Whitewashed

 

 I feel pretty
Oh so pretty
I feel pretty and witty and gay
And I pity
Any girl who isn't me today 
--Westside Story 

The Ku Klux Klan, who saw Zelig as a Jew,
that could turn himself into a Negro and an Indian,
saw him as a triple threat
--Zelig (1983)

He married me up at the First Church of Harlem.
He told me he was the brother of Duke Ellington.
--Zelig (1983)

~I'm colored, Mr. Townsend. I'm a Negro.
~Gerber, what the hell have you been doing - 
sitting under a sunlamp? 
--Watermelon Man (1970)

Who in this world is what they seem to be? 
--The Spanish Prisoner (1997)
______________________

So Rachel Dolezal, a white woman, wants to be black -- our latest tempest in a teacup. How is this relevant to RangerAgainstWar?  Just wait.

First, the obvious: another example of not telling the whole truth. Some are bemused by Dolezal's fabulation ("girl got the hair"); others, outraged at the dissimulation.

But why does it make print that a white woman chose to present as black? If former Olympian Bruce Jenner wants to now be "Caitlyn" because he identifies that way, we are meanies if we do not accept her as a woman. But we mayn't cross the color bar (white-to-black). Why is that?

The first subtext is, who could imagine a desire to be black? Whereas blacks have been "passing" for generations in order to be better situated socially, it seems untenable to them that a "privileged" white woman (all white people are privileged, right?) would want to turn the other way. (This is not to defend Dolezal, per se, who seems like a troubled individual created by a chaotic family.)

New York Times Op-Ed writer Charles Blow wrote a tortuous column opposing Ms. Dolezal because hers was "a form of one-directional privilege that simply isn’t available to a black person." This is illogical EOE thinking, in extremis. Blow even admits "[race] is a societal construct" while trying to deny this participation to Dolezal. He accuses her of linguistic somersaults, yet his piece is full of them.

A female New York Times Op-Ed writer presented a similar non-sequitur argument against Dolezal that historically one has been labeled "black" if only 1/64th black. She seemed angry that this "one drop" rule was imposed upon the black race, but she did not address why she found it unacceptable for a zero-dropped individual to choose for negritude.

--Zelig (Woody Allen) turning black at Jazz club

Why be upset? Blacks do not mind that light-complexioned blacks have "passed" as white, nor do they mind whites co-opting blackness when following rap gansta culture, even adopting the patois and the dress.  What made Dolezal's emulation so unpalatable?

White women may co-opt pieces of blackness, like Bo Derek's cornrows, but they may not fake being black, unlike blacks who may fake being white.

The second subtext is that there are only so many good EOE-type positions available to blacks, and perhaps only a limited pool of qualified applicants for them. Therefore, Dolezal the white woman is cheating a black out of his or her rightful EOE slot. It is a not-so-subtle denigration of blacks by blacks that a white person could do black better than a "real" black person.

As a black woman of power and position, Dolezal would also have entree to a rarefied pool of desirable black males for possible relationship, another thing which many black women are protective of. With one in five black males incarcerated at any given time and a matriarchal culture, relationship-worthy high level black males are at a premium, and Dolezal through her dissimulation would have access to the pick of the litter. Especially in a black culture which favors light-skinned blacks.

Dolezal's "tan and black" costume rendered all of the prizes of the Equal Opportunity system at her fingertips.

There is also the unfortunate overlay of minstrelsy, which threatened Dolezal's project as a possible grand mime. She could simply be some striving academic trying to make a name for herself in a future study by going undercover for years, unlike John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) who could only carry on his charade for a limited time.

But by all accounts, Dolezal has been a genuine and effective advocate for black rights, and her job as President of the Seattle NAACP was not race-dependent. Dolezal's earlier claim against Howard University for reverse racism against her then-identification as a white woman opens up space for a sincere dialog, as did Edward Bakke's reverse discrimination lawsuit in 1977.

Humans tribe up, and it is that exclusionary and insular impulse which we must fight if we are to become an inclusionary world, a world in which we are all part of the human race. While the media is forcing various agendas in the name of removing exclusions -- such as affording the rights of marriage to gay couples and the inclusion of various gendered individual in the Armed forces  -- it is interesting that the racial line is being so vigorously protected.

If a person may go through religious conversions, naturalization ceremonies and gender reassignment, why is one not allowed to choose the race with which one will affiliate?

Probably, it has mostly to do with a scarcity mentality and economics. As in the film Soul Man (1986) where a white student claims for being black in order to gain college entree and tuition subsidies, blacks do not want to share this EOE windfall. It is similar to the Veterans Administration ratings system for medical treatment. Those prioritized in the upper echelons are just grateful that they are not at the bottom of the heap, and do not often fight for an equality in the treatment system for those lower down.

This is what preferential treatment hath wrought -- a mean and petty protectiveness of the succored individual's standing. Divide and conquer.

Whenever a system can get its members to participate in competitive and exclusionary behavior, there will not be the peace of a fully-functioning system.

The tie-in to RAW?:

This attitude of exclusive ownership without an honest discussion of what being black means is why racism persists in the U.S., for surely the black censure of Dolezal is racism, and racism is a form of war.

In the Middle East we see this harsh affiliation/disaffiliation playing out daily in a deadly game. If the warring members could rise above and see they are all one, with an agenda of a better life for them and their families, there would be a new day.

If divisions like race were not so contested and protected, perhaps the racial crimes we continue to witness would disappear. The guarding of race by the black community via harsh criticism of others reveals an exclusivity guaranteeing their isolation and resentment.

Unfortunately, the human animal cleaves from just as strongly as it cleaves to


NEXT: A wrap up on our general blindsightedness.

Running from the Police

 --Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Intelligence is a moral category
--Theodor Adorno

 "Nay, I’ll not unvision
A shape which, somehow, there may be." 
So I went on softly from the glade,
And left her behind me throwing her shade.
--Shadows on the Stone, Thomas Hardy,

Give 'em lots of sex, perversion and rape
Give 'em lots of violence and plenty to hate 
--Give the People What They Want,  
The Kinks
_______________________

Maybe our fascination with zombies is largely metaphorical. What if the grotesque, suppurating beings represent the vulgarities that live beside, within and among us daily? What a clever and poetic thing to call that which you place outside of you, "undead".

The term recognizes the thing's existence in a liminal area; not quite exterminated, though you wish it were gone. They threaten the existence you think you have lest you avert your eyes for a moment allowing the thing to reanimate, and possibly consume you. Eternal vigilance is the only salvation.

"The Undead" is a trope we may use to explain every recent incident of a black man dying while in contact with the police. Like Casablaca's Captain Renault, we cry a disingenuous "Shocked!" when we see videos which prove the fact.

We prostrate ourselves, overlaying our collective guilt upon the scene, as if to erase the reality of power over a group of people we fear and disdain: the outlaw, the threat to conformity within the society. We can shuttle off our concerns onto the culpable officer of the law and breathe somewhat easily for a moment, but the mise en scene is still "undead".

The benefits to the masses of this forefronting of our outrage, backgrounding our fear, are many.  We get to throw stones, and discharge a collective angst. We get the high of viewing the salacious footage.

Snuff films used to be outre, the outliers in the undercover world of porn. Now, with the advent of our ubiquitous recording devices, we may view heads rolling or bodies pumped with bullets day or night from the comfort of our device of choice, from our own bed (if you wish.) No need to trek to the Coliseum anymore. 

Michael Eric Dyson's recent New York Times Op-Ed, Racial Terror, Fast and Slow, offered little that was new. Dyson wrote, "Problems arise when images of blackness contradict a received racial script" -- what blather. In fact, the "images of blackness" cohere quite nicely with the racial script. 

The images follow the script like night the day: 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock. Children born into a single-parent household languish in most developmental tests from the beginning. It is hard enough to run a household with two parents, how much moreso with one usually marginally-educated parent in a society which does not support single parenthood. 

In 1992, the white, liberal, educated and employed t.v. character Murphy Brown played by an attractive Candace Bergen sallied forth to bear a child without marrying, and the liberal commentariat cheered her. Republican Dan Quayle had the temerity to suggest this might not be a good thing, and the liberals drowned him in howls of execration. A woman can do what she pleases (and it's especially nice when, as with Brown character, she has an attractive Latino handyman and a good paycheck helping her out.) 

An iconic 1970's commercial of female empowerment for a perfume (!) featured a perfectly groomed woman in a power suit and heels slinging a frying pan to the sassy tune, "I can bring home the bacon / fry it up in a pan / and never, ever let you forget you're a man." The reality for most single mothers and their offspring isn't an Enjoli commercial or Murphy Brown's sophisticate dream, and it is their children you are seeing on the real-life snuff films.

Another script is, black men have been marginalized by the advent of various social welfare programs which  benefited single mothers in the 1960's. But perhaps the programs were developed to meet a need, and did not have the nefarious intent of displacing the male head of household. A sociological survey in the 1950's, "The Negro Street Corner Man", suggested that black males, like males in many machismo cultures, enjoy hanging out with their boys (their peers, not their offspring), leaving the women to run the household. Kick it, and run, or as the Jamaicans say, "Trow down and take away."

In a supporting role is the rap culture which glorifies the bling of the lone trolling thug, the female reduced to his adoring toy. (We are not talking about "life-affirming" rap, which is a small subcategory of the genre.) Too many young women have bought into this, so a working-class male cannot match this image. Therefore, they end up with no partner.

In addition, many African tribes are matriarchal, as are many black American families today. During slavery in America, blacks were forbidden to marry. Following Emancipation, there was a rush to enforce marriage in the black community to bring them quickly into the Western Christian model, but many rejected this enclosure.

These are just a couple of idiosyncratic observations, but rather than accept Dyson's constructed script-and-image duality, let us look at the reality. This is not often done as most people want to see themselves as good and as such, refrain from stating anything which might be construed as racist, pejorative or prescriptive. But by not stating what is apparent (though unpalatable to some), one never has the opportunity to change the actuality (if it needs to be, or can be changed.) 

When looking at the black men who have died in police encounters, we should be honest about our presumptions, the realities and the solutions. Over the next few posts, we will aim for that.

To the Point

  We don't see things as they are,
we see them as we are
--Anais Nin
__________________

Amidst today's talk concerning police procedure vis-a-vis the deaths of black Americans sparked by the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, there is an unasked question, namely:

"Would the police have acted any differently if the suspect were white?"

If the answer is "No", then the shooting in Ferguson was not a racial incident from the police perspective. The answer to the question is discrete from how the event was perceived by the black population. Moreover, that precipitating event was a discrete event from each future police engagement with a black citizen.

Unfortunately, the concatenation of all following (or preceding) events is a human overlay, and humans have a compulsion to finding meaning or connection; we are pattern-makers. (We must be wary of our tendency to apophenia, as Lisa's Cambridge friend reminds her.)

Law enforcement officers have an unfortunate and built-in adversarial relationship with many of those those whom they must police. They are not filming a Hollywood police procedural and do not have the luxury of several takes. A pretty simple formula for not getting killed would be to not engage in crime, to not point a weapon at an officer and/or engage him in any physical way. Otherwise, it is an easy guess that the outcome will be an extremely violent one.

Lisa has a deputy sheriff friend who explained to her that many officers develop a poor attitude because they are dealing predominately with confrontation and shady characters on a daily basis. He, as a very Christian person, is able to access his faith and maintain a charitable outlook, but he allows that it is difficult in his position. He and his other deputies wear bullet-proof vests daily, a reminder that all do not welcome his appearance on the scene, despite and indifferent to his charitable outlook.

This is the law, which has no exceptions for race. So the question is:

"Do we have a race problem, or a police problem?"

A Comparative Analysis

--Capital City Bank sign:
"NO HOODIES"

[my goal is] the creation of a society
without domination
--Adrienne Rich

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
--Maya Angelou

It was the last night before sorrow
touched her life, and no life is ever
quite the same again when once that cold,
sanctifying touch has been laid upon it
--Anne of Green Gables,
L. M. Mongomery

Ranger Question of the Day;
My bank has been robbed a few times and
has a sign on the door:
"No hoodies allowed in the lobby"
--Is my bank racist?
__________________

[NOTE: The zombie white faces and Anglo features in the "No Hoodie" bank sign. Just 'cause most of the robbers were black, we didn't notice that, you see? So, no racism, right?]

Subtitle: Florida -- the Death Knell State.

The death of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old killed by a community watchman, has been called a martyrdom and an assassination by his bereaved mother.

If so, consistency requires that we also call the targeted killing of the U.S citizen and 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki also an assassination and a martyrdom. With martyrdom comes the need for a cause, so what shall we call it -- the death of innocence?

Why is the younger Awlaki's death cheered, while Trayvon's is decried? Are we less discomfited when the kill is called by our president on an erstwhile innocent than by a civilian? If this is truly a racial issue (as so many arguing), then is it simply that a black man can kill a brown man, whereas a brown man may not kill a black man today? Do we only turn the other way when African Americans kill their own (as they do in 91% of gun murders in the U.S.)?

Is it that we just presume that it is a righteous kill, or that we simply don't care -- we don't want to get up in their business? And could that be because we know how entirely and hopelessly estranged we are from a culture that lives under the rubric, "U.S.A."?

But let us forget the dark-skinned little man called al-Awlaki's son, as dark-skinned deaths in the Phony War on Terror are oh-so forgettable; just another brick in the wall. Let's bring it closer to home, back to Florida and assassinations and all the stuff that is beyond the limits of civilized behavior, to another story of young black men involved in murder which you will not hear much about, though it is in the same edition of the paper that fronts Trayvon's saga.

But this story runs several pages back, and under the fold. It is the story of two British tourists murdered in cold blood by a 16-year-old black youth less than three hours Southwest of Trayvon's story. The murderer, Shawn Tyson, called his victims -- James Kouzaris and James Cooper -- "crackers" as they begged for their lives before he shot them to death last April. Tyson was just convicted of two life sentences.

One of the witnesses testified that Tyson told her the day after the killings that he said to the victims, "Well since you ain't got no money I got something for your ass." Calling someone one a cracker when you single them out for death because of their skin color would seem to be a hate crime, but no such charges were filed.

The AP reported, "Authorities say it was initially difficult to get people in this case to reveal details about the shootings (as) many of the witnesses were friends of Tyson's" -- how's that for civic responsibility? Nobody "saw or heard nothin'," a familiar refrain. (If you've ever dealt with the criminal justice system, you know every con was framed; no one really did anything. A culture of responsibility it is not.)

Tyson had been improperly released to his mother's custody from juvenile detention via administrative error the day before the killings for shooting into a car with an illegal firearm the week before. The silence continued when "savage" Tyson was observed tracking his intended cracker victims, enabling the two murders. While the witnesses were complicit in their silence, maybe in their neighborhood that is what is called "neighborhood watch."

Friends of the victims expressed their disappointment with the lack of parity in President Obama's non-response to their plight:

Davies said:"We would like to publicly express our dissatisfaction at the lack of any public or private message of support or condolence from any American governing body or indeed, President Obama himself.

"Mr Kouzaris has written to President Obama on three separate occasions and is yet to even receive the courtesy of a reply.

"It would perhaps appear that Mr Obama sees no political value in facilitating such a request or that the lives of two British tourists are not worthy of ten minutes of his time" (Parents of Murdered British Students Criticise Barack Obama.)

The same scenario was played out in 1993 at a rest stop in Monticello, about 30 miles from Tallahassee: four black youths executed another British tourist, wounding his companion; five days before that, a German tourist was murdered in Miami. After these events, the British and German tourist authorities issued travel advisories to their citizens heading to sunny Florida (the Governer Chiles also wisely suspended the "One Florida, Many Faces" tourist campaign.)

When one of the assailants, John Crumitie, was sentenced to first degree murder two years later, his mother blamed the change of venue -- and REDNECKS -- for the decision:

"It's horrible. It's horrible," said Crumitie's mother, Susie Mae Johnson, blaming the conviction on a change of venue to Pensacola. "The town ain't nothing but a damn redneck town, and Monticello is just the damn same."

Seems like everything boils down to blacks and crackers.

--He didn't like me taking his photo today

Today, our rest stops have security guards -- or post warning signs indicating their absence. Many have simply shut down anyway due to funding strictures.

Alas, there is no outrage in our communities for these murders. Everyone knows you don't roll down your window for a group of young black men . . . and they were foreigners, anyway.

Maybe it was that the victims were not wearing hoodies.

The Armed Citizen II

I ain't asking you to keep no secrets
My reputation already shot
I ain't asking you to commit treason
Just tell me if you like it or not
--Skin Deep, Melissa Etheridge

I'm watching the news …
Tupac Shakur was assassinated,
Biggie Smalls assassinated,
struck down by assassin's bullets …
no, they wasn't.
Martin Luther King was assassinated,
Malcolm X was assassinated,
John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Them two niggas got shot!
--Chris Rock
___________________

We are not sure why Trayvon Martin's sad case has become a national hullabaloo -- it is one more senseless black death. It is NOT an assassination, as Trayvon's mother claims, and her son is no martyr.

This post will offer further observations on race in America. We'll tell you what we see, and to answer those who feel our view is myopic: Lisa is from Washington, D.C., Ranger, Cleveland. We may live in Hickville, U.S.A. now (otherwise known as Florida's capital city), but we can offer perspective; if not exactly 360 °, certainly more than 270 °.

When the local historically black college, Florida Agricultural & Mechanical (FAMU) has its homecoming, there are always black-on-black shootings. This fact has closed down the local Governor's Square Mall in the past. It is well known that it is wise to avoid getting channelized on the major streets the night of the game, not only to avoid the violence, but also the risk of accidents due to drivers under the influence -- the lane markers are ignored, and cars swan out across Tennessee Street.

Citizens have the right and responsibility to be smart and avoid threat environments. I personally would not travel to South Tallahassee during these weekends if The Pope were standing on the street corner handing out Life Savers.

Writer Jonathan Capehart has been leading the Trayvon charge for The Washington Post, and bemoans "the rules he was taught as a teenager: 'Don’t run in public,' 'Don’t run while carrying anything in your hands,' 'Don’t talk back to the police',” but those are not rules singled out for blacks. News flash: If you're a human being, don't talk back to the cops. Period.

We know Zimmerman was not a cop, but what might have happened had Martin openly approached him and said, "Good evening", or "Is something wrong?" or anything that might have shown him to be a Good Guy?

We know Chris Rock is a comedian, but in his skit, "How not to get your ass kicked by the police", he addresses the problem by taking it to the utmost: "You probably won’t get your ass kicked if you just use common sense; Be polite ..." His satire applies to anyone, and should we be surprised? There is a reason some neighborhoods are gated and have neighborhood watches. Hint: the people do not feel like they live in Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.

Ranger frequently attends gun shows for mixed crowds of collectors, hunters and everything in between, and he has never seen a young black man view or purchase any weapon other than a hi-capacity 9 m/m pistol, an AK-47 or an assault-type shotgun. These are politely known in the gun world as "kill your neighbor" guns. In addition, he has never seen a National Rifle Association (NRA) membership drive or hunter or shooter safety course held in a predominantly black neighborhood.

Every white man he knows owns and carries a weapon in his car and for home protection. This observation is not restricted to the South. This applies to his buddies in Cleveland, all of whom served in Vietnam and some of whom returned to enter law enforcement. Many of us have been threatened or beaten at some point in our lives by a group of blacks. (Many of Lisa's male friends have had the same experience.) You realize we are not saying this is everyone's experience -- this is our experience.

Every day one sees young black men with pants down to their knees, buckled (if buckled) under their rumps, underwear exposed in broad daylight. Slabs with stereos blasting hateful rap lyrics tell me these folks don't exactly share the values of white bread America. Then there are the locals who advocate arming all blacks so that they can annihilate each other, such is their feeling of alienation and antagonism. For a culture in which getting shot earns one street cred, this idea is not far-fetched.

Again -- and obviously -- we are not talking about all African-Americans, by any means. However, the above-described is a large enough contingent to cause a rupture in our society. And for the rest of us to stand back and to deny this is hypocrisy of the finest grade -- a willing blindness which allows the sorry plight of all involved to continue, and do we dare to imagine that by bemoaning one death we are setting things aright?

What are the life choices for young black men? Be a Clarence Thomas, a LeBron James . . . what? That is what we need to resolve if we are to survive as a nation.

Meaningless though Martin's death is, there will soon be another in my neighborhood when the next drug deal goes bad, and it will never go beyond page three of the Gadsden County Times. On game day, the locals will continue to bet on whether "our nig**** will beat your nig****." And so it goes.

I will maintain my outrage for a war and a government that in my lifetime has killed Gooks, Hadjis and other dark people, invaded Grenada and Panama, and supports Egypt, Colombia and Turkey, where they repress their middle-shaded citizens.

Life can be a jungle out there, and this shooting death may be emblematic of our downfall not as blacks or white or Latinos, bit rather as a nation.