From Skittles to Stereos

We've all rolled up at a red light or in a parking lot next to someone who seems to have a blatant disregard for his or her long-term ability to hear. We've all rolled our eyes and muttered under our breaths, asking if it's really necessary for that person's music to be loud enough to make our cars vibrate. We've all written it off as a momentary frustration in the course of our days, and maybe sped a little to get away from the jerk with the loud music before the next red light.

Michael Dunn is not like most of us. When Michael Dunn thought that Jordan Davis and his friends were playing their music too loudly when both parties were stopped at a gas station, his solution to this problem was to confront them. He approached the car that contained Davis and his friends, and an argument ensued. Dunn felt "threatened" during this argument, which, remember, came about after he went out of his way to approach and confront these boys, and decided to rectify his feeling threatened by pulling out a gun and firing 8 or 9 shots into the teens' SUV, collecting his girlfriend from inside the gas station, and driving off. When he was later apprehended by police in his home, he claimed that he "didn't think he'd hurt anybody" and had just been "trying to scare them off."

1) Warning shots AREN'T A THING. This isn't the Wild West. You aren't a police officer. 2) Even if warning shots were a thing, I believe that by definition, to be a warning shot, you must not be shooting horizontally at a target in front of you. 3) 8 or 9 shots "to scare them off"? Fired INTO THEIR CAR?!? This is actually the worst defense story I have ever heard concocted. This man murdered a 17 year old black boy in cold blood at a gas station in front of three of his friends because their music was too loud. He walked away from his car with a gun in his pocket to confront a car full of minors about loud music and riddled one with bullets because HE felt threatened. 

Maybe this is a horrible thing to say, but I want this to be a bigger deal than Trayvon Martin's death. Both are absolute tragedies. Both exemplify why so-called "Stand Your Ground" laws have got to go. I firmly believe that George Zimmerman's decision to leave his house to chase Trayvon in his car and then hunt him on foot to confront him completely and totally eradicates any right he had to defend himself using deadly force, but no one knows what actually happened in their scuffle after George cornered Trayvon. There is a tiny tiny speck of reasonable doubt. There is NONE in this case. How could Jordan threaten Dunn's life FROM INSIDE HIS CAR?! No sane person in the world can tell me that emptying one's clip into someone else's car is an appropriate means by which to "scare someone off." You just can't. Dunn started this confrontation and ended Jordan Davis's life long before it escalated into anything physical breaking out between the two parties. He has shown a bone-chilling level of disregard for this young black man's life and property. 

It doesn't lend itself to photos and protests as easily, but Twitter says to turn the music up for Jordan. But beware--like wearing a hoodie makes you suspicious, playing loud music can evidently be construed as justifying homicide. I hope the mass media picks up on this. If not, the country might as well be saying, "Oh well, sorry, we can only rally behind the unjust killing of one dark-skinned boy in a 365-day period. Y'all will just have to wait. Don't worry, we know it'll happen again soon."  

David Banner knows what's up

I'll admit that I only know his popular music, but David Banner was definitely not on my list of rappers I'd call socially conscious. Thus, I was surprised and impressed when I stumbled upon this on Colorlines:

This made me cry

Since Zimmerman's arrest 7 weeks after Martin's death, we are finally on the road to something we've come to call "justice". But that word seems so thoroughly inadequate. A world where things like this can happen and no one cares for so long and mothers have to feel this way about their sons and five year old boys ask heartbreaking questions should never be called "just". Where is the justice in these kinds of fears?

Reblogged from ChoosingPancakes

Disliking hip-hop doesn’t make you a racist any more than liking hip-hop makes you not a racist, and I’m sure there are plenty of Stormfront enthusiasts with Rick Ross in their iTunes. If you don’t like Jay-Z because you just don’t like the way he sounds, or you’re sick of his cloying ubiquity, or you wish he’d talk about something other than where he’s from for five seconds—hey, I’m not mad, I don’t like Bruce Springsteen for the same reasons. But if you don’t like rap music—a genre that contains multitudes—because of a self-satisfied moralism, or because you’re scared of it, or because you wish those people would stop talking about their problems and get out of your television and radio and kids’ bedrooms: well.
And I’m not just talking about the American right, I’m talking about all the well-meaning white folks who’ve told me how they want to like Lil Wayne but lo, the misogyny, the violence, the drugs. But, but, I’ll say: Bob Dylan aced misogyny; the Rolling Stones sang about violence; the Velvet Underground knew their way around some drugs. Yeeeah, but it’s different, they’ll say, elongating that “yeah” with conspiratorial inflection: you know what I mean. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
Rap music doesn’t get unarmed kids shot to death, “it’s different” does. “It’s different” infuses “these assholes always get away” and gives solace to people who hear that sound bite and nod their empty heads in agreement. “It’s different” is the same logic that suggests a teenager’s skin color combined with the music he listened to means he had it coming, and it’s the same logic that lets a bunch of people feign outrage over a teenager’s use of the n-word to describe himself when they’re really just outraged that he beat them to the punch.
“It’s different” makes me shake with anger because it turns music into a dog-whistle to justify the murder of a kid who doesn’t seem all that “different” from me was when I was his age, not that different at all. I liked Skittles and hoodies and weed, too. And yeah, I’m white and never worried about getting shot for any of it, which is only the most loathsome excuse for not identifying with someone that I can possibly think of.

--Jack Hamilton, “America Is Dying Slowly: Talking About Hip-Hop After Trayvon Martin”

(via ChoosingPancakes)

Gorgeous socially concsious Black men. Yes.

#angryblackgirl

This is the hashtag that best describes my life and attitudes with regards to what is going on in America right now and for the forseeable future. 

A fellow Black Princetonian (DD) asked me last Monday night how I was feeling. I responded, "I feel..like I wanna blow something up. Like I wanna fight somebody." He put down his soda and gave me a fist bump, saying "Yesssss. If someone punches you in the face, you don't go and run to the administration saying, 'Excuse me, can you do something about this?' You punch them right back." 

Another hashtag that I have used recently and will likely continue to use in the near future is #Ishouldabeenablackpanther. My hashtags are not unrelated. It has taken me so long to write this post because earlier in the week, I was tense and shouting and shaking with anger. Anything I wrote would have boiled down to FUCK ALL OF THE PEOPLE, EVERYONE, I CAN'T EVEN FUCK WITH THE WORLD RIGHT NOW, and that's not what I want to say. 

This conversation with DD happened minutes after leaving a Black Student Union meeting at which we discussed (1) the racist comments left on a Daily Princetonian article my friend MJ, a Black sophomore, wrote about the application process for Creative Writing courses (a commenter called her a "whiny black girl" and from there all hell broke loose), (2) the small-scale protest we as the Black Princetonian community launched against the Sanford PD's failure to prosecute George Zimmerman:

What looks like a Black Power fist is actually me fixing my glasses, but I kind of wish it were an intentional Black Power fist, because that would be pretty baller. I'ma call it a subconscious act of resistance.

and (3), the unfair arrest of fellow Black Princetonian Mandela Sheaffer, '13, who while home on Spring Break was thrown into county jail for "obstruction of justice" when visiting a White friend at home in Ohio over Spring Break. I'm not going to post about the details, because it's an open case, but nothing in the vibe that I get from him as a person suggests that anything in the police report is factual. We all collectively smell something fishy, even if you don't want to toss around terms like "racial profiling" all willy-nilly. 


In the time since that meeting, my friend MH discovered this lovely message scrawled across the map in an elevator in our student center:

Let's let this serve as the fourth piece of evidence in the claims I will make in this post.


I'm sick and tired of fronting like progress is being made and everything is gonna be okay. It's fucking pouring outside, and I'm not expecting to see a rainbow after the storm.

I feel like no matter which way I turn, I see my people under attack in this country. In this particular post, I'm talking about my people as (young) Black people, but similar things could be said about women as my people, or people who don't identify as straight as my people, or the [lower sections of the] 99% as my people. 

Granted, I was 11, but I don't think I actually feared as much for the state of my life as I know it after the September 11th attacks as I do now. I'm actually afraid that I'm coming of age in a country where my views, opinions, and rights simply don't matter to anyone in charge AND it's uncouth to even suggest that that might be the case. I'm so over this post-everything era. I want to be able to talk about racism and sexism and classism and homophobia and cissism, etc. in public spaces. I want to be able to say that I. don't. feel. safe. and not be looked at like I'm paranoid or insane. 

Hold on. Let me not just put that into the atmosphere with no context. One of the things that has stuck out the most to me with everything that's going on with #TrayvonMartin and the conversations I've had with friends about the case is the degree to which racism operates in sexist and classist ways. I have never had an unfairly negative encounter with a police officer, though I was raised to try to handle things without their interference. I can walk around campus at 4 am and never feel like one of the campus safety officers is going to stop me and ask to see my ID, which I know has happened to various Black male students on this campus. Trayvon's hoodie had nothing to do with his death, but it honestly felt weird to wear my hood up on my hoodie, and it took me quite some time to figure out what to do with my hair on Monday to even make wearing the hood up feasible--if the "hoodie" (which Trayvon wasn't actually wearing when Zimmerman began following him, let us remember) is part of what makes young Black men suspicious, then I'll never be that. I have been told that my ... self can be intimidating, which hurts, but that's a rarity in my experience, rather than a frequent occurrence in the lives of Black men I have spoken to about this. Similarly, I can count on one hand finger the number of times I've been made to feel like I don't belong in an integrated academic space, like I have to prove that myself and my ideas are worthy of my professor, preceptor, and/or classmates' time, and while that is undoubtedly related to the fact that I'm a Sociology major with a certificate in African-American studies and a bunch of Gender and Sexuality Studies classes under my belt, and while I hate trying to map systems of oppression onto any sort of hierarchical scale, I just don't feel as directly persecuted as young Black men are in today's society. 

And I know that it's not only cases of young Black men meeting unjust ends that get ignored by the mass media. I know about Rekia Boyd, and that cases like hers aren't rarities. And so maybe this is where class (or the fact that generally speaking, I've never hung out with large numbers of Black people publicly outside of this campus) comes in, but I've just never ever been made to feel like my life is in danger in a racialized situation. The closest I've ever come to this is probably this little gas station my family stopped at in this little town with giant crosses on the sides of the buildings when we were on our way to Ithaca, NY when I was college visiting. I was oblivious to anything going on at the time, but my mother and grandmother told me that three muscular White men were staring at our car the entire time we were there, and that the cashier refused to take my mother's money out of her hand, but rather made her put it down on the counter and pick her own change up off the counter.


Regardless of all of that, I feel like we've regressed into a system where talking about "Black" issues means talking about the issues pertaining to Black men, and talking about "women's" issues means talking about the issues of liberal White women of at least some financial and/or educational means. (Did we ever actually grow out of this system? I'm finding it hard these days to reconcile my conceptualization of the world as shaped through the literature I'm exposed to in my classes and the blogs/news sources I read and the actual reality of the situation to people who aren't sociologists and/or race/gender scholars.) The only "big" stories about Black women I can remember existing in the past few years are all OMG BLACK WOMEN AREN'T GETTING MARRIED WTF IS WRONG WITH THEM WHAT SHOULD THEY DO?! and we're going to table that discussion for the purposes of this post. 


Trayvon Martin's death hurts me. It is my issue. It is the issue of decent human beings everywhere. And I don't use hormonal birth control, but it and abortion are my issues, not even as a woman, but as a sexual being. I don't see stories in the media about people like me, but at the same time, I see these stories and can't help but see myself or my brother or someone in my heart. Humanity is in my heart. 


I'm getting off subject. The point I want to make here is that I'm hurt and upset by...basically everything that's going on in our country right now. I'm hurt by action, by inaction, and by responses to both. I'm outraged, and I'm even further outraged that people are outraged about my outrage, and I don't give a fuck if that makes me sound like an #angryblackgirl, because that's what I am right now.

But I want to harness that anger. I can write a blog post and wear a hoodie and help to write an open letter, but none of these things feel like active resistance. I'm sick of low-level resistance. It's not working for me anymore. 

One of the things that came up at the BSU meeting last week was that more Princetonians would have participated in Martin Monday if they'd known about it. So I'm toying with the idea of creating a like, Social Justice at Princeton Facebook page. It would be one place for every person or group with a cause to find other people who care, even if that issue isn't particular to their defined community. The first step to resistance must be the creation of an army, yes?   

Let us remember the name of the perpetrators, too, not just of the victims.

When I look at Trayvon Martin, I see my "baby" brother, who turns 17 next month. I'm almost positive he has that same red Hollister shirt the press shows Trey wearing. My brother likes to wear hoodies instead of coats. My brother walks to his part-time job at McDonald's sometimes, and what is preventing some racist motherfucker with a history of violence like Zimmerman from thinking he looks suspicious, or like he doesn't belong? It sounds to me like these "stand your ground" laws give anyone the right to take the law into their own hands in a dangerous situation--evidently even one where you could have not gotten involved in the situation. I can't live comfortably in a world where grown-ass 200 pound White men can *murder*--let's call this what it is--skinny Black high school kids. This is just too close to home. And it's not the only case of its kind recently. I NEED people to understand that this is not an isolated incident of one crazy man. It's not even the first such incident in that county in recent years. 

There were no eyewitnesses, and the police don't seem to regard the police calls from nearby residents in which you can hear Trayvon's bloodcurdling screams for help as sufficient evidence. No one saw can't be justification for injustice. Our judicial system exists to bear witness to that which no one witnessed. We must be the voice for those whose voices have been taken away, but progress can't happen if we remember only the victims. Remember both of their names.

Excerpts from one of the best posts I've seen about #TravyonMartin

"How do we make sense of the senseless?

 "If this were 1912 and not 2012, we would call a Black man killed by a one-man firing squad with no just cause what it is: a lynching. These days, we search for euphemisms. Self-defense. That feels so inadequate. I mean, whose selves really need defending if it is Black selves--primarily Black male selves--that keep being murdered?

"How does it feel to be a problem? It feels like gunshots, unheard screams, and a lonely, violent death.

"When scholars talk about a school-to-prison pipeline, they are not simply talking about the ways that systematic lack of educational access sets up Black people for a stint in the criminal justice system. They are also pointing to the fact that the very logic of public schools is designed to discipline Americans into a certain model of  citizenship, one that helps us to believe in the propaganda of equal rights that we are taught in our social studies classes, while obscuring the systematic inequalities that are on gratuitous display through the treatment of children of color, students with disabilities, and poor students.

"I have zero-tolerance for a justice system that deputizes overzealous white men and vests them with the power to be judge, jury, and executioner, under the trumped up guise of self-defense . If this community fails to prosecute George Zimmerman, their silence, their acquiescence, their approval will constitute an official sanctioning of his course of action.

"Even with eyewitness testimony, the police seemed incapable of seeing Trayvon as the victim. Young Black men are always the aggressors, right? Not the gun-toting white guy, who weighed 100 pounds more than Trayvon. Not the self-styled neighborhood vigilante with a documented disrespect for law enforcement. Nope. Just the Black kid, whose skin is (perceived as) a weapon.

"Trayvon’s skin, not his actions, not his character, made him a criminal. Blackness always looks suspicious. Whiteness always looks safe.

"In this post-most-racial moment*, we must seriously re-evaluate this narrative of linear historical progress that we are beholden to. No, Black men don’t routinely find themselves hanging from trees. But that might be less an evidence of progress and more an evidence of white racial adaptation. “Racial patterns [will always] adapt in ways that maintain white dominance.” – Father of Critical Race Theory Prof. Derrick Bell’s famous maxim echoes in my ears.

"Trayvon is Black. And that matters when whiteness is the sine qua non of the American legal system, when possession of a white skin is the prerequisite for justice. And it is precisely because of this deep-seated association of white skin with property, that George Zimmerman felt he had the right to “patrol” his neighborhood for interlopers and outsiders. It is not coincidental that Black men are routinely profiled for looking suspicious in nice neighborhoods “because they don’t belong there.” The battle over who belongs in neighborhoods– even though Trayvon’s step-mother lived there!—is just a modern site for a long-standing warfare over white racial entitlement to control land and every thing that moves on that land."

 --The ever-eloquent crunktastic, in this post

Post-racial is the dirtiest word I know.

I cannot, in fact, think of a single word with the same factual inaccuracy and potential to do great harm. 

When we were out visiting other eating clubs on Saturday night, something we rarely do, KS and I saw no less than three Black-female-White-male couples dancing and making out. This prompted KS to comment on our "post-racial" society. I wanted to slap him upside the head and remind him that the caramel color of our skin serves as a legacy to the history of such interactions in our family trees and communities more broadly, but that's too serious a conversation for the club, so I just rolled my eyes and reminded him that I'd fucked a White guy too, but that didn't mean I thought we as a society or me as a person were "over" race.

I didn't need a reminder as to why I don't think we're there yet (and have little faith, really, that we'll ever GET there), but the news gave me one anyway, in the form of Trayvon Martin.

Trayvon Martin was a 17 year old high school junior. Trey, as he was known by family and friends, was visiting his father and stepmother in a gated community in Orlando, Florida, two weeks ago. During halftime of the basketball game he'd been watching with his father, he decided to walk to the local convenience store to pick up some snacks. On his way back to his dad's house, he was spotted by George Zimmerman, a 28-year old White man serving as the Captain of the Neighborhood Watch in this gated community. Zimmerman found the sight of a young Black man walking alone through his neighborhood--never mind the fact that this young Black man was his neighbor's SON--so "suspicious" and threatening that he called 911 to report the activity and jumped into his SUV to follow Trey. The 911 dispatcher told Zimmerman to stand down and let the police handle the situation from there. Zimmerman had other ideas, though. He confronted Trey, who supposedly gave Zimmerman a bloody nose during their altercation, and fatally shot him in the chest using the black Kie Tek 9 millimeter semi-automatic pistol he was carrying.  The medical examiner found only Skittles, Arizona Iced Tea, and $22 in Trey's pockets, but Zimmerman is claiming self-defense, and the authorities seem to believe him, because more than two weeks have passed, and no. charges. have. been. filed. against. Zimmerman.

I'm going to say that again. This White civilian--a Neighborhood Watch captain--thought a young Black kid "looked suspicious" as he walked down the street, so he shot him dead in the middle of the street on a Sunday evening and is getting away with it.

 [Excuse me while I control my tears and rage, as I'm at work right now.]

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

Lynch (v.): The practice of inflicting summary punishment upon an offender, by a self-constituted court armed with no legal authority; it is now limited to the summary execution of one charged with some flagrant offence.

Show me one person who says this was not a modern-day lynching and I'll show you a goddamned liar. A community watchman has no. fucking. authority. to. murder. a. teenage. boy. But the police aren't filing charges against this man--who directly defied their orders and KILLED A MINOR. Show me one person who says race doesn't matter anymore, and I'll show you someone who is deaf, dumb, and blind. Trey was a KID. He was walking down the street with Skittles and iced tea. And just being in that neighborhood--where his father LIVES--was an offense worthy of taking his life. My father used to live in a gated community in Fort Lauderdale. If I were a boy--because, don't forget, racism and sexism can never be fully separated, and Black men supposedly present more of a "threat" to White society with their very existence than do Black women--could I have been Trey Martin? The story Trayvon Martin's mother is telling now is the same story told by Emmett Till's mother, by the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives of the nearly 3,500 Black Americans who were lynched in the US between 1882 and 1968, and by the families of contemporary LGBT persons who have been killed by mob violence for their existence as non-heterosexual beings. 

This is vigilante violence. This is MURDER and no one is doing anything. This is Jim Crow. This is sexualized racism and racialized sexism. The lack of response from the police and the mass media? That's institutionalization. This is literally not being safe in one's own body. This is oppression. This is hatred. This is why I do not fault my friend OO for telling me he needed a break from all the White people. Tell me race doesn't matter, or that people don't need to be afraid. I DARE you.

*drops mic, walks away*

[Meanwhile, on a smaller scale, Tumblr is threatening to take down Dumb Things White People Say for being "abusive" and "harassing," while the vast majority of the blogs spewing White supremacist bullshit that DTWPS posts screenshots of have been defended by the Tumblr administrators as free speech. And click here to see what some White person evidently thinks I'm learning in my African-American studies classes (I don't want this picture staring back at me for a week on my page). I'm done.]