At the MLK Day event after the march (see previous post), there were a series of speakers onstage alongside the soft rock, interracial band. The topic of these speakers was that they were lobbying to rename the bridge where Martin Luther King Boulevard goes over Interstate 35 as the J.J. Seabrook Bridge, after J.J. Seabrook, who along with a group of others lobbied for renaming 19th Street as "MLK Boulevard". What the others in this lobbying group did not do, however, is have a fatal heart attack shortly after working for the renaming, almost certainly for unrelated reasons. And apparently, though it comes as a great surprise to me, dying makes you a more moral person than staying alive, even when other actions performed are the same.
I have no problem with the act itself of renaming a street to anything that is not obscene. It's the city's and citizens' business what they want their street signs to read. That is not the issue I have. What I found annoying was the immense self-congratulatory remarks the speakers at this event were making because they were changing the name of a part of a street to a allegedly great African-American leader. One might have thought they were ending racial inequality entirely by the way they were figuratively shaking each other's hands. And all this because of the great 'symbolism' of renaming this bridge. This symbolism, they professed, was to be an important and great accomplishment, something that really matters a great deal.
This is where I feel that a few words about what I think about symbolism should be expressed. Symbolism is most useful in literature, and, to a lesser extent, in other forms of media, to say things in fiction without saying them outright. The primary reasons for this are either to avoid social censure for discussing the actual topic or to convince the reader of something that they might not otherwise accept using an analogy, which is the third most effective form of argument (More on effective arguing at some later date.) And sometimes, writers use symbolism just for fun.
Symbolism in action, however, is, as the title of this post says, a largely masturbatory exercise. What does that mean? It means that it is an activity that has no other result than providing pleasure to oneself. In this way, while the people behind naming the J.J. Seabrook Bridge may feel that they have made a difference, their actions had no practical effects. Will black children with reading problems suddenly have increased literacy when they see the sign for J.J. Seabrook Bridge? Will a racist employer decide to finally hire a black employee once he drives over a road named after a black man? No, these will not happen, and I am not positing that the proponents of these renaming measure would say that these would be the case. Rather, I suspect that they are subscribing to the argument that having a public work named after a black man will inspire black students and allow them to look into the world and see something that is marginally more reflective of their own skin color. Whether or not this argument is valid, it is insufficient to justify the act. This a line from comedian Chris Rock that says that every city has a MLK street and that street is a violent and rundown area. When it comes right down to it, I would rather spend the money it would cost to rename a street toward building a community center (or some-such) for that same neighborhood.
So my position is: Rename the bridge if you want but see it for what it is— an exclusively symbolic and therein, largely masturbatory exercise.
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