AMHERST — In the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. warned that the greatest obstacle toward true change is not open hostility, but complacency.
Almost 58 years after King’s assassination, Imari K. Paris Jeffries, president and CEO of racial justice nonprofit Embrace Boston and a trustee of the University of Massachusetts system, finds that King himself has become a symbol used to placate the masses rather than a reminder of the work to be done.
In his keynote address at UMass Amherst’s fourth annual Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Racial Healing brunch on Tuesday, Paris Jeffries stepped into the role of Morpheous from the 1999 science fiction movie, “The Matrix,” in an effort to illuminate ways the online world simulates change rather than creates it.
“We celebrate Martin Luther King as a dreamer while quietly removing the weight of his dream: demanding,” he said. “The vision is honored, the cost is erased.”
This year’s remembrance of King’s legacy comes during a difficult time, Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Marsha McGriff said, where the actions, words and policy choices of the federal government roll back the protections and progress of the Civil Rights Movement. Now is the time to act, following King’s example of nonviolence disobedience, moral courage and love, she said.
“He asked us life’s most persistent and urgent question, ‘what are you doing for others today?'” McGriff said.
Many of the actions people take today merely mimic King’s methods, Paris Jeffries said. People participate in marches without an intended goal. Posts on social media perform moral courage without any of the sacrifice needed for systemic change. Everyone does this, Paris Jeffries said, because people want a normal life, but they also know something is deeply wrong.
“They live in a world that feels familiar yet free, yet is quietly policed, not always by force, but by agents of distraction,” Paris Jeffries said. “It is how the system stages itself, not by silencing dissent, but by absorbing it, by allowing expression without consequence, by converting moral agency into content.”
This, Paris Jeffries said, is our matrix. In the famous movie, Neo, played by Keanu Reves, learns that his life is a simulated reality. He is offered the choice between a blue pill, which will keep him in the simulation, or a red pill, which wakes him up. In today’s world, the blue pill “allows us to celebrate justice without practicing it,” and the red pill is the recognition that participation, sacrifice and repair keep democracy alive.
“Martin Luther King did not ask us to admire him,” Paris Jeffries said. “He asked us to continue to work. The question is not which pill you prefer. The question is what kind of world your choices are quietly sustaining.
Before Paris Jeffries offered attendees the choice between the red and blue pills, UMass honored three members of its community who exemplify the words of MLK with the Dr. John H. Bracy Jr. Leadership Awards. A civil rights activist and academic, Bracey was a founding member of the WEB Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies who, like Du Bois did with his famed 1900 Paris Exposition, use Black history as a counter to the false belief that Black people were inferior to others.
“I think what he showed me is that the power of those (historical) documents lies in what they recorded, which is the essential complex, fully articulated humanity of people of African descent,” said David Swiderski, lecturer and former student of Bracey. “What more powerful weapon against racism, against the system of oppression and exploitation, which depends, fundamentally, as always has, on the dehumanization of people of African descent?”
Gabriel Mesole, a doctoral candidate in environmental and water resources engineering, received the Emerging Leader Award for his work celebrating and uplifting voices from African countries on campus. Felicia Griffin-Fennell accepted the same award for empowering students as director of Remedying Inequity through Student Engagement (RISE). The Transformational Leadership Award went to Wilmore Webley, professor of microbiology, for his leadership inside the university and service translating scientific information regarding viruses and vaccines to marginalized communities.
“Dr King dedicated his life to advancing a more just and equitable society,” UMass Chancellor Javier Reyes said. “But it’s on us, on our shoulders, institutions like UMass Amherst and the community represented here to maintain that place, to fuel it, to ensure that it continues to be transferred from generation to generation, and that the advances that we have accomplished are not denied and don’t change direction.”
