What King Really Meant and Means to Me as a Black American Expatriate
It is still January 15th,2024 in my homeland USA so allow me to say a few words to commemorate the 1929 birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a Black American expatriate living in Botswana, Ethiopia, Mauritius Namibia, and South Africa. I do so not as one who has rejected my nationality, as many Black expatriates have chosen to do. Actually, I am a proud American whose historically oppressed and degraded people have more than earned our citizen rights; one whose enslaved and ex-enslaved ancestors contributed to building and defended our country with floods of our tears and rivers of our blood . The national constitutional freedoms instilled in me since childhood have given me the boldness to stand for justice and thus peace wherever I have laid my head, beginning with critiquing the dehumanizing gap between the rhetoric of democracy and the derogatory names I am still called when I rarely these days venture to home America.
This is why some of you have noticed how my usual polite demeanour changes course quite quickly when you put me in a box as an American or as a westerner being either or both ignorant or indifferent to the fact that I am a Black not just an American as if to imply I am a member of the historically dominating White class. I am part of America which contributed to building the nation from the bottom up not from the top down. Through cleaning toilets rather than chairing corporate suites and being beat up by cops and lynched by mobs rather than being protected by law enforcement and court rulings. I come from that sector where education and health are much more daily struggles than the average, as is having a decent equal pay job and a home without a leaky roof with running water and lights turned on rather than off.
Yes, even though I am an upper middle class thought leader with a global identity and profile, educated and employed among some of the most elite universities in the world I am still restricted by the negative social implications of my skin color and racialized male gender in both my private and public life. I will always have less power than a white male infant though never will I allow that fact of life hold me down or hold me back as a tireless warrior for justice and thus peace wherever I am.
This is what Martin Luther King Jr was and symbolized for me. The
paradoxical stance of being born in the greatest democracy in the world
rooted in norms rejecting you with your lifelong determination to make
those norms practices of inclusive justice for everyone no matter who or
what you are. Being willing to live in that paradox wherever you are
and spend your days and nights struggling against the midwife inequities
until for everyone everywhere is OK in terms of dignity and integrity.
In my modest opinion, what King stood for is what we all should become
and be as human beings no matter our nationality, ancestry, color,
gender, religion, or socioeconomic status.
It is why by the time
King met death he was evolving into more than an American, more than a
Black man, more than a Christian, becoming a human being concerned with
the challenges facing humanity and the need to overcome them through us
caring and loving each other, fighting for the dignity of all not just
some or just my little clan. And why can’t you and I do the same,
change, evolve, and thus come to put down our weapons of hatred and
division and pick up the olive branch of justice and thus peace we so
desperately need today wherever we are, whoever we are?
John Huston Stanfield
Faith and Justice
ASARPI
Mauritius
January 16th, 15th in USA