On Phantom Negro Weapons

Phantom Negro Weapons are those weapons which White Americans report black people having but which are never found for some strange reason.

Examples:
1999: Amadou Diallo - shot 41 times, hit 19 times, died. His gun shapeshifted into a wallet.
2006: Sean Bell - shot 51 times and died after one of his friends reached for his gun. The gun cloaked itself and was never found.
2009: Oscar Grant - shot dead when he reached for his gun. Since it was a Phantom Negro Weapon, police failed to find it when they searched him before putting him face down on the ground.
2011: Kenneth Chamberlain - shot dead when he threatened armed policemen with a butcher’s knife. The knife, of course, being a Phantom Negro Weapon, did not appear on the video recording.
2012: Ramarley Graham - the gun in his waistband cloaked itself after police shot him dead in front of his grandmother.
2012: Trayvon Martin – no weapon was reported, but the way his killer acted you would think his Arizona iced tea and bag of Skittles had shapeshifted from something far more deadly.
2012: Rekia Boyd - was killed when police shot at Antonio Cross, whose gun shapeshifted into a mobile phone.
2012: Jordan Davis - killed after threatening Michael Dunn with a shotgun rather than turning down his music. The police were unable to find the shotgun. Maybe it will still turn up, but more likely it was Phantom Negro Weapon which has cloaked itself.

Phantom Negro Weapons | Abagond

(via Sister Outsider)

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."  

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.]