Dear Gentle Reader(s),
I have to say something. I
have
to. I don't know whether anyone is reading this or not. But I know that
if there's even a remote chance that anyone who has anonymously enjoyed
my quirky blogs about "cute" things, or sexism, horror films, or late
pregnancy loss, dating faux pas, or toxic people, or the awesomeness of
Foo Fighters, then I know that I need to share this, and in a moment it
will be clear why.
There's a guy I know from the film
industry here in London. He seems a gentle soul, intelligent, humorous,
and unmistakably upper middle class in that quirky, weird vintage
sweater-wearing British sort of way. Since working with each other years
ago, we've been Facebook friends. He once made it clear that he enjoyed
vintage clips of the TV show
Soul Train, which I found to be
such a charming trait that for one of his birthdays, I posted one of
these clips on his page - of course, he loved it.
Living
in London has afforded me the luxury of getting to know people whom I
might otherwise not have had the opportunity to even meet - and I don't
just mean that in a literal way; I mean it in a sociopolitical way.
Because I know something about my home country of America that others
like me, from Josephine Baker in the 30s to your average modern day
African American US military person, know:
Europe treats us better.
And just when I think I'm descending into mental dramatics, I remind
myself of how socially segregated my life was in America, even though
I'm the product of an ethnically and religiously mixed family.
Here's
the reality check: I am brown skinned, so in America I am "just black".
Beyond my own high school social group, I can count on one hand the
times I witnessed multicultural groups of adults socializing together,
and beyond my own family, I can count on that same hand the number of
white people I was actually close to or called friends when I lived in
America. My life in the UK is completely different. Sure, here I can
complain that I don't get nearly as much film work as an English Rose
with the same credentials because I don't fit the standard,
BBC-mentored, middle class white girl mould. And yes, that certainly
hurts my pocketbook, but I can say that I have a generally pleasant life here where my social pool is very diverse, and much more importantly I don't fear for my safety like I did back
home. Even in the face of the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan in
2011, I know that in London my class status and gender, the fact that
I'm articulate and pretty by British standards protects me, unlike in
America.
There is a certain emotional discomfort in the
knowledge that my British contemporaries, with their predominant
acceptance of me and belief in my in right to experience social dignity
in daily life, have no idea why I have so much in common with someone
like Trayvon Martin. I know this because I've had countless discussions
with British contemporaries who scoffed at the idea that I might
identify with a disenfranchised underclass, or the possibility that I
know anything about being racially profiled. This place, where average
men become impatient with me for bashfully trying to cover myself in my
bra and underpants when faced with another early waking visitor at a
friend's house because I "
obviously know [I'm] beautiful" is a place full of people who have no idea what it means to be black in America, much less a fat black woman in America.
After the George Zimmerman acquittal I posted a link to the Southern Poverty Law Center's
press statement on my facebook feed. Shortly after posting this link the British friend I mentioned earlier posted a link to a
video
which he clearly thought pertained to me. In it, radio talk show host
Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio (which calls itself the largest and
most popular
philosophy show on the web) proceeds to break down the Zimmerman case quite subjectively. Molyneux reconstructs, and even
reimagines
facts of the incident, cites the worst comparative social statistics
concerning African Americans I've ever heard barring Neo-Nazi sites,
then closes with (and I'm paraphrasing here) urging presumably
intellectual, middle class people to focus on things other than "race" and
"race baiters" because "we" have bigger fish to fry. Without saying
anything more about how this pertains to the first portion of my
thoughts here, I would like to take this moment to present my response
to the poster of this video on Monday, July 15, 2013:
"Sorry, [name withheld], but this is essentially hegemonically
constructed hogwash and I can’t allow it to go unaddressed in my presence. In
fact, I’m just going to put it out there and let the chips fall where they may.
This is the only time I’m going to address this issue and I’m going to make it
count so everyone knows where I stand. I warn you, it’s going to be lengthy,
but this is important. This is my contribution to fighting the good fight so
I’m not going to skimp. A hegemonic, white supremacist framework and its
institutional apparatuses are, as far as I’m concerned, not to be trusted when
it comes to fair and balanced collection and reporting of all of these
*amazing* statistics which your buddy above is using to essentially rationalize
the murder of an unarmed boy and absolve society of any further concern for its
lowest rungs. This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time, and
I’m frankly surprised that you seem to be advocating this sort of thinking. It
has actually been a very long time since anyone has not known better than to
approach me with such a load of drivel – I’m being quite serious. Watching this
man reduce (one of) my ethnic group(s) down to savagery in order to rationalize
or contextualize this Zimmerman crime... God, it’s as if Critical Race Theory
never existed at all, and someone has travelled back through time to find this
rationalizing, pathologizing, asshole.
Part of the very meta-discourse being had in cultural and
critical studies and theory (and this is technically aside from critical race
theory, though there are clearly overlaps) since the late 20th
century covers how cultural and social data have historically been, and
continue to be collected in alignment with, and through the agents of hegemonic
frameworks. So thank you for posting a shining example of that above (not the
meta-discourse, but the hegemonically aligned data) which, by the way, is particularly
ironic since he speaks at the end about people who are selling off “our”
future, starting and sending “us” to wars, putting massive numbers of “people”
in prison for having the wrong “vegetation” on them. So it just escapes this
man that in my country, the majority of people who were actually sent to
Vietnam, the majority of people encouraged to join the military rather than
going to university today, and the majority of people who are sent to prison
for having the wrong “vegetation” on them are working class and poor people of
colour... specifically, black people, who were/are sent up the river because
they were profiled, targeted, slated for mediocrity, and processed with more
zeal, harshness, and at greater rates than their white counterparts, thanks to dehumanizing
rationalizations shakily formed by the dodgy collection of *exactly* the sort
of hogwash data that he peddles throughout most of his video? Seriously, I
didn’t think anyone outside of backwoods, poorly educated, middle America was
into pathologizing the oppressed with such a straight face anymore.
On a personal level I understand, as a person who did not
grow up in an environment of poverty and lack of education, that if someone
like me can be affected and profoundly traumatized by the realities of
institutional racism, and if I know that, via institutional apparatuses, the
odds are stacked against minorities, particularly poor minorities, then I
should be wary of the message of the gatekeeper any time he wants to drag out
the trumped up carcass of black savagery to rationalize a terrible act like
shooting an unarmed boy. This is an old song. You should read some Tim Wise,
Stuart Hall, and perhaps some Homi K. Bhabha, since the endorsement of such a
video as the one above happens to denote a terribly archaic perspective.
Speaking of Tim Wise, amongst so many other reality checks, he
mentioned a few years back that according to a US study released in 2004 “black
and Latino males are three times more likely than white males to have their
cars stopped and searched for drugs –even though white males are four and half
times more likely to actually have drugs on us on the occasion when we are
stopped.” That small statistic is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to
racial profiling, stopping and searching, and the greater goals of maintaining the
prison industrial complex which is overwhelmingly full of black people. The
prison industrial complex generates everything from free labour to manufacture
goods, to prison-based gerrymandering – which, by the way is structured pretty
similarly to counting slaves as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of using them
as constituents while denying them any political voice. This is a business, my
friend, and every business needs personnel to keep running. Why not fast track
potential personnel by sending them straight to prison? Of course if you do it
the way Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. did, you might get done for selling thousands
of kids straight to the prison system, which actually isn’t shocking when you
consider how much more likely black people in the US are to be given the
straight to jail ticket.
In the decades following slavery, multiple generations
of us have been treated as second class citizens, been firebombed (someone
planted a bomb outside a beach house my family was renting one Thanksgiving in
the 90s – the police had to actually disarm it), chased, intimidated, grandfather-claused,
used for medical experimentation without anaesthesia, disenfranchised, marginalized,
shot, beaten to death, and pathologized all by the same system and its agents
which supposedly impartially collect data on us. Yeah, okay, single black
mothers are the *real* problem with “the blacks”. In fact, it’s their problem.
I don’t understand why those “blacks” are such savages, but this obviously has
nothing to do with US. Racism is just... over. Not. The game is rigged and has
been for a long time. Fortunately, as I mentioned earlier the academic sphere
has cottoned onto this reality (if you’ll pardon the pun), though I won’t hold
my breath for any of this to filter into the mainstream consciousness.
But because you saw fit to share this video with me thereby
implying my inclusion as member of the group your boy Molyneux seems to feel
has bigger fish to fry, I’m compelled to share some personal observations and
anecdotes here. Perhaps Molyneux and his contemporaries have bigger fish to fry
because his children won’t EVER be at risk at the hands of fascist police and
crazy nutcases like Zimmerman. Mine will, which is one of the reasons why I
live here rather than the US. Yes in Britain black and Asian men are 30
times more likely than whites to get stopped and searched, but at least I
probably won’t have to worry as much about some neighbour PROFILING, STALKING,
SHOOTING and MURDERING my future son one day. Only people who will never have
to worry about such a fate for their children are loath to admit that this is a
serious problem. It actually speaks to a degree of acceptance within in your
culture, [name withheld], that you would even consider sharing this video with me and
believe that it applies.
But wait, there’s more. Let’s break down Racial Identity in
America 101: George Zimmerman’s ethnic background holds little to no
significance to how he is identified and self-identifies in daily life. In a
society where skin colour has traditionally represented, and been legislated as
currency and rights to social privileges, and is the predominant means of
identifying and categorizing people, having very light skin makes a person
essentially “white” in the eyes of a majority of citizens, including those
charged with the responsibility of upholding and enforcing laws. Conversely,
having dark skin makes a person essentially “black” to said majority. The
social signifiers attached to colour in my country are deeply ingrained and
very negative for those who fall along the darker lines of the spectrum. Note
the confusion and hurt experienced by many dark immigrants who arrive into
America and suddenly realize that they’re being called, and treated as black
when they’re not from Africa and don’t consider themselves to be black –
surprise! Colorism is a bitch and it is very real. Racial profiling wouldn’t be
such a huge problem if this weren’t the case. Even as a person who grew up
upper middle class, presumably with all the hallmarks of class privilege, I
have had the opportunity to experience first-hand how racial profiling works in
America. One of the major reasons I moved out of my country was because I got
tired of suffering through racism and racial profiling as part of my pedestrian
life. Let me share a few anecdotes.
My maternal grandmother used to take me everywhere with her
when I was a little girl. My grand was European and very pale, and I am brown,
which amounted to stares and comments (often nasty) when we went out. For many,
it was an impossibility that we should, or could be related simply based upon
our skin colours, though in all other physical features I very much resemble
the women on her side of the family – in the eyes of many strangers it was okay
to stare at and ostracize a grandmother and her little granddaughter. This may
not seem like much to others, but for a small child, it’s terrifying and
demoralizing overall. In fact, the first time in my life when my grandmother
and I were not stared at or commented on was when she came to visit me here in
London in 2005.
My father, who is African American, a consultant level
physician with his own practice, and a past president of a state medical
association was stopped by police in his BMW while on his way back from seeing
patients at a hospital one night. He was wearing a shirt and tie, had a
stethoscope around his neck and his lab coat in the back seat. He was stopped
for no apparent reason and repeatedly questioned about where he got his car.
Eventually, they reduced themselves to repeatedly asking if he had STOLEN his
car, even though it had to have been clear that he was a doctor. In the end,
they were forced to let him go, but he was lucky to have made it away from
there without getting his skull bashed in or run into jail on some sort of
trumped up charges, considering the reputation of the county he was driving
through. From my father to men like Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr and
actor LeVar Burton, this sort of harassment happens routinely and most consider
themselves lucky if they escape these incidents unharmed. Imagine your own
father having to deal with living this way his whole life no matter what his
class, how successful, what his credentials were, or how much money he had.
Imagine yourself having to live this way. Imagine your son having to live this
way. Really, try to imagine it.
In another experience, I once watched as my ex-husband was
taken out of our flat in his pajamas AT GUN POINT, handcuffed, and held at gun
point as a “suspect” in a robbery, because the police arrived at the wrong address.
What robber have you ever heard of who would be willing to answer someone
else’s door in striped Polo pajamas? We were truly in fear for his life because
these police looked positively poised to use their guns at a moment’s notice,
and had a reputation in that city for having used deadly force on hundreds of
unarmed, innocent people. In this same city, my ex and I were repeatedly
stopped by police without explanation while driving through neighbourhoods, including
our own, where we apparently didn’t ‘seem’ to belong. Racial profiling isn’t
just something that police do in ‘drug ridden ghettos’. And obviously, it isn’t
just police.
In another incident, my ex and I once had a volatile, noisy,
alcoholic neighbour whom the management couldn’t manage to legally evict. We pleaded
with our building management to move us to a different apartment, which they
agreed to when one became available. Later, the executive building manager, in
an attempt to distract from promises to move us, started talking about not
feeling she could trust us because of “that black guy down the hall who does
drugs and doesn’t pay his rent on time”. She was actually attempting, based
upon skin colour, to link us with the poor behaviour of a total stranger with
whom we had nothing in common. We were at this person’s mercy and her extreme
prejudice. Never mind that we’d lived in that building for over two years,
never mind their promises to move us; suddenly, we had simply become like that
black drug user who never pays rent because it was more convenient to intimidate us
and let us move away than to prepare a new flat. Incredibly demoralizing. This
same woman’s associate also offered us another apartment in another building at
one point. Imagine our shock and dismay when our “viewing” amounted to being
shown a flat in a dilapidated building all the way across town in a ghetto.
I have had two incidents where I sat with a group of friends
in restaurants and literally been ignored by the staff as other patrons arrived,
were served, and went. Once we waited to be served for nearly two hours in a
restaurant which actually had a reputation for refusing service to African
Americans, but we were young uni students on a road trip, were hungry, and
there was nowhere else in the area open after 9:30 pm, so we just waited. And
waited, and waited. And after the 100th attempt to flag down a
waiter or waitress, a waitress stopped at our table with a sour look and simply
asked, “What?”
I can’t count the number of times I have been followed
around high end department stores and shops (sometimes by black or Hispanic
security guards, by the way) as if I were going to steal something – never mind
that I was always well dressed, well spoken and that I could afford to shop at
these establishments – I was still automatically a potential thief because of
my colour.
I can’t count the number of very well qualified people I
know who have had to shorten or change their names for their CVs just to be
granted job interviews because their names sounded “too African American”. I’ve
had friends and family walk through my parents’ neighbourhood and not long
after, we’d get neighbours calling to “make sure” those people were associated
with us, otherwise the police might be called. In fact, I was almost abducted
by a strange man in a car at dusk in my parents’ neighbourhood while walking one
of our dogs, and I knocked on a neighbour’s door to get to safety and the
gentleman wouldn’t open the door, speak with me, or even call the police.
Later, at a neighbourhood association meeting this neighbour claimed not to
know who I was and therefore didn’t feel “safe” helping me. To him I was just
some ‘suspicious black’ knocking on his door at dusk, even though I clearly
identified myself, my address, my name, and my parents’ names, asked him to
phone the police, and explained the situation at hand –I’d been in tears, as a
strange man first tried to blind me with his headlights, then cut off his
lights totally and slowly followed me down the road before quickly speeding
away. None of that mattered to the man behind the door. All he saw was that
someone black was at his door and he had no intention of helping. The reality
is that the majority of the (very few) crimes in that neighbourhood have been
committed by white criminals, but for this gentleman, my skin colour meant that
I was suspicious, and my skin colour even trumped my gender (which was
presumably why I was targeted by the man in the car).
I have an African American friend who was hit in a head-on
collision by a pair of drunk drivers (who happened to be white) and was asked
by the police repeatedly what SHE was doing, driving around that neighbourhood
at 8 at night. The drunks weren’t even taken to jail, though they were deeply
intoxicated. I have hundreds of these stories not from the trenches of “the
ghetto” but from middle class life. This is life in America, where a person
like me has to be concerned with personal safety in an environment where I am
automatically assumed to be the suspect. And I’m not even male.
The situation becomes even further complicated by
intra-racism and colourism. Not unlike India, where dark skin is bad, ugly, and
automatically takes on a signifier of low class and criminal potential, people
of colour in America don’t exist in a bubble where we haven’t internalized
institutionalized racism and colourism. Hegemonic victims can and do become its
agents very often. There are self hating minorities all over the place. And why
shouldn’t there be, when they’re given a pretty consistent message that they’re
nothing in society? It’s no more difficult to understand than the case of
people in Britain who move up in class, then reign hatred down on lower class
people because they’re trying to escape being painted with the same brush. But
what about those who don’t ever escape? What do we supposed happens to their
internalized racism? This might be a bit complicated and inconvenient to those
who enjoy reducing racism to the use of offensive words and KKK hoods, but it’s
a real phenomenon, is employed in pedestrian life, and is an extension of a
larger hegemonic framework.
Consequently, anyone who believes that the average person
like George Zimmerman, regardless of his controlled dealings with black people,
or even his own ancestry wasn’t making assumptions about Trayvon Martin based
upon skin colour is living in a fantasy land influenced by the greater hegemonic
framework. At the end of the day, people are complex and internalize racism in
all sorts of ways. George Zimmerman’s alleged volunteer work with ‘young
blacks’ doesn’t negate his aggressive and racist Myspace messages in 2006
slamming random Mexicans he saw crossing the road for potentially being “gangsters”
or “gangbangers” –yes, he’s technically Hispanic and this is how he views
Mexicans. That explains a lot for those who wish to excuse a racist motive from
Zimmerman’s actions. Trayvon Martin’s alleged 3.7 grade point average or his
drug use is irrelevant. Sensational statistics about how terribly black people
treat their children are irrelevant. What is relevant, when a citizen – a minor
no less - is not investigated, known, or observed engaging in clear criminal
activity but profiled automatically as a suspect by another citizen, is raising
questions on how the person doing the profiling came to such a conclusion, and
if we should continue to give creative license for citizens to act as judge,
jury and executioner with other citizens based upon skin colour. Given how common
racial profiling is, it isn’t whining or race baiting to admit that if Trayvon
Martin had been white – given all the same background and history - George
Zimmerman likely wouldn’t have profiled him at all and he might still be alive.
Dragging Trayvon Martin’s character through a fine strainer and finding dubious
activities does not negate the fact that Zimmerman had no idea who Trayvon
Martin was. Given Zimmerman’s qualifier for sighting a ‘suspicious’ individual,
he could easily have been profiling one of my younger cousins – any one of my
incredibly bright and gifted male cousins who happens to inhabit a tall, brown
body. Even though my cousins, being nerds, aren’t known for being particularly
tough I can imagine that any one of them would have attempted to defend themselves
against a stranger who took it upon himself to follow and aggressively interact
with them. One of the many ways a hegemonic, white supremacist framework
succeeds at crazy-making is by denying that being young, black, and male is a cultural
signifier or code for potential criminal, and putting the onus on its victims
to prove it so in an environment where all the odds of believability are
automatically stacked against them because they’re not respected members of
society to begin with. Rendering subjugated people crazy by pathologizing them;
calling them delusional and paranoid in the face of what is actually real makes
it easy for hegemony to propagate and carry on, business as usual. The fact
that the President of the United States made an acknowledgement of widespread
problems of racial profiling, racially motivated aggression and violence by coded
language; that had he had a son, he would have looked like Trayvon Martin,
should tell you something.
Whether or not it is legally binding, it is a bad idea and a
clear act of aggression and of racial profiling to decide that someone you
don’t think ‘belongs’ in your neighbourhood should be followed and questioned
as you carry a your *gun* when dispatchers tell you that you don’t need to do
such a thing. I don’t care how anybody wraps it up in twisting facts, presumed
intentions, dodgy backgrounds, and what was within Zimmerman’s legal right to
do – he thought he was going to take down a big, black, criminal but instead he
got a scared kid who was willing to fight his way out of the situation, and so
Zimmerman MURDERED him. And guess what? He got away with MURDER. They actually
said that Trayvon Martin “weaponized” the sidewalk. That is amazing and really
presents a new low. Zimmerman wasn’t the first in my country to kill a black boy
in a murder which was the culmination of his personal suspicions, and I’m sure
he won’t be the last.
This isn’t philosophical for me, this isn’t just theoretical
for me, this is real. Me, my husband (who’s English and white, by the way) and
our close friends, particularly in the US, who stand any chance of raising black
boys have taken time to discuss and strategize on how to keep our children safe
not just from bullies, or drugs, but from fascist police who are willing to use
deadly force as an automatic measure, psychos like Zimmerman or Michael David
Dunn, and a justice system which insures that men like them get to “stand
[their] ground” against an unarmed, teenage boys with whom they pick fights and
murder.
It’s obvious by his dismissive tone and use of insider/outsider
language towards the end of his diatribe, Molyneux absolves himself of all
responsibility after presenting a case for the perpetuation of internalized
violence in the so-called black community and that is his prerogative, though
again, it’s a cheap trick to inject this discussion of profiling and rights
with the familiar ink of ‘black on black’ violence. But what I really have a
problem with is the use of “I” then being transferred into “we” and “we” transferring
into “society”. The problem with the
“I’m/we’re not responsible” argument is that it makes “I” or “we” (one’s contemporaries) synonymous with
“society” and then muffles legitimate discourses on institutional racism and
the functional, practical apparatuses of hegemony to spotlight skirmishes over
who is an individual racist and who isn’t. Consequently, the much needed
discourse about how to reduce structural racism is ignored, the reality of white
privilege is ignored, and economic and educational stratification are ignored. Molyneux,
never having been on the receiving end of prolonged racial profiling and racist
verbal abuse and experiencing racism’s psychologically debilitating effects
(like I have), and being confident that society belongs to him and his, now
positions himself into the privileged spot of basically claiming that the
social failings of people of colour as a group aren’t society’s problem to
solve, since “we” aren’t racist, and black people have created these terrible
problems all on their own.
When Molyneux speaks about what “we” need to do, he isn’t
speaking to me, because I have grave concerns about where structural and social
racism are going and how people of colour have and may continue to internalize
racism. I am a person of colour, so this affects me and goes way beyond whether
I live in a mansion, a ghetto, or in the hipster central of East London. Maybe
it’s because I have one foot in the subjugated camp and one in the privileged camp,
but I say this IS society’s problem; society created these problems and helps
to perpetuate these problems. It’s amazing how society gets drawn into it when it
concerns young white men who freak out and suddenly shoot and kill dozens of innocent
people, but somehow, a society which has had African Americans as slaves longer
than it has had African Americans as free people, isn’t responsible for the
creation and perpetuation of social ills playing out in the lowest economic
rungs of society which happen to be mostly black (clearly by design, by the
way). The double standard is staggering. Again, this affects me, people I care
about a great deal, and lots people I don’t even know and will never meet, so
please don’t post any more of this garbage on my Facebook posts. This man’s
video clearly isn’t addressing me, no matter how acceptable and pleasant a
black person you find me to be."
That
was my response, friends, because I'll not sit idly by and allow anyone
in my presence to endorse propaganda shamelessly debasing the direct
descendants of the population responsible for physically building
the United States brick-by-brick in chains for free; the
population responsible for launching a civil rights
movement so powerful that it has inspired the world community; the
population which boasts intellectuals, professors, artists, musicians,
doctors, attorneys, scientists, and business people produced with
talent, brilliance, hard work, and tenacity with no white privilege or
legacy privilege to rely upon. Emmit Till, Rosa Parks, MLK, and Malcolm X
might be symbols of the fight, but countless other unnamed black
Americans, in all their glory, fought and continue to fight this
spectacular fight against stacked odds and against those who benefit
from a hegemony which rationalizes the terrible treatment of blacks
while allowing those who succeed as exceptions to their general view of
black people as savages. I will double dog dare anyone to assume that it
is okay to come to me with such nonsense. At the end of the day it
isn't enough for me to be tolerated or accepted, live away from home in a place where my future
children will be less likely to encounter crazies like Zimmerman and
therefore avoid suffering great personal loss, like Sybrina Fulton,
Trayvon Martin's mother, did. I need to know that wherever I go,
wherever my future children go, wherever we all go, we
will be afforded all the privileges of first class citizenry in any
lands on which we set foot, but especially in the land we toiled over
and bled on. Until that day comes, I will not be complacent, I will not
be silent, I will fight for what is right.
