LEWISTON, Maine — William Jelani Cobb, a staff writer for The New Yorker and director of the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut, was the keynote speaker Monday for Bates College’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day program.
This year’s program focused on mass incarceration and black citizenship. Cobb’s address, “The Half Life of Freedom,” was delivered in the college’s Peter J. Gomes Chapel and focused on the point that American history cannot be understood without understanding racism.
Cobb pointed to the creation of the state of Maine as a result of an effort to ensure an equal number of “slave” states and free states, and the conflict surrounding the Alamo as largely a result of Americans ignoring Mexico’s prohibition of slaves when the country offered free land to grow cotton.
Even a first draft of the Declaration of Independence included Thomas Jefferson’s denunciation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Cobb said, “although that doesn’t make it into the final version.”
“Every Fourth of July as we recognize the nation’s independence, we also recognize the anniversary of black humanity being copy-edited out of the final document,” Cobb said.
Turning to present-day America, Cobb said the “elation” that followed the election of Barack Obama as the country’s first African-American president, and subsequent comments about a “post-racial society” were followed by “seeds of regression” including the deaths of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and others, as well as the April 2015 massacre of nine African Americans at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, among others.
Cobb spoke of remarks made by Dylann Roof, the man charged with the murders of nine people in the Charleston church.
“He says explicitly that he is trying to reinstate the old order of the South,” Cobb said of Roof. “This is a person who has looked at the devalued currency of whiteness and is attempting to resurrect the old order .. more specifically, he says that he is making sure he protects white women from black men.”
It was in this vein that Cobb touched on the controversy around comments by Gov. Paul LePage made during a Jan. 6 meeting in Bridgton, in which LePage spoke of out-of-state drug dealers impregnating “young, white” girls in Maine.
Those comments, Cobb said, stem from the same trope about protecting white women from black men.
“I’m not saying the governor thinks the same thing as Dylann Roof thinks,” Cobb said. “What I am saying is that we should be disturbed that these ideas share the same provenance, that they come from the same place, that we should be concerned about what these ideas have been used to justify.”
Cobb said that instead of despairing over such challenges, he turns to King’s famed comment after the Selma to Montgomery March: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”