Inside the mind of a kind of quirky, pretty stubborn, way too opinionated, twenty-something, heteroflexible Black female newly employed up-and-moved-to-DC Princeton GRADUATE who's just trying to sort out her life. An uninhibited celebration of all that is me, this blog is an exercise in self-discovery and live-with-your-heart-wide-open-ness. Though I make respect a habit, I will not always be politically correct, and I believe in the power of making audiences uncomfortable to inspire change.
"If we actually started calling bullying what it is and address it as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, fat phobia, and classism, it would actually give children a better way to deal with the very same power dynamics they will face as adults, while also giving adults more responsibility to challenge the intolerance that is rooted within our society overall."
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.]
"I am past the point where I have any patience for people telling me how I should feel about how black women are presented in the media. Especially people who have never walked a moment, much less a mile in the shoes of black women in America. And before someone decides to break out the face paint & do a documentary? Let me tell you right now that a day or a week or even a month in makeup won’t touch what it’s like to hear from birth that you are worth less than every body else because of you hair, your skin, your culture, your history, & your gender. You know, all those things that make you human? Yeah, the message we get is that we’re not really human. We’re beasts, we’re Mammy, we’re bedwarmers, we’re everything under the Sun but people who are valued & valuable. Well, we’re valuable when we can be exploited by someone else, but pearl clutching ensues when we want to profit from our own labor.
Black women have a reputation for being strong that is sometimes helpful & sometimes harmful. We do our best to survive everything that gets thrown at us. We fight the messages, we teach our kids to fight the messages, but it is 2011 & I am still seeing books, movies, TV shows, & articles lauded for explaining exactly how much less we are worth than everyone else. We can’t even tell our own stories without having to argue over whether or not we’re qualified to speak. If we’re silent others speak at top volume until we are rendered down to Mammy, Jezebel, or Sapphire with no room for reality. When we do speak up suddenly we are too loud, too angry, too confrontational, simply too much. Even when we whisper, we are doing it wrong, but trust & believe we will be heard whether anyone else likes it or not. We are women. We are black. We will not stop speaking for ourselves. Get used to it or get the fuck out of our way."
I wanted to blog about these ads last week, but didn't know how to type STEREOTYPICAL, RACIST, and CULTURALLY INSENSITIVE in large enough letters. Or how to convey that I'm fucking sick and tired of women being told that their bodies aren't good enough at every damn turn. SUMMER'S EVE, YOU ARE CREATING A PROBLEM HERE TO INCREASE YOUR REVENUE (and exacerbating lots of other problems in the process). So much shaking my goddamn head here.
But that's just me whining. Colbert did something so much better than whine. He launched a counter-attack [though I must say that the fact that simply making a very similar ad tailored to men reveals the ridiculous nature of the situation just goes to show how accustomed we've become to women's bodies being problematized in the media...]:
One of the biggest tangible changes being an African-American studies certificate pursuer has made in my life is my like, newfound...let's say "objection" to Martin Luther King Day as a holiday, as part of a larger...yeah, I think we can actually say "disgust" with the commonplace representations of the Civil Rights Movement in contemporary American classrooms and homes. I hate being lied to, particularly by authority figures. I hate the images of Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln that are portrayed to young children everywhere. I hate when culture tries to rewrite history to make it more convenient. And similar to all these hatreds, I hate that America puts MLK up on a pedestal without addressing any of the flaws in his strategies and ideologies. Now don't get me wrong; Martin Luther King was an incredible man who did phenomenal things for black people in this country, and who tried to do similarly phenomenal things for poor people. There was a time when I would have said that I owe my very lifestyle to him; but that kind of statement, and the mindset it reflects, is exactly what pisses me off so much about this holiday. I owe my lifestyle to the Civil Rights Movement, fact, but while culture elected King as the Movement's face, there are so many other people who made contributions just as--if not more, in light of the fact that I am a black WOMAN--relevant and effective on my day-to-day being. With all of my knowledge of African-American history, I can think of NO reason King deserves to be elevated over Malcolm X or Ella Baker. I can think of NO reason for the American public--even the BLACK American public--to think of Rosa Parks as just some little old lady who wouldn't get up from her seat on the bus one day, as opposed to the die-hard political activist she really was.
Martin Luther King was many many wonderful things, but he was also a stickler for some pretty bad ideas: a) political sexism, and b) passive resistance. I think that to some degree, the black "community" as a whole is still struggling to recover from the lasting implications of the utter dominance of these ideologies, and the effective hero-worship and idolization of King in this country simply pushes conversations about the inherent badness of these ideologies further and further under the rug. If we can't address the faults of the persons we are told to view as having been great in the past, how will we ever recognize them in the future? Sexism in the black community is STILL un-talked-about by anyone but black feminists, and fact: no one really listens to them anyway. My mother STILL says she's oppressed as a black person but not as a woman, and black women's position in society will NEVER increase until we can eradicate the existence of such limited mindsets. But how can we if we continue to praise King as our savior? Political sexism is, in some aspects, even worse than in-everyday-life sexism, because it's like saying there are specific areas in which women can never be equal to men and certain arenas in which they should never be listened to, as opposed to just being generally ignorant. Passive resistance too often leads to just sitting there and taking the shit this country throws at us, and maybe I'm a radical but I will fight to the death for the things I deserve. We all should; it's the only way to get anyone to listen. The Movement has DIED; now we all practice passive resistance, and our men and boys rot in jail, and our children fail in failing schools, and our success stories are ostracized and remain single and childless for being strange exceptions to unwritten rules...it's not getting us anywhere. Blindly accepting King as the face of the Movement, as the King of race relations in America and as having the chief ideas that should be recognized and remembered just sets us back into the faults of his time, and I for one shall not regress.
