FAMILY MATTERS

 

FAMILY MATTERS

 

"Lately researchers have found a new understanding of wildness in the study of chaotic and complex systems."

James Gleick, Nature's Chaos (1990)

 

At the 26th annual FOR MY PEOPLE AWARDS (Jackson State University, January 14, 2021), Doris Derby,

David Dennis, Sr. and David Dennis, Jr. were honored for their contributions to American history and social action.  I stress American history or narratives of the United States of America, because civil  and human rights are quintessentially American. They are pragmatic struggles to deal with the aberrations of our nation's experiments with democracy.  These struggles do not float about on the margins.  They are the center.

 

The oral histories that were integral parts of the award proceedings focused primarily on the black family as the primal agent in our conduct of everyday life.  The honorees did not disappoint in making an excellent case regarding how family matters.  As we contend with the unholy trinity of pandemic, climate change, and sociopolitical chaos, we ought to be about restoring the primacy of the family, especially the extended family.  Family is neither  hip hop sweet tea nor backside shaking lemonade.  Family is too important to be  brews of whim and fantasy. Those aspects of Afrofuturism that glorify fantasy as fantasy do not serve us well in our  hard struggles to assert dignity, civility, our total humanity. Family matters a thousand times more than constructing future fairytales and dreams that shall never completely materialize.  We are existentially destined to manage actuality and to swim in racialized chaos.

 

We occupy the dark days that James Meredith bid us to acknowledge in A Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America (New York: Atria Books, 2012).  Before any of us can undertake what Meredith called "divine responsibility," we must act in ways that confirm family matters.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 15, 2021

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