What's Going On

Fifty-one years ago this week, Marvin Gaye’s brilliant album What’s Going On was released. Electrified by the civil rights battle raging around him and angered by the stories he heard from his brother who had recently returned from Vietnam, Gaye determined to craft an album that spoke to his community’s anger and alienation. The result, a dramatic departure from the typical Motown fare that dominated the nation’s airwaves, was one of the most poignant and influential records of all time. To this day, songs like "What's Going On," "Mercy Mercy Me" and "Inner City Blues," continue to stir listeners and, sadly, convey the unhappy day-to-day reality (changed little over the ensuing fifty-one years) for millions of our nation’s citizens. The recent mass murder of African American shoppers in Buffalo provides yet further evidence of how little has changed in our nation when it comes to race relations and the plight of American minorities. Anyone who expresses surprise that something so evil could take place in this country is merely fooling themselves. Violence (physical, political, economic, cultural, and social) perpetrated against non-whites is as American as it gets. This violence has, as of late assumed a new form as well—a war to control history and what is taught in schools about American race relations and the nation’s often ugly past. Sanitizing history does not negate it, nor does it help our nation heal. As with any problem that must be solved the first step is to acknowledge that a problem exists. Growing up, as I did, in a segregated neighborhood surrounded by white neighbors who freely used disparaging terms to refer to anyone who did not look/act like them, I remember vividly how Marvin Gaye’s songs along with those of Stevie Wonder and others, songs that played all day long on the transistor radios blaring from neighborhood windows or in neighborhood backyards, provided me with the opportunity to shift my perspective and to consider the world around me differently. When coupled with trips across the city, trips that frequently took me into neighborhoods that reflected a very different socio-economic reality than the working-class neighborhood that I grew up in, these songs provided me an education that had largely been kept from me and, I am grateful to report, enabled me to recognize and challenge the narrow mindedness and bigotry that surrounded me. It opened my eyes and ears to the reality around me and these experiences inspired me to want to become an historian and to share what I had learned with others so that, someday, our children and our children’s children might, by acknowledging the wrongs done and trauma caused, find a way for our nation’s racial wounds to heal. That dream seems further off than ever after the events of the last weekend but as Marvin Gaye reminded us fifty-one years ago, we cannot stop asking the question, What’s Going On?