{"id":11862,"date":"2017-01-27T18:20:27","date_gmt":"2017-01-28T02:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=11862"},"modified":"2017-02-06T11:31:30","modified_gmt":"2017-02-06T19:31:30","slug":"migrants-kept-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/27\/migrants-kept-coming\/","title":{"rendered":"And the Migrants Kept Coming"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
The Migration Series, Panel 12: The railroad stations were at times so over-packed with people leaving that special guards had to be called in to keep order., 1940\u201341<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cBig weekend,\u201d said the woman. It took me a minute to understand what she was talking about \u2013 it was the Women\u2019s March. Here in Seattle turnout estimates went as high as 175,000 marchers.<\/p>\n

I had no context for her remark. I was at a talk about the artist Jacob Lawrence. There\u2019s an exhibit of Lawrence\u2019s work at the Seattle Art Museum right now. This particular body of work is 60 small paintings which, when displayed together, tell the story of the migration of African American workers out of the south during World War I. In short, floods and parasites had devastated the cotton crop, the War had jacked up the cost of food, and hungry families headed north in search of something better, refugees in their own country. Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, but his parents moved there from the rural south, the work is his story, too, his family\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Friday, I turned off my TV, shut down all my internet connected gadgets, and opened the front door to my house. Through the course of the day, about a dozen people stopped in to sit at my kitchen table, share snacks, and trade stories. It was nice, a Weimar era salon in my kitchen, artists and writers and queers and Jews and Europeans and musicians and even my dog is stray; he chose to hang out with us much of the time.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, I\u2019d been on the streets of Seattle. It had been a good day. I\u2019d attended a pre-March party where we raised several hundred dollars for Planned Parenthood. And then the streets of Seattle filled with joyful protestors of all stripes. Jews in solidarity with Muslims. Men chanting, \u201cHer body, her choice!\u201d The Socialists and a group of sex workers and families with young children. Later, I saw pictures of Native American groups and the Satanists and Black Lives Matter protestors. And of course there were scores of marchers in pink pussyhats, the guerilla symbol of the march.<\/p>\n

And now it was Tuesday. The weekend seemed ages back and I was waiting for a talk about Jacob Lawrence, a black artist whose work was funded by a WPA Federal Artist\u2019s Grant. That same day it was reported that the new President (I don\u2019t use his name) wants to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts.<\/p>\n

The woman who said \u201cBig weekend,\u201d was white, perhaps in her 60s. The other woman at my table was black, maybe the same age, maybe a little older.<\/p>\n

\u201cBig weekend?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe March,\u201d said the white woman, and I snapped into focus.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, yeah, that was something. I was amazed by the crowds. And it turned out to be a nice day, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d said the black woman. She launched into a speech \u2013 it felt like a speech \u2013 about how she\u2019s a black conservative. \u201cPeople assume that because I\u2019m black, I\u2019m liberal, but I\u2019m not, I\u2019m a black conservative. John Lewis? What\u2019s he done for us lately? And marching, well, it\u2019s freedom of speech and people should do that but it\u2019s not going to change anything.\u201d She repeated the term \u201cblack conservative\u201d several times. \u201cI voted,\u201d she said, \u201cmy people fought for the right to vote, but none of the fools on the ballot deserved my vote. And this march, it\u2019s not going to change anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t seem like a good time to get into it. I didn\u2019t have John Lewis\u2019 voting record handy and I was drawing a complete blank on what he had recently led a sit-in on \u2013 it was gun control, I looked it up when I got home. “I try not to assume anything,” I said, and asked her if she’d been in town for the 1999 WTO protests. She’d lived in Seattle a long time.\u00a0 “You’ve seen this before, then,” I asked, and she nodded. The presenters turned the lights down and started the slide show, so we turned our attention to that, and then, we went into the gallery.<\/p>\n

The paint on the Jacob Lawrence panels is thin and dry looking and the panels are small. They have a graphic novel kind of feel to them, like the best way to experience them would be to hold them in your hands and flip through them, one at a time. They\u2019re hung in a row that wraps around the gallery walls, a few of them are stacked two high, but mostly, it\u2019s a single row of these small, dry, graphic paintings with wildly understated captions. One of them says \u201cThere were lynchings.\u201d One says \u201cThey found discrimination in the North; it was a different kind.\u201d I don\u2019t know that I would say they are beautiful, but I did find them deeply affecting, they certainly tell the story Lawrence wanted to tell.<\/p>\n

The women\u2019s march was predominantly white, at least from my point of view. It\u2019s not that there was no color, it\u2019s just that the majority was white. Through the course of my day, I\u2019d say a mere 10 percent of the crowd I saw were people of color, an approximate mirror of my experience in Seattle on a daily basis. And you know what? I\u2019m totally guilty as charged, I do default to thinking most people of color I meet are liberal. With what I know of American history, it is hard for me to imagine anything else. I try not to assume. I fail, often.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t mean I think the left deserves some kind of award for our work; we are clearly not serving our black and brown neighbors the same justice we reserve for ourselves. I have the same problem with Jewish conservatives; I find it shocking that Jared Kushner, an orthodox Jew, thinks it okay to stand in the same room with the man behind Breitbart \u2013 a website that propagates anti-semitism.<\/p>\n

The last panel in the Lawrence series shows a crowded railway platform. There\u2019s luggage on the ground, and brown faces under hats, figures dressed in heavy coats and ties, men and women and children, all of them waiting for the train that\u2019s meant to take them to a better life. \u201cAnd the migrants kept coming,\u201d it says; that is the understated caption for this image that suggests an endless tide of humans seeking a better life.<\/p>\n

Friday \u2013 a week after his swearing in — the President signed an executive order preventing Syrian refugees and those from a handful of other countries from entering the United States. I saw a rumor on Twitter that passengers from those countries were being denied boarding for US bound flights. Saturday night I joined the protestors at the Seattle airport, we stood at the baggage claim shouting “LET THEM IN. LET THEM IN.”<\/p>\n

You should go see the Jacob Lawrence show<\/a> at the Seattle Art Museum. It tells a great American story about change and racism and hope. The work is called The Migration Series and it will give you a lot to think about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jacob Lawrence’s series, The Migration, is at the Seattle Art Museum. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":11863,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-seattle","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11862"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11872,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11862\/revisions\/11872"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}