston, Texas. Those You asked me how I’m doing. The answer an extrovert, so thank you for checking on people who are watching, just know and is twofold. The first is, and I highlighted it in me—because extroverts doing this time from say a prayer for his family. the book, last year, January 7, 5:28, Stokely the South, you know, I shake hands, I hug. My mom and dad would always say was born, 5:33, Sadie was born. By about Those things are so passé in 2020. that the two most important words 10, 11 o’clock at night, [my wife] was passed MCAFEE: That’s right. in the English language are the words out. She was feeling warm. She threw up, her A VANISHING COUNTRY
eyes rolled in the back of her head. It was just me, her and a lactation specialist. We were trying to learn how to breastfeed twin babies. I never forget that night. No one was moving fast enough for me. The nurses were taking their time.
Finally, because we had a relationship [with] three Black women who where the OB/GYNs at my wife’s practice—I knew them. I called them up. I had them come to the hospital. They came as quickly as they can. One of the OB/GYNs had an eight-yearold child. She left her garage open and called her neighbor to come over and watch her daughter while her daughter was still asleep. That’s the type of care that they provided, because I told them something wasn’t right with my wife. The nurses—although she had passed out and kind of come to—they just weren’t giving her the proper attention. We found out she lost seven units of blood. She was hemorrhaging. She spent the first 36 hours of our children’s life in ICU. [We] went through a lot with that moment. And, you know, the overlay of politics: African-American women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts.
And then two months later, our little girl, Sadie, was still a little bit yellow. We couldn’t figure it out. We went to the pediatrician. And our pediatrician called us back when it’s Saturday. You should know that if your pediatrician ever calls you on a Saturday, it’s not a good thing. Our pediatrician let us know that we needed to go to the hospital as quickly as possible. Sadie got diagnosed with biliary atresia. We had a Kasai procedure, which is a procedure where they try to connect your large intestine to your liver. That didn’t work. We ended up going to Duke University. She was on the liver transplant waiting list for 93 days. She got a transplant on September 1, and we’re so blessed and so fortunate. She got the gift of life. She’s thriving. She’s running around here. She loves the camera. I don’t know where she got that from. She got that from her daddy, but I’m not sure.
So you asked me how I’m doing and I can tell you that even though we’re in quarantine, and even though there is so much going on around us, my family is good, because we’re all healthy and we’re all together and we’re all happy. So we count it all as joy. MCAFEE: Thank you for sharing that. I’m glad that you started there. I feel the same sense of privilege and gratitude and really just full of being blessed that I get to work and do what I love. The employees of PolicyLink are able to continue to work through this time.
But you said something in your book that was really important, because it speaks to something that I’m holding. I wanted you to explain it a little bit more. You [said] being angry isn’t a sin. And I feel deeply angry right now, in some ways also guilty, because of how we’re taking care of, and angry because of what I see in the world, angry because I don’t have full confidence that leaders like us will translate that tension from the street, the demand in the street, into really the transformative action that folks have. So I’m trying to hold that and channeling in productive ways, but that anger is not a sin spoke to me in your book. So I would love for you to share more about that. SELLERS: I wanted to name the book Anger Is Not a Sin. My publisher and everyone else, we were having these conversations about the pictures that were painted in the book and the story about country and being country, —country versus Southern, it’s a whole theme in the book. And not just that, but the country and the ideals that the country holds. But you know, I’ve always learned and it’s always been sizzling in my spirit—as the comedian Kountry Wayne says, it’s been sizzling in my spirit—that anger is not a sin and too many people treat it as such. The trick though is that you can’t allow anger to paralyze you, right? You have to allow anger to manifest itself in a productivity, which is very difficult to do. But it’s righteous. And those people who have that righteous anger who were in the streets protesting right now, I’m with them 110 percent.
The best example I can give [is] the Charleston massacre for me. I was in Charleston, and I was a block away from when that happened. I was with Hillary Clinton and some others. I knew Clementa Pinckney so well. [Pinckney was the senior pastor of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he became one of nine victims in Dylann Roof’s June 17, 2015, racially motivated massacre.—Ed.] He would have been perfect for this moment. You know, Clem let a straggly white boy that they’d never seen before into Bible study, and he sat him down right by him in Bible study. He didn’t sit him on the other side of the church. Didn’t lock them out. Like if a straggly white boy with a backpack walked in your door right now, what you going to do? Exactly. It’s Bible study Wednesday, what did they do? They let him in the church. Right? They let them in. That’s what you do. That’s what you’re supposed to do. They had a full hour of worship and learning and experience.
Clem set him right by him, so that this new kid that they didn’t know—I mean, this sounds really weird, but they treated Dylann Roof like you would hope to treat Jesus when you meet him. Like a refugee, somebody you don’t know, somebody who’s just here to get the Word; they set him right by the preacher. And when they prayed the benediction, he shot them. Clem was so strong. Clem made it all the way to the the hospital. Eight others were [also] killed. [Dylann Roof ] stood over [Mother Emanuel AME parishioner] Polly Sheppard and told Polly that he was going to let her live. Polly’s old; Polly’s like 80 years old now. [Roof] said, “I’m gonna let you live, but I want you to go out and tell the story” [of the shooting].
For everyone who’s watching [us today] or who will watch, please, whenever you’re in Charleston, let me know. I’ll take you to Mother Emanuel AME. When you get to “anger is not a sin,” I tell that story because there are a lot of people in that church who were further along in their Christian journey, further along in their religious journey, and they can forgive Dylann Roof. And I can’t; I’m not there personally. That story, it makes me angry. Seeing a knee on the back of George Floyd’s neck makes me angry. I’ve stated this many times since the video of George Floyd came out: To be Black in this country is being in the perpetual state of grieving, because we went from anger to immense sadness back to anger, back to rage, back to clear-eyed for justice.
Today, it was a homegoing celebration, right? For all the white folks who are watching this funeral today: Yes, we do have fourhour funerals. That is the way that we do it. [Laughter.] Welcome to the Black church. And the only thing you didn’t get, was a repast. Because usually after their funeral, you get to go into the little cafeteria in the church and you get your fried chicken . . . and you get your macaroni and cheese and your rice and gravy.
We go through these stages of grieving, and I’m angry. I really am. And your anger should be noted. The challenge should not be to not be angry. Don’t look at your anger as a sin, never; but challenge yourself to meet this moment. We’ve been in moments like this before, and we swung and missed. We
had a moment in 1955 when people saw the lynching of Emmett Till. We had a moment on the Edmund Pettus Bridge [in Alabama], when for the first time the 5:30 and 6:00 news was showing the images where people were getting beaten and bludgeoned. We had an opportunity after the president of the United States sang “Amazing Grace” at the funeral for Clementa Pinckney.
And we missed all of these moments. Let’s make this moment true. MCAFEE: In order to make it true, how do you stop this thing that happens where we center white comfort over Black pain? I don’t know how we move forward. If everything has to be juxtaposed or whatever, whether I’m comfortable with it— SELLERS: You have to allow yourself to let go of some of this stuff, right? It’s not on Black folks to cure this world of racism.
Like it’s not on you. One of the things that I wrote this book [was because] I wanted to tell my truth. And just as every day you go to work, you try to speak truth to power, right?
Let’s back. Let me reframe the discussion here before we get to the end. I’d like to define what racism is so people understand it. Stokely Carmichael defines racism as this. He says that if you want to lynch me, that’s your problem. But if you have the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. See racism is a power construct, right? It’s not somebody calling you n----r. It’s these systems of oppression that people live on.
It’s the fact that Flint, [Michigan] and Denmark, South Carolina, where I’m from, still don’t have clean water. It’s the fact that children in this country are still punished because of the ZIP code that they’re born into. It’s the fact that the fastest growing small businesses in the United States of America are owned by Black women. Yet, many times over they are the ones who have limited access to capital and resources. It’s the fact that we have lack of access to quality care in our communities, especially in the rural South, where hospitals are closing, where many people live in food deserts—which y’all big-city folk probably take for granted, but where I’m from, it’s two to three miles to the nearest grocery store where you can get fresh vegetables. It’s more than that, right? So when you think about these systems of oppression, that is what we’re talking about.
This is larger than George Floyd. This is larger than Breonna [Taylor]. . . . This is the systemic racism and injustice that we’re talking about. It’s not on us to remedy this scourge of racism. One of the things I want to highlight though is that we have to begin to have very, very difficult conversations. Right now in this country, we have an empathy deficit and in order to make up that deficit of empathy, we have to begin to listen and we have to begin to understand. Everybody’s not going to be a social justice advocate. Everybody’s not going to have to make a statement. For example, I’m a huge Tiger Woods fan. His statement was weak sauce. I used to like the Knicks a little bit, but their statement—they could have kept it.
But sometimes you don’t have to make a statement. Sometimes you can read a book. When I wrote My Vanishing Country, I wrote it so that we could get some pride and hope. But then when people read it and wanted to know about the experience, what it meant to be Black in this country, the experience of the pain from the Orangeburg massacre where my father was shot, to the Charleston massacre, were able to get some understanding about the struggles they’re in. MCAFEE: Thank you for sharing this. Are you comfortable talking about how that massacre has shaped you and some of the things that your father hadn’t yet— SELLERS: I’m literally an open book. MCAFEE: I know how magical being in the South and West Point, Mississippi, was for me in the summertime. Share some of those fondest memories you have of just being a boy in Denmark, in that region, and then connect it to, What did you take from your parents that shaped who you are right now? SELLERS: Growing up in Denmark, where you have three stoplights and a blinking light,
where it’s a country city where everybody knows your name, you realize that you are very, very rich in experiences. You’re rich in who you are, you’re rich in understanding that you can be unapologetic in your Blackness. You don’t necessarily recognize the poverty around you. We didn’t realize that it was a really, really poor community.
I’ll give you an example. In the book we talk about the number one thing you can do as a person of color is be an example. We highlight that. One of the things that we used to do in Denmark, South Carolina—we had a recreation center that my father ran. Every summer we would take the kids to Carowinds. How can I explain it? Carowinds is like a bootleg Six Flags. It’s our theme park that’s close by. It’s like McDowell’s in Coming to America. Do you remember that? Anybody who doesn’t know that joke, if you watch Coming to America, McDowell’s is the knockoff from McDonald’s. [Carowinds] is on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina. We would take kids every year after the Demark Recreation Center summer programs. Every year we get on a bus and we would go up to Carowinds. It wasn’t the turkey legs; it wasn’t the big bags of popcorn; it wasn’t the big rides. People where I’m from, they wanted to stand on the border. They wanted to straddle the border between North Carolina and South Carolina and take pictures. The reason they wanted to do that is because they wanted to be able to tell people that they literally had left South Carolina, that they had seen something else. They had been somewhere like that. They were no longer defined by 29042, which was our [ZIP code].
Just remember this one piece. Rededicate yourself to being intentional and purposeful in everything you do, especially when it comes to raising your children, especially when it comes to being advocates for justice.
My parents were very, very intentional and purposeful. I’m a product of the proverb “it takes a village to raise a child.” My village has Stokely Carmichael and Marion Barry, Julian Bond, Kathleen Cleaver, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer. That’s who we either knew directly, or my father was friends with who passed away before I was born. Because I had this village, the lens that I contextualize things through is from being a child of the movement. That’s how I look at things politically, culturally and socially—as a child of the movement. Their struggles—it helps me with the perseverance and [to] keep going. MCAFEE: Barkari, when you would stand on that border as a little boy, where did you project yourself? As you were standing on that border or talking about folks wanting to [be] somewhere, did you have a sense of where you wanted to be? SELLERS: Yeah, I did. I firmly did. MCAFEE: You talk about being an old soul, so I was curious about your purpose. SELLERS: I did. And part of the reason was because my parents said, “If you want to be a doctor be”—okay, well, this is going to sound weird. But at that time, if you wanted to be a doctor, be Benjamin Carson. It doesn’t have the same ring that it once had. For those who are watching, who may not know that in Black churches, especially throughout the South, you had pictures of Jesus, Martin Luther King and Ben Carson, right? Those are the pitches you had in the repast hall. Things have changed.
But they would say, if you want to be a doctor, be Ben Carson; if you want to be a lawyer, be Thurgood Marshall. If you want to be a politician—in my childhood room, I had pictures of Nelson Mandela. So I knew I was purposeful. My parents treated me with so many experiences that although we were sharing these experiences with other kids in my neighborhood, they were very, very honest about the fact that, even though I was Black in this world, I could be anything
I want it to be. MCAFEE: You talked about growing up and not knowing you were in poverty. I didn’t feel that I did, for moments, but there was generally a lot of fun and especially in the summertime. But I’m trying to juxtapose that with a lot of folks who are white in rural America and who are feeling left out, how do you connect as a bridge, if at all right now, to some of this anxiety of what people would call flyover country? People feeling disconnected from the opportunity centers in the nation. It seems like your story could be one, and how you show up could be a bridge to some of this tension where we see ourselves as other and not connected. SELLERS: Now you’re in Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, rarefied air right here. You’re asking really good questions.
So you’re asking something that we don’t really do a lot in the media. When you say working class, they mean white. When they say rural, they mean white. When I say urban though, that means me and you —this is an urban conversation, right?
One of the things I try to do in My Vanishing Country is debunk those and say that we have these rural working class folks. Now, this book is a political book, but it’s not partisan at all. There’s nothing in this book Democrat versus Republican. I just feel that would muddle my voice. I felt like there were so many things that we could say without having to go down that path of divisiveness.
But I don’t believe economic anxiety is a true theme that’s pervasive in this country. I think economic anxiety is a myth. I think we have a lot of cultural anxiety that’s rooted in race. I think the fact that the browning of this country is petrifying a large group of people, that they feel as if they’re going to be replaced by immigrants. They feel as if they’re going to be replaced by others. I’m very cognizant of that, and I have to push back on that
Where there can be a bridge built out, I think there should be. I really believe that there are some common bonds between socioeconomic levels in this country. And I think that if you’re poor in this country, you have not all but many of the same struggles. MCAFEE: Well, you talked about the bridge and you use the word in the book— atonement. Do you think that’s essential to that bridge being able to be built? And what does that word mean for you? What does the work look like if it is a path to building the bridge? SELLERS: I frame that in a sense that Black people are always in a position where we have to forgive. We talked about that earlier, like [people asking] George Floyd’s family, “Do you forgive the officers?” I mean, there’d be certain members of the family force that forgives, etcetera, etcetera. But why are Black folk always in this position to forgive?
Today Al Sharpton said something that was really refreshing. He talked about the power of a name. I thought about that a lot. I’m 35 years old. I have a beautiful family. I have a New York Times bestselling book about my story. And every time I sign that book, I sign the name of someone who owned my family. Like when I signed my name Bakari Sellers, the last name is not the name that my family [chose]. That is the name that was given to my family when we got off of ships from West Africa on the coast of South Carolina. That is how pervasive and profound that is. One of my pinnacles and highest moments that I will achieve in this world, having this level of success, even when I signed my name, I’m signing the name of someone who wants to own my family and [control it] through degradation, oppression, etcetera. So when you think about that type of position that you have, you recognize that what I write in My Vanishing Country is true, that we’ve made a lot of progress, but we still have so far to go. MCAFEE: When you think about progress, you talked about when you were in office being frustrated with some of the elected leaders, who you felt maybe have lost their way a little bit in terms of serving. SELLERS: Yeah. Do you go to church, Michael? We probably should have had this conversation offline. MCAFEE: I don’t have a church home out here, no. SELLERS: I don’t want your pastor calling me. You know, back when our fathers were toiling in the vineyard, the Black church was the epicenter for social justice and change. And I just feel like right now it’s reclaiming that. weirdly enough. Al Sharpton today I think began what others wanted to do, which was reclaim the purpose of the Black church. I wanted to challenge institutions to be better than they were, because for a long period of time, the Black church became a place where you wanted to figure out if you were a mega church or how many branches you could have. It wasn’t focused on being the epicenter of sustenance to both heal you spiritually, emotionally, etcetera.
It wasn’t a place where you went to ensure that it was the epicenter for community involvement, engagement, voter activity, etcetera. But right now it’s all hands on deck.
We don’t have a problem with challenging these institutions at all. In the book, I challenged this country. There are people who have a more conservative bent who will chastise me for having the audacity to challenge the United States of America. I’m very firm in my stance that the blood of my family literally runs in the soil of this great country. My father was shot February 8, 1968, so that he could bowl, so that he could bring an end to the injustice that we saw through the Jim Crow South. I have just as much claim to this country as anyone else, which means that I can push to make it better. MCAFEE: When I’m listening to you talk, I often think about you sharing your spiritual orientation, the power of what your family says, but if I make the leap, if I’m listening carefully, the way you love humanity is very evident. But I often hear people say that love is weak. So I would love to hear what you think about, Where does this nation go if you can’t figure out how to love Black people, and why is that so important while not saying it’s at the exclusion of others? Where does this nation go if they cannot figure out how to love Black folks? SELLERS: Let me just start off by saying if love is weak, then call me the weakest S.O.B. on Earth. I’ll be that. I’m a very emotional being. I am someone who falls in love and I love hard. I fell in love with this country and everything it can be. But I’m also petrified, because there is a large portion of this country that does not give people of color the benefit of their humanity. People watching, ask yourself, Do you know anybody who can put their knee on the neck of somebody else for eight minutes and 46 seconds? You can’t even do that to a dog.
My daughter was protesting yesterday. It was a proud moment. She was out there and she wanted to go back, so she and her girlfriends, they went and they wear their masks. They made their signs. They went out and we dropped them off. We picked them up.
But why does my daughter have to protest for Black Lives Matter? Why can’t she just be 15? Why does she have to be so cognizant and why does she have to work so hard and so diligent in proving to people her value?
So we have a long way to go. That’s the truth of the matter.
