note on injustice

 

ANOTHER NOTE ON INJUSTICE

 

Virgil Tibbs, the protagonist in the film "In the Heat of the Night"(1967), is remote from Fred Daniels, the main character in Richard Wright's novel The Man Who Lived Underground (2021).I paraphrase one of Julia Wright's observations about her father's book in a May 25 zoom session from Arkansas.  It is not a protest novel; it is literature.  Likewise, the film is not protest cinema; it is visual art, visual narrative.  This is an assertion that Americans of no-color devoutly refuse to honor. They do not want to leave Plato's allegorical cave. Quel domage.

 

We might marvel, as Countee Cullen long ago marveled about poetry.  Despite their individual differences, Daniels and Tibbs suffer in common the indignities manufactured by American society even in the 21st-century. Officers of the law irrationally assume African American women and men are innately criminal.  They must be severely policed.

 

Genuine art is a warning among other things. It exposes  the smelly vulgarity of the majority of our nation's population, the dedicated will perpetrate social injustice.  I have an amusing vision of where all of this will end.  Americans of no-color will ultimately become what Lot's wife became. Happy day, oh happy day, when  God-ordained salty justice finally arrives. It matters not that none of us will see that happy day. We can be content with vision.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 26, 2021

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