Charlotte City Councilwoman Kimberly Owens is the white moderate Dr. King warned us about.
Last week, with a pinch in her voice and on her visage and employing a tone of righteous indignation, her presentation and demeanor evidence of the distaste and disfavor with which she viewed the discharge of her perceived duty — undertaken in circumstances she herself described as “coercive,” “chaotic,” “undemocratic,” and “destined to create confusion, impede thoughtful decision making, and unfortunately leave the public frustrated” amidst “undue pressure backed by unfair punishment” — Owens, like other white moderates, past and present, who fancy themselves well-meaning, good-hearted, and right-thinking, in the name of a progress the pain and pinch of which they routinely offload onto the most marginalized and vulnerable among us while expressing cheap sentimentalism meant to act as a self-soothing balm and an offer of proof to themselves and others of their fundamental goodness and decency, reputational concerns being never far-removed from the minds of white moderates who, needing to believe deeply in their own enlightenment even as they inflict harm on others, find comfort and satisfaction in the expression of merely symbolic, ultimately empty solidarity with the unwilling targets of their non-consensual beneficence, voted to disrupt, displace, and destroy Black property, homes, and lives.
Charlotte City Councilwoman Kimberly Owens is the white moderate Dr. King warned us about.
As she explained her vote to back the planned expansion of I-77 into the neighborhoods of West Charlotte, Owens, a resident of southeastern Charlotte, tucked away, safe and sound, far from the earth movers and industrial machinery and other implements of so-called progress that will, with her approval, uproot neighborhoods and communities while she insists that destruction is creation, that the infliction of yet more harm will somehow bring healing, that worse is somehow better, said that she intends to “put the residents of West Charlotte first” and that going forward, she would “side with the residents of West Charlotte,” even as, at the very moment she made this promise, she ignored the people and the protests of West Charlotte by voting to bring demolition to their doorsteps, a contradiction that highlights Owens’s failure to understand that this fight isn’t about symbols but geography, the literal land under our feet, and whether the land under the feet of white moderates like Owens, treated as sacrosanct in the suburbs, will remain solid and the homes built upon it safe and secure, while, once again, Black land and Black homes, historically treated as negotiable and disposable on the west side, will not, a dissonance between Owens’s words and deeds that calls to mind the observation made by, among others, James Baldwin: “I can’t believe a word you say because I see what you do.”
Charlotte City Councilwoman Kimberly Owens is the white moderate Dr. King warned us about.
While lamenting the devastating legacy of urban renewal — yesterday’s’s urban renewal, that is — Owens, a Democrat who flipped a Republican seat in the last municipal election, recounted an email she and other members of Council got from a young woman named Addie, a West Charlotte resident and opponent of the interstate project who asked her elected officials, in the face of extortionate threats from the state, “how local government actually works,” Owens, by her actions, answering that local government actually works by bearing witness — false witness, it turns out — to the harms that will be wrought by malignant policy proposals and then acquiescing to the forces and interests pushing for those policies, Owens perversely pledging, in the face of Addie’s plea that Council spare her community from the wrecking ball and Owens’s insistence that the wrecking ball will come, and come at Owens’s behest, that “today my vote is for her.”
Charlotte City Councilwoman Kimberly Owens is the white moderate Dr. King warned us about.
Inviting us to ignore the plain meaning of everyday, ordinary words, Owens, in an attempt to gaslight us while preparing to cast a vote in favor of the interstate project, declared that her support was “not an endorsement; it is an indictment,” a dishonest metaphor, a white moderate’s offer of disingenuous thoughts and prayers, that seeks to obscure Owens’s complicity in today’s urban renewal even as she criticizes yesterday’s, a reminder that white moderates, risk-averse, comity-obsessed collaborationists to the core, will always, through strained calculation and phony compromise, find a reason to stand with the powerful and against the powerless, will always, through surrender mistaken for savviness, find a reason to go along to get along, will always, when forced to choose between order and justice, cast their lot with what is and against what might be since genuine human liberation is always uncertain and contingent and campaigns on its behalf are often messy and raucous, realities that white moderates, who, above all else, prize stability, will not tolerate because, as Dr. King wrote, they “are more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” and “prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
Charlotte City Councilwoman Kimberly Owens is the white moderate Dr. King warned us about.
