The Stand
Activist and media personality Marc Lamont Hill keynote speaker at annual SU celebration
“All power to the imagination” was one of the most popular slogans during the ’60s. On Jan. 31, TV personality Marc Lamont Hill took the oldest members of his audiences down memory lane by stressing the relevance of imagination as this was a recurring subject of the two events that he attended in Syracuse that day.
“We need to strengthen our radical imagination and imagine a world like the one in our dreams,” he told the audience at the first event, adding “We have to imagine a world that is not there yet” at the second one.
As some of his most important influences for this stance Hill cited historian Robin Kelley and educational philosopher Maxine Greene, authors of “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination” and “Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change,” respectively.
Hill spoke on the topic of “Activism and Agency for the Future” at the 31st Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration in the Carrier Dome that Sunday evening. Three hours prior he held a question-and-answer session in Maxwell Auditorium. Both the auditorium and the dome are located on the Syracuse University campus.
Besides covering the theme of imagination, Hill, a political commentator for Cable News Network (CNN) TV channel, talked about love. After being asked by Cherish Cobb why did he work for this channel, Hill responded that he operates in a practice of freedom and love and that it is in the interest of black people not to concede all the public sphere to others.
“Before taking the job at CNN I inquired to myself whether this would reflect love for us as a people,” he said. “I think of love primarily as a verb, not as a noun. Love is what you do to other people.”
He added, “The performance of debate in CNN is not between me and my interlocutor but between me and my audience.”
Hill quoted Dr. King as saying “Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.” To achieve this goal, he said, Hill helped found the non-profit organization My5th, which promotes the education of youth about their legal rights.
In response to a question by Tatiana Williams about the significance of people wearing hoodies to show solidarity with slain African-American teen Trayvon Martin, Hill answered that this was a symbolic gesture. “Symbolic gestures are the hairstyles we display, the clothes we wear, the music we listen,” he said. “But cultural politics must not be confused with concrete politics. Underneath a symbolic gesture there has to be broader action such as a march. A symbolic gesture has to be linked to a broader organization.”
Danielle Reed inquired about Hill’s college life. Hill told her that he had an unusual set of experiences while in college. “I was an organizer, an activist in the black radical tradition of Martin Luther King, Ida B. Wells, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Malcolm X and Assata Shakur, but my activism was not connected to campus,” he added.
Alexis Peña brought up the issue of the current political process regarding the presidential primary elections. Hill warned her: “Don’t let people over determine your choices. We have a host of mediocre candidates who sacrifice long term success for short term gain within a corrupt system based on a free market fundamentalism considered as the final court of appeal and adjudication.”
Then Hill transitioned apparently seamlessly from the intimate environment of an audience of 30 people in the auditorium to a crowd of more than 1,000 people in the cavernous Carrier Dome. Here he said: “Blacks have always been America’s moral consciousness, America’s arbiter of justice. Martin Luther King got where he got by listening to everybody, so we must listen to the voice of the poor and we must not ignore the voice of women neither the voice of the young. We must listen to people regardless of their religious status or immigration status. We shouldn’t have differential values on different lives.”
He returned to the motif of the system.
“We need to challenge the candidates within a corrupt system to do better,” he said. “If you do this in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. Dubois, Angela Davis and others you are going to be alone.” In order to overcome this initial isolation, he suggested following in Dr. King’s footsteps. “Martin Luther King understood the importance of coalition. Have your connections by listen to one another. The simple answer is the one that beats up on poor people; the complicated answer is the one that King sought. You cannot talk Martin Luther King and not talk about acting bravely. The biggest problem in the world today is too many people not doing anything.”
– Article by Miguel Balbuena, The Stand community correspondent; top image provided by Daniel Hinton / TheNewsHouse.com
