After Such Knowledge?

By the time of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King I had some awareness of the terrible injustice of slavery in America and its protracted aftermath, through the Civil Rights movement. I was twelve in 1968 and I'm guessing now that consciousness of such matters had come to me in the two years prior to that, since I can't remember my younger self reacting in a particularly visceral manner to any story of injustice prior to this - though, of course, there would have been plenty. I was thinking of this today in relation to the current growth in our collective consciousness in relation to racial injustice in the U.S. (and elsewhere) - though I should qualify that by noting that this more particularly appertains to a growth of such consciousness outside the black community.

It's telling how the spate of video evidence of police brutality towards black people in the U.S. over the past few years, and especially the last two or so, has helped foster an understanding that such brutality has been and is more routine than those distant from it, like myself, ever really were able to accept. I don't mean I ever doubted the reality in any deep way, but the lived reality sort of remained beyond comprehension somehow. And still does, I suppose, since this is not a threat that I've ever faced or had to deal with.

This came home to me with special force yesterday when I was reading a piece on Open Culture relating to the great Miles Davis being beaten by the cops in New York at the time of the recording of Kind of Blue. I don't think I'd come across the particular story before, but I had some awareness that Miles had had his fair share of run-ins with the boys in blue, as had probably every black jazz musician of note in that era. Despite knowing this, and feeling an appropriate sense of anger at the gross injustice involved in all this, somehow I'd never felt quite as outraged as I did reading of this assault. I'm guessing that it's my recent sort of enhanced knowledge of what really takes place all too often on the streets that led to this intensity of feeling. And it gave me that bit more understanding of what drives so many on the streets to protest.