The Clapback Mailbag: I Get It From My Mama
Our weekly response to emails, DMs, messages and comments from our readers.
Top 5 Dorothy Harriot sayings of all time:
5. “Don’t let your wooden god or your cornstalk Jesus fool you.”
4. “Time tells a better fortune than a g*psy.”
3. “The world ain’t supposed to be fair. You’re thinking of heaven.”
2. “You ain’t gotta listen to me; life will beat it into you. You’re choosing bruises.”
But of all the life lessons that my mother dispensed, the shortest axiom was perhaps the most valuable. In two words, she explained how to solve every problem the universe could ever pose – from self-doubt to overconfidence, failure and success. Her adage didn’t necessarily provide a one-size-fits-all solution, but it told you where to look to find the problem.
Every Friday, we answer emails, comments, DM from our readers. While we may wax poetic with parables, statistics or stories from history, every response is essentially a version of Dorothy Harriot’s greatest clapback.
“Interrogate yourself.”
She didn’t even need a mailbag.
The article about Dr. King drew a variety of responses from people who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.
The interesting thing about these comments is that they have nothing to do with Dr. King. They are from people who want to selectively weaponize King’s words to further their own agenda.
And, while we valorize King for his civil rights achievements, he didn’t just fight for Black people. He traveled the world to fight for oppressed people around the globe. He was the most prominent anti-war protester of his time. His Poor People’s Campaign called for a “step-by-step plan for wiping out poverty.”
To be fair, there is a good reason why these people don’t know this. When King started speaking out against colonialism, American imperialism and economic inequality, the media said he “diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people.”
These people are still using the white version of Martin Luther King Jr.
In 2019, I got a call from an auctioneer who told me a story. While cleaning out their father’s house, the daughters of Eugene B. Sloan, a South Carolina civil rights journalist from The State newspaper, found a box containing two recordings. One was of a speech their father secretly recorded at a Klan rally planning to kill King. The other was of a previously uncovered speech King made in Charleston, S.C., the next day discussing reparations, poverty, white backlash and why civil rights victories would not solve racism. Fortunately, I had a chance to listen to the recording in its entirety and publish excerpts before it was auctioned off.
It is still not available to the public.
Now, here is the question:
Do you think there isn’t an author, researcher or historian alive who wants to catalog every King speech into one definitive volume or that all of the Big Five publishing houses, every record company and all the streamers just don’t want it to exist? Is it more likely that no one is rich enough to purchase the rights for such a project or that the King estate doesn’t want the money?
I own a copy of every book King ever wrote (technically, there are only three), and while there are collections of his most essential speeches, no one has compiled a collection of everything he ever wrote and said. While I don’t claim to be an expert, here’s a tip:
Whenever I buy a nonfiction book, I also buy the Kindle version for research purposes. So, when I searched King’s digital collections, his writings and his personal letters for the phrase “peaceful protest,” here’s how many times King used the term:
Zero. Nada. Zilch.
In fact, there is only one passage that includes both words in the same sentence:
Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.
— ”Why We Can’t Wait,” Martin Luther King Jr.
The question is not about what King believed.
The real question is: Why are you so cocksure about what white people told you?
Interrogate yourself.
People are still in their feelings about this:
From: Sam
If I called Black people dumb, you’d be upset. Except I can back it up with IQ tests, literacy rates and education data.
Even more interestingly, a lot of people agreed with everything about the article except the “dumb” part. Essentially, they believe that white people are so intelligent that they created a game of 3-D chess that we can never unravel.
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