Dear [Black Hero]
In Nic Stone’s challenging ‘Dear Martin,’ Justyce McAllister helps make sense of his complex life by starting a project in which he addresses letters to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Justyce uses the opportunity to examine his own behavior and how the world reacts to him, the color of his skin, his academic and social statuses, and whether he must do what is expected or follow an entirely different path that was never set out for him.
Stone’s book teaches many lessons, but also offers an invitation to start our own Dear Martin projects addressed to anyone from whom we could learn about the world. This year, for Black History Month, I’m doing my own version of a “Dear Martin” project wherein I’m studying major works from black artists and thinkers, and addressing letters to them with how their lessons are alive in my life today.
As a white man, I must examine what my intention is with regurgitating the experiences of black lives into my own. So I’ll be very clear: my intention is to show others (probably mostly of my own race) that some of these lessons are immediately applicable to lives that look different from their authors, to work through some of my own personal shit that I’m dealing with, and to give Nic at least a teeny bit of due PR.
It would be gross for me to make a cent off of this project which is why it’s here on Medium and not on any of the publications I routinely work with. No publication in 2018 should pay for or host “What This White Dude Learned From Black People,” so I’m putting it here on this platform.
This page will be routinely updated with the Dear [Black Hero] letters as they are completed. I expect to write five in total. But we’ll see!
Please feel free to excoriate me on Twitter.