At the time, 2012, it was an odd decision to return home to work; most foreign correspondents in Istanbul had begun covering the war in Syria, and the refugees fleeing over the Turkish border, which from the position of Istanbul, and Europe, still seemed very far away. I remembered the refugees I had seen in Greece; so many of them, I knew, had for years gotten to Greece through three major refugee routes that passed through North Africa, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and then Turkey. There, many went to an area in Istanbul nicknamed Somali Stand-Up Street to find a smuggler who would get them to Greece. Istanbul had long been a transit hub, and I had always wanted to write about the refugees. But I had never been to Syria, and I was no expert on the Arab Spring, and I had begun to lose my belief that I was qualified to cover a region I knew little about. So when I read that a black doctor in Mississippi named Dr. Aaron Shirley was arguing that Americans should consider adopting a health care system pioneered in Iran, I went home to cover the country I thought I knew.
In the United States then, the financial crisis, to some degree, had prompted self-examination: Occupy Wall Street denounced the One Percent; the concept of gross inequality evolved from a leftist preoccupation to undeniable fact. Soon the French economist Thomas Piketty would question the very nature of capitalism and his book would become a bestseller. But the old American habits returned, too: white people hated the black president, the occupation in Afghanistan continued while the defunct one in Iraq was bearing new terrorist groups, drones detached from human emotion or responsibility continued to seek out their targets in Yemen and Pakistan. Guantánamo Bay was open. Obama’s efforts to reform health care earned him the epithet “Socialist,” and the American conservatives I knew had begun believing the man himself was a conspiracy against the country. Something in America wasn’t working: you could feel it in the dread vibrating in newscasters’ faces, and in the president’s deepening, self-protective cool. But Mississippi wasn’t part of this fast-changing world; in Mississippi, not much had changed at all.
The historian John Dittmer once wrote in his book about the civil rights movement that the state of Mississippi was “the standard by which this nation’s commitment to social justice would be measured.” He wrote that in a book about a time when words like “social justice” were used more frequently, when the United States, both at home and abroad, still aspired to fulfill the myths of its perfect modernity, when the Turks still told American visitors they loved America. John Dittmer said that Mississippi would be the standard by which Americans’ commitment to social justice would be measured in a book about a bloody but hopeful time.
It was then, too, that James Baldwin debated William F. Buckley at Cambridge. The topic of the 1965 debate was: “Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?” In 2009, when I watched it, I wondered whether a related question couldn’t still be asked: Was the American dream at the expense of the world? “From a very literal point of view,” Baldwin says in the beautiful, grainy video; he is small in stature, and proud, and surrounded by admiring British boys, while William F. Buckley looks on with his nose pointed to heaven. “The harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country—the economy, especially in the South—could not conceivably be what they are if it had not been, and this is still so, for cheap labor.”
His voice became stronger. “I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else’s whip—for nothing. For nothing.”
In that spirit, did it not mean that as a white American, I ran the plantations, and I owned the slaves, and I lashed the whip—for everything? For everything?
Dittmer’s concept of “social justice,” Baldwin’s beautiful accusation—these statements, questions, and assumptions seemed comparatively so innocent, language from a time swept away long ago. To go to Mississippi and to read about the civil rights movement again—to speak to people who still carried with them the language and spirit of that time, no matter how downtrodden they felt—was to realize that those violent years had actually been more progressive than our own. When I went to Mississippi, it was clear not only that the United States’ standard of commitment to social justice had declined, but that the larger forces of political corruption, economic decline, and indifference had made it impossible for social justice to exist. As the author Ta-Nehisi Coates would write some years later, back then African Americans aspired to the dream, but today they know that it was built on their backs.
Dr. Aaron Shirley’s belief that Americans needed to look to Iran to solve their health care crisis wasn’t meant to be some heartwarming act of innovative international diplomacy. His plan—which never went very far—was, like Coates’s pessimism, a middle finger to the system, an acknowledgment of hopelessness. But most remarkable to my eyes was that Dr. Shirley’s idea reversed the logic of American modernization theory: here was the United States asking a so-called developing country for help, and not any third-world country, but Iran, the country that spurned America’s destructive embrace with the greatest and most lasting force.
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DR. SHIRLEY was a rabble-rouser, an old civil rights–era hero who for a long time was the only black pediatrician to see black patients in Mississippi, the type of activist who, in the 1960s, wasn’t necessarily of the “nonviolent persuasion.” At that time, black people were killed and houses were bombed regularly, and policemen were the ones doing the killing and the bombing. Upon hearing that the local KKK was headed to his home to kill him, Dr. Shirley would warn the police department that each of his four children knew how to shoot and all of them were ready.