Listening to Black America

I have been wanting to write something since the Zimmerman verdict came down.  Wanting to write about why these cycles of extrajudicial killing and judicial legitimization keep happening, why the national "we" (as opposed to most of you) keep being shocked by them, why we keep demanding "justice" through the criminal courts while knowing that those courts exist to perpetuate injustice.  Mostly wanting to write about how it can possibly be that a majority of whites (nearly 60%, according to a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll) believe that we have achieved a "color-blind" society - or more precisely, that "America is a nation where people are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

 

I've been wanting to write about the protest movements that so predictably rise up around these killings and how and why they fail to demand or deliver real change.  About what it will take for the whole country to become North Carolina, with its "Moral Mondays" -- weekly civil disobedience actions by a multiracial coalition at the state Capitol.

But when I sit down, I put my hands on the keyboard and nothing comes out.  I finally realized, my hands might be telling me that this is a good time for well-intentioned white people to shut up and listen to what Black people are saying.

Here are two of my favorite things I've read in the last couple weeks.  I would love to see yours.

StrangeFruitvale

The eerie intersection of Trayvon Martin and Fruitvale Station

By Wesley Morris on July 25, 2013

...
The collective reaction to the Zimmerman verdict is striking. These protests and demonstrations aren't directed solely at another race, at white people (black people know Zimmerman is also half-Peruvian and that the president is half-white). The outrage is directed at a system that's demonstrably harmful to non-white people. It's the institutions and all they've wrought that people are sick of. We don't yet live in the world the Supreme Court thought we did when it struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act and weakened the case for affirmative action. More than ever, we live in a time of racism without racists, just racist laws, racist policies, and racist ideas.

This is how the writing on Mad Men can be so sagacious and imaginative about life in America for one set of characters and so casually insulting for another — not because its mastermind, Matthew Weiner, is a racist but because auteurist television is capacious and permissive enough to subscribe to the institutions of racism, the racism you sense, the racism you breathe, the racism that makes you turn to your friend and say, "That just happened, right?" There is n-word racism. Then there are the lingering, toxic particles that centuries of n-word racism leave in the air. We all breathe them, but we don't always like to talk about it. So it is heresy to mention that, say, the strategic use of Planet of the Apes in the same Mad Men episode that featured Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination might itself be heretical. It's still hard to talk about negative depictions of race in culture without comments sections and Twitter feeds turning infernal. We're breathing the same air, and yet we're not.

Perceptively, the president picked up on the central frustration with the calls for a national conversation. Lots of people want to talk, but fewer want to listen. This is also how it has always been at the movies and on a lot of television. Hollywood tells the world what life is like for black Americans without black Americans being able to say what life is like for themselves....

Read the rest 

Who Will March for Marissa Alexander?

By Marissa Jackson

...

I, too, stewed and brewed in the immediate wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal. I worried a lot, as I always have, about my two burly black younger brothers, knowing that their prestigious college degrees and multicultural groups of friends will not save them should some vigilante feel intimidated by their existence and decide to shoot them to death. I worry about my husband, who speaks mostly French and recently arrived in the United States from a country where blackness is the norm--what would happen to him if he were stopped and frisked? Would he know how to behave, or would he freak out, unintentionally committing suicide-by-cop? But I also felt in my stomach a deep grief for black womanhood, and a jealousy of sorts, that our oppressions will never mean as much as those of our brothers. I felt absolutely browbeaten over the sobering reality that if Trayvon Martin’s life meant nothing, than the lives of my sister and I mean less than nothing--even to members of my own community.

Read the rest

The Revolution Will Not Be Hacked

It used to be that every time I went to a meeting to figure out some action we could take to raise awareness about something or other, there would come what I called the “helicopter moment.”  That was the moment when someone said, “It would be really great if we could charter a helicopter and” … parachute onto the field of the Super Bowl – land in front of City Hall during the mayoral inauguration – drop the ashes of people dead from AIDS …. 

It was a flight of fancy, an expression of the wish we all shared that we could somehow break out of the mold of ritualistic protest people have gotten so good at ignoring.  But I would always get irritated because people would spent more than a minute talking as if we could actually get a helicopter, and if we could, that we could actually do what we imagined with it.  I was irritated because it distracted people from the discussion at hand, but also because it pointed up how difficult it is to interrupt the dominant conversation.

I was also irritated because you can get three, maybe four people in a helicopter, and there were generally at least ten of us in the meeting.  The helicopter idea is that a few people with a grand gesture can make change, the modern version of Deus ex Machina, the ancient Greek method of quickly wrapping up a play by having the gods come in and fix everything.  What we needed was not the helicopter ex machina, but the Movement ex machina, and that’s even harder to accomplish.  If we could have gotten everyone on Market Street to form a helicopter with their bodies, that might have been something worth doing.

About fifteen years ago, the helicopter moment morphed into the hacker moment.  Brainstorm long enough, and someone will say, “We should change their [the Corporation, the FBI, the Army, …] website so it says …”  Or we dream of changing those electronic signs that run across the screen in BART stations (oh, how thrilled I am that I’ll be seeing those signs again, now that the BART strike is temporarily over) so the people looking up to see when their train is coming see “Support the Guantanamo Hunger Strikers” or whatever.

I still roll my eyes when those conversations start because one, we don’t know any hackers.  The conversation will go on and on about what we’re going to do with their websites, and ultimately we are going to have to come back to the discussion of what we can really do and it’s not going to look as glamorous. 

And two, if we did know hackers, we would go to them and say, “We want you to do this,” and then what?  It wouldn’t be our action, it would be theirs.  We would be replacing the joy of collective power with the smugness of being in the know.  The goal would obviously not be to get the people who saw the message to join us – how could they? but simply to admire our (or actually our hacker friends’) skill and boldness.  It’s the ultimate transformation of political action into a spectator sport.

That’s why Anonymous, which started out hacking BART’s website to protest a killing by BART police a few years ago, started calling demonstrations.  And in fact, the demonstrations – which were not attended by that many people, actually – had a much bigger impact than the hacks.  BART overreacted by shutting down train service and – gasp – even shut down cell phone access during the protests, which sparked more international outrage than the killing did.

We’re currently in a prolonged national hacker moment.  It started with Wikileaks and Bradley Manning, now it’s Edward Snowden.  These are brave and smart guys, and for sure, they have provoked discussion about issues like secrecy, surveillance and the legitimacy of whistleblowing, maybe even about targeting civilians and mistreatment of prisoners, though I haven’t heard nearly as much of that.  Manning has certainly inspired activism here – the Bradley Manning contingent in the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade was the biggest queer antimilitarist action we’ve had in decades.  Julian Assange has rallied support in Europe, and no doubt Snowden will too wherever he lands.

The problem is not these guys and what they’ve done but the mythic stature being accorded to people who are in a very rarified position.  The fascination with Edward Snowden’s mad dash across the world is understandable, but ultimately feeds the idea that only a few people with inside information have the ability to change anything, and the role of the rest of us is to cheer for them and wait for their next revelations.  Young men like Snowden and Manning, whose quest for heroism led them to join the military and the security apparatus in the first place, now find heroism in bold acts of martyrdom.  They become celebrities in a society already obsessed with celebrities.

I have been re-reading Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life.  After spending a year in prison for “inciting to riot,” in 1893-94, Goldman found on her release that she had become a celebrity.  She writes, “I knew of the American craze for celebrities, especially the American woman’s hunt for anyone in the limelight, be it prize-fighter, baseball-player, matinee idol, wife-killer, or decrepit European aristocrat….Every day brought stacks of invitations to luncheons and dinners.”

Movements have always used celebrities, but they are not built by celebrities.  What these young people, sadly, are missing is the experience of the movement AS THE CELEBRITY, of seeing that we, who have no unique skills or information, can make a splash simply by combining all of our ordinary talents and information. Look at the Egyptian people, out in the streets again.  Most of us don't know one of their names, but we sure know the name Tahrir Square.

Snowden himself said, “the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.”

That’s a lovely sentiment, and it’s probably more or less true.  Yet it casually combines two words that do not, in our era, go together.  An “informed” public is not necessarily an “angry” public.  Today, in fact, the more “informed” people are the more resigned they become.  I've heard outrage in the press over the revelation about "PRISM" and the NSA's commandeering of phone records, but I haven't seen any expressions of public anger.  In the wake of Snowden’s revelations, the pundits pun, the bloggers blog, but where are the activists?

Waiting for the next installment of “Where in the world is Edward Snowden”?