Simply put, the Day of Apology has been an absolute disaster for Macon. The majority of the day's failure simply has to do with the fact that Macon's not really as great of a leader of the masses as he believes himself to be. What he's been doing throughout the entire Day of Apology is going out expecting the world of his followers with expectations high as the moon, ultimately having to conclude with, "I was wrong to think that you've got what it takes to change. Forget apologizing. It'll only make things worse." Macon's definitely beginning to lose faith in his followers by the end of this major event because he wanted and expected "erudite, die-for-the-cause radicals." What he got instead were moderates of the cause, and he honestly has no idea how to speak to them.
Macon is decidedly on the far end of the bell-curve, and he thrives there. His radicalism and strive to be different are what make him a good leader to those who are passionate about his cause because he brims with confidence about what he's doing. People who aren't hellbent on Macon's agenda, however, are easily disturbed by his personality and methods or are simply following him for the wrong reasons. This is largely why the media picked up on him, he made a very good story. Unfortunately for him, with his appearance on television, his target audience seems to have gone from very niche to very widespread, and his radical ideology isn't really tailored to that crowd.
Macon is really counting on his followers people to use their own brains on the Day of Apology instead of blindly following him to the letter, which ironically enough, is largely what he's been doing with previous civil rights leaders. "Malcolm never said what black people's response should be when white folks started apologizing." He forms a lot of his own ideas, but for the most part, he just set the Day of Apology in motion and hoped it would go in roughly the right direction, not wanting to craft it to his agenda at all. Whether this is laziness on his part of just a massive level overconfidence in his followers, I can't really tell. He really just wanted people to begin thinking about day-to-day racial issues within the context of the modern day and instead got violent and somewhat misguided riots in the streets with no real enlightenment occurring for either party involved. To me, Macon's hard fall definitely seems to be inevitable.
I think Macon didn't really give instructions for the day of apology as he wanted people to come up with their own apologies after reflecting on their lives. He seems to think, and I agree, that race is very fundamental in pretty much every interaction between black and white people in that time and especially after the LA riots. He knows people have done things that they probably don't want to think about, or at least haven't done things that they could have done if they actually wanted to further the cause that they "sided" with. Either way, Macon thinks his followers will have enough sense to do the right thing, but people that follow the mob mentality, generally aren't going to be the ones that self-reflect on their lives very often.
ReplyDeleteI think that he did want people to come up with sort of personal apologies, but this didn't work out at all. Macon is very aware and knowledgeable about white privilege and its effects, but the truth is that most people in his new audience aren't; many are pretty ignorant about race and white privilege. This sort of makes it harder for them to look at their own lives and immediately find something that white privilege has helped them with and apologize for it, none of that would be that obvious to them, and I think that's a big part of why the apologies largely fail.
DeleteI think something that's really interesting that you brought up here is the question of is Macon actually a good leader. It seems to me as though there are two ways you can interpret the failure of the day of apology depending on your perspective on if Macon is a good leader. If you do believe that Macon is a bad leader you can attribute it's failure to the orchestrator of the entire day. Now if you do say Macon is a good leader, then that would seem to imply that the issue of race is impossible to solve well no matter how good of a leader you are, and also seeming to imply that whatever "failures" there were following the civil rights movement were not due to the leaders, but rather due to the nature of race relations in America. I'm not quite sure if this is what Mansbach was going for but it's an interesting perspective.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest Macon doesn't really show any leadership through the Day of Apology. Rather he comes up with the idea, and then just lets it loose into the public. Granted he announces a formal Day of Apology, but other than that Macon doesn't do anything in order to set up the Day of Apology. Despite his lack of involvement, people look to Macon for leadership, and he fails.
ReplyDeleteI think the whole situation is indicative of Macon's naivety, or at least his self-centered focus. Macon specifically wishes to be the leader of a movement, and therefore wants to receive as much attention as possible. This leads to him making compulsive statements, such as with the Day of Apology, but failing to follow through as a leader in any meaningful way.
DeleteEven calling it "overconfidence in his followers" seems like a stretch to me. Macon toes a line between serious critical interrogation of privilege and a mischievous desire to shake things up throughout, and there are indications that he doesn't necessarily expect any widespread reconciliation or obviously positive/harmonious outcome to follow from the Day of Apology. He seems fine with the idea that some apologists will get beat up, maybe robbed, likely humiliated. There's this vague sense that it would be "good for them," to shock them out of their complacency. There seems to be no master plan at work--just a rather adolescent impulse to chuck this volatile hand-grenade of white guilt onto the streets of NY and see what happens (and then to run away and hide when it explodes).
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