I missed the opportunity to say something about the passing of Jesse Jackson, who died last week at the age of 84. Jackson was a childhood hero of mine, and my point of entry into politics. I was fifteen when he gave his famous speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, was electrified by it, and went on to become a card-carrying member of the Rainbow Coalition.

I no longer have the card, but I re-read Jackson’s speech the other day, and can say in all candor that card or not, I’m still a member.

Photo credit: Warren K Leffler, public domain

Jackson was a transitional figure between the civil rights movement of the MLK era and the present, with its brief periods of hope and its eventual decline into the miasma of MAGA and Trump. And so he was, in many ways, the grandfather of the DEI-inspired “wokism” that’s nowadays so heavily derided and under attack. But if you study its origins with an open mind, its rationale becomes clear.

I grew up in a suburban Jersey town, West Orange, that was for all intents and purposes a Jim Crow town, and in many ways, still is. I grew up in fact as the “nigger” of my neighborhood–people actually called me that–but in some ways the sad thing is that they called me that for lack of anyone else to play the role. There were by design no African Americans in the St Cloud district of West Orange where I lived, and there wasn’t a single African American student in the local elementary school I attended for my K-6 years, either, between 1974 and 1981. I don’t just mean there were no African American students in any of my classes; there were none in the whole school. There were no African American teachers, either, and just one African American student-teacher that I remember. So I was by default the South Asian “Nigger of St Cloud.” If ever you want a portrait of moral impoverishment, hold that picture in mind.

That was the world Jackson understood and called on us to resist, and the rise of MAGA demonstrates that no matter what nostrums anyone invokes today about the great racial progress “we’ve made,” it was never quite defeated. It lay dormant for lack of the vigilance to resist it. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” as Thomas Jefferson, the slaveowner, supposedly said. It was, I think, Jesse Jackson who actually practiced it. That’s what I think of when I think of the man and what I owe him. I owe my own sense of vigilance to him. And by practicing it as he did, I make my modest contribution to its preservation, whether for eternity or for however long we’ve got left.