Good Neighbors
This is a speech I delivered as part of the United Parish in Brookline’s “Who is My Neighbor” series. United Parish in Brookline is in no way responsible for the content of the speech.
Hello, good neighbors. As introduced earlier, I am Raul Fernandez. Among many past and present roles, I come to you also as the chair of Brookline for Racial Justice & Equity.
Thanks to Kent & Amy for inviting me to be here with you today, and thanks for all the work you do as a congregation — especially in support of queer and trans inclusion and reparations.
I must say, mine is a secular family. For my part, that may be because of my family’s lack of consensus on the matter. My father’s mother being Catholic and his father being a Jehovah’s Witness and my mother’s family being Pentecostal.
Actually, for one year, as kids, my parents sent my sister and I with our neighbor, Ms. Carvalho, who everyone called Grandma, to an all-Black church in Harlem. I don’t remember much, except the people were kind and never made us feel out of place.
While I live a secular life today, there is one religious figure whose words have had a tremendous impact on my life and work: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It’s his Letter from Birmingham Jail that I want to revisit with you today. It’s been 60 years since he penned that letter, and it still resonates. Especially here in Brookline, where too many elected leaders talk about the need to really listen to one another but turn a deaf ear to the issue of racism in their own community.
Now, King is someone all of us grow up learning about. As kids, his soaring oratory and message of nonviolent resistance was drilled into us at least every February during Black History Month. The idea that we should judge someone by the content of their character not the color of their skin seemed particularly important for educators to instill in us.
But, of course, those were not the only teachings that King left behind for us. There’s a different lesson from King that I want to discuss with you today.
It was actually at an early age, in elementary school, that I was first confronted with the differing views of King and his message — it was a school assembly for MLK Day. Our teacher asked us to put together a skit, which included a rap that one of my friends wrote, and I still remember it! At least part of it. Here it goes:
Martin Luther King was a very good man. He wanted to do what you and I can. He fought for Civil Rights and equality, so that all Black people could be treated equally.
Good, huh? Well, that’s how he originally wrote it.
The only reason that’s stuck in my memory, other than it being so catchy, is that I also remember our teacher telling him to make an edit. My teacher, who was white, explained to my friend, who was Black, that MLK wanted all people to be treated equally, not just Black people. And, I remember, even being just a kid, that there was something off about that.
And so, reluctantly, my friend made the edit, and did his rap at the assembly:
Martin Luther King was a very good man. He wanted to do what you and I can. He fought for Civil Rights and equality, so that all people could be treated equally.
You could actually see on his face that his heart wasn’t in it. He wasn’t excited like he was when he first wrote it. And it just sounded off.
You see, he wanted to say something about the unique struggle of Black people in America, and his teacher, not by mandate or coercion, but through innate power, marginalized that important statement.
That was the first time that I was confronted with the idea that King’s message landed differently for different people. That there were different readings of King based on our different positionalities. And that some people’s readings may lead to the oppression of others.
Over time, I, developed my own reading of King. It wasn’t his I Have a Dream or To the Mountaintop speeches that spoke to me — although they’re pretty good.
No. It was what is sometimes called the “Radical King” best read through that Letter from Birmingham Jail. Written in April of 1963 as King sat in jail for participating in a protest march which a judge just days before had made illegal.
As King sat in jail, he received a copy of a newspaper which included “A Call for Unity” — a letter written by local white ministers decrying King’s tactics, calling them “unwise and untimely.”
Letter from Birmingham Jail was King’s response, and it was fire.
The letter is probably best known for the phrase, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” which he uses to assert his own responsibility and ours to act in the name of justice regardless of who we are or where it occurs.
Yet, some of his strongest, but somehow more forgotten, words were reserved for what he called the “white moderate,” writing,
I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
Throughout the letter, he repeatedly calls for more urgency and involvement in the fight for freedom and rejects the notion that all will be well in time. One more excerpt:
It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.
What we hear in this letter is a King who is frustrated by those who sit on the sidelines while others suffer injustice, and worse, criticize the way they rebel against it. Especially, otherwise good people.
I’ve thought about that a lot. That notion of what it means to be good.
I was abroad once in conversation with a deeply religious person who asked how I decide what to do if I don’t have a higher power to guide me, and I responded, I do what I think is right. And I thought that was a really good answer at the time.
What I didn’t know then is that what we think is right is so powerfully guided by our positionality. That is, the collection of identities we hold and the experiences we have had that shape our view of the world and the people and events around us. It’s why some of people view the those who stormed the US Capitol as traitors and others view them as patriots.
Whether religious or non-religious, there is some part of all of us that believes ourselves to be good people, regardless of what we do. And, in places like Brookline, long celebrated as liberal, that is where this phenomenon is exacerbated.
I, a good person, was for marriage equality while others were debating civil unions.
I, a good person, was a climate activist even before An Inconvenient Truth came out.
I, a good person, have donated to worthy causes and personally helped people in need.
Therefore, I, a good person, would know if there was a problem with systemic racism in my community, in our police department, in our schools, in access to housing, in our government, in the very laws that this Town is governed by. And I would do something, urgently, to stop it.
What King knew in writing his letter is that for centuries people who believed themselves to be good passed and defended laws that created a racist hegemony that still exists today.
Some grant dispensation to those offenders, those founding fathers, including enslavers, saying they were people of their time.
But the enslavers weren’t the only people of their time. So, too, were the millions of enslaved Black people. They, too, were of their time. They dissented. They rebelled. And those who believed themselves to be good used their power, including deadly force, in an attempt to silence them.
Racism was as wrong and morally repugnant then as it is today. And, thankfully, there were enough people with privilege who knew it and did something about it. But they risked so much more than we seem willing to today in the name of justice.
They laid their own lives on the line to help free enslaved people and did so again during Jim Crow to ensure that their descendants were extended the civil rights that were due to them.
But perhaps it is because of those abolitionists, because of those freedom riders, because of the Kennedy brothers that we in the north feel so superior when the question of racism arises. Why what is called segregation in the south, we more softly call racial imbalance here in the north.
Perhaps it is that legacy which has given so many Brookline residents the false impression that race problems exist elsewhere but not here. At least, not really.
Even as Brookline, a town whose residents benefitted from the slave trade and redlining, sheds its Black population. From just 3% of Brookline residents in 2010 to a mere 2.5% of residents in the most recent census. This should be an outrage. But is it?
Here we are, in the now seemingly distant wake of the racial reckoning after the murders of George Floyd and so many others.
Our work on policing taken as far as our elected leaders would allow it to go. Yawning gaps in educational outcomes persisting for kids of color in our schools. A town budget that has lots to say about parks and roads (thankfully) but virtually nothing to say about racism and poverty. And a complete lack of urgency to do better.
One final story.
April of 2022 was my last full month as a Select Board member. It was in the final meeting of that month that the Select Board passed my plan for utility debt relief for Brookline residents.
The plan was to use federal ARPA funding to eliminate more than $600,000 in gas and electric utility debt for more than 1,000 Brookline households. Debt that had accrued since the onset of COVID and which had hit modest income families the hardest. It was passed, critically, one month before the moratorium on utility shutoffs was set to end. This was a lifeline to these families and the need and urgency to meet that need were made clear and the funding was there, and I got the votes to do it.
But, here we are, one year and three months later, and the bureaucracy of our Town of good people still hasn’t gotten those checks out. Although I’m told, once again, that it should be any day now.
This heartless lack of urgency should be an embarrassment to all of us.
To the Select Board, who voted and walked away. To the government, that failed to prioritize getting these monies out quickly. And, to us — the good people of the Town of Brookline. Most of us who live in relative comfort. With little or manageable debt. And certainly without fear of our utilities being cut off.
We good people failed to hold our government accountable for meeting the needs of those who need it most. And I have seen it time and time again.
So, what would King think of Brookline and our lawn signs?
Those that say Black Lives Matter and that Immigrants and Refugees are Welcome Here in a town where the people those signs refer to can hardly afford to live here? Would we, too, be the subject of his criticism. I think so. I hope so.
But there is a way forward, and it must be centered on four active commitments: acknowledgement, accountability, remediation, and reparations.
Acknowledgment that systemic racism is real and pervasive in our community. Accountability for our own role in perpetuating racism through our actions or inactions. Remediation through the implementation of racially just policies and practices. And, making reparations for past harms, with a commitment to never allow them to be repeated.
And, as King said, this work must happen urgently.
I’m proud to chair Brookline for Racial Justice & Equity, a multi-racial organization whose mission is to eliminate racism in Brookline by building an informed, motivated, and organized constituency for racial justice, and leveraging our collective power to reshape the systems around us.
Our board is more than two-thirds people of color and about one-third white. We are focused on durable policy change and whole-community accountability. And mostly, we recognize as King wrote in his letter that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
It may sometimes feel like the window of change has closed, but we cannot wait for the next shocking murder, the next racial reckoning to move this work of ending racism forward. We have to hold our government accountable not just for passing laws but enacting them, and prioritizing the distribution of our abundant resources to those who need them most.
This listless local government, this supine State Legislature. They must be pushed to action.
And we, good people, we must act with the urgency of someone whose freedom is under eminent threat. Because there are those among us for whom there is no other choice.
With gratitude for the invite to be here and for all you already do, I call upon you, good neighbors, to redouble your efforts and join us in this work.
Thank you.
