Azzi: Wake up to Woke this Presidents' Day

"If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that," Roberto Clemente said, "you are wasting your time on this earth."

Roberto Clemente was a Hall of Fame baseball player for the Pittsburgh Pirates who devoted much of the off-season to charity work. At age 38, in his 18th professional season, he died in a plane crash on New Year's Eve, 1972, while delivering aid to victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua that killed perhaps 11,000 people and left over 300,000 homeless.

A biography of this American hero — "Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates" — written for young people, is today among 176 books sequestered and denied to children in Duval County, Florida, presumably because it discusses racism the Puerto Rico-born athlete encountered in America.

One hundred seventy-six books, which include "Dim Sum for Everyone!," "Who Is the Dalai Lama?," "I Am Jazz," "Unstoppable: How Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team Defeated Army," "The Turtle of Oman," "Thank You, Jackie Robinson," "Sonia Sotomayor," "Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag," "Barbed Wire Baseball: How One Man Brought Hope to the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII," "The Berenstain Bears and the Big Question," and "The Gift of Ramadan," are today being denied to students in Florida because political leaders — not just in Florida — are trying, with some success, to deny the reality of America by labeling supporters of diversity and inclusion as expressing “woke fantasies.”

I am woke — and proud of it.

Understand that I believe the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are woke documents — created in part by flawed humans — being challenged today by those who believe that acknowledging the facts of American history diminishes their privilege.

I believe that teaching the truth challenges the dominant white narrative of American exceptionalism, a narrative of immaculate conception, of being born without sin; a narrative indoctrinated over generations of a white Christian cis-gendered country privileged to rule over everyone unlike themselves.

In 1946, Nobel laureate Albert Einstein spoke at Lincoln University, America's first degree-granting Historically Black College and University (HBCU), and said, “The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people, but a disease of the white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”

Einstein, who feared and opposed Nazi government policies and antisemitism, whose works were torched during book-burnings in the 1930s, fled Germany and became an American citizen in 1940.

Einstein was never silent. He was woke.

Not silent, too, are The Squad: Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, all U.S. representatives who were once told “they should go back to the broken and crime-infested places from which they came."

They, too, are woke not just because they speak out against privilege, systemic racism, inequities, and injustice but because they personally have experienced exclusion, marginalization, and disenfranchisement.

They, like so many Americans, like Clemente, like Einstein, don't need to be awakened ... they are woke because they want to awaken America and demand it rise and fulfill its promise to all Americans.

There is no middle ground between woke and anti-woke, between facts and prejudice, between democracy and demagoguery.

Expecting people who for generations were told to shut up and pick cotton, shut up and sit in the back of the bus, shut up and dribble — people fighting for clean air, safe water, insulin, medical care, and education for their kids — to today play nice with bigots and consider the feelings of others, to moderate their voices and compromise with folks who believe their privilege has entitled them to oppress other peoples for 400 years is not only wrong but unreasonable and racist.

“This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly," Barack Obama said in 2019 from his position of authority and comfort. "The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and, you know, share certain things with you."

I don't care if they love their kids. I'm not ready to share.

I care that they are still trying to enact policies that may harm my kids and grandkids, harm my friends and their kids.

I care that you are telling me that I've been judged for 400 years and now you're asking me not to judge those who not only oppressed people of color and minority communities but want to continue the oppression.

For too long too many people have been too quiet, from the day when enslaved Africans were brought into Jamestown, from when enslavers attempted to sunder our nation in two, from the white ministers in Birmingham, from white pundits and politicians - and people of color who prefer to be in proximity to whiteness — who are telling Woke Americans to tone it down.

“… we must make every effort [to ensure] that the past injustice, violence and economic discrimination will be made known to the people: The taboo, 'let’s not talk about it' must be broken.” Albert Einstein told the National Urban League, 1946.

"Let's talk about it."

“I love America more than any other country in this world,” James Baldwin wrote, “and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

For that reason, for our survival, that’s what Americans — especially Woke Americans — must continue to do.

Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Azzi: Wake up to Woke this Presidents' Day