Lia Neal competes in the Women’s 200 yard Individual Medley heats on day one of the AT&T Short Course National Championships at McCorkle Aquatic Pavillion on December 2, 2010 in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
As Lia Neal, Cullen Jones, and Anthony Irvin compete in the the 2012 Olympic Games, they are not simply battling the best in the world; they are helping to close the book on a sad chapter in American history. With each start, each stroke, and each flip-turn, the trio of African-American swimmers are putting the historic (and occasionally more recent) exclusion of African-Americans from America’s pools further behind us. Their presence on this year’s Olympic team and their place among the larger history of black Olympic swimmers (they join Maritza Correia, who won a silver medal in 2004) reminds us of a larger history of racism and exclusion.
Indeed, to witness three black Olympians competing as swimmers represents the continued struggle against the longstanding efforts to keep pools white.
“Sports reflect a larger quandary in the land of opportunity, that so many sports have been resistant to inclusion for all races,” writes William C. Rhoden. And for decades, African-Americans were denied access to swimming pools and other municipal activities: and not only in the south. In Pittsburgh at the turn of the 20th century, whites attacked blacks in the name of swimming segregation.
Richard Allietta describes the level of violence and harassment directed at African-Americans within a segregated swimming culture: “As a youngster in Bellaire, Ohio in the early 1950′s, we would go to the public swimming pool on Mondays, ‘colored day,’ and sit in the observer stands and jeer at the colored swimmers.” Similarly, Ted Gaskins’ memories of his childhood in New Mexico, as described to American RadioWorks, illustrates the longstanding connections between American racism and swimming:
During my early childhood days in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early-to-mid 1950s, my grandparents owned and operated the local municipal swimming pool. This was before filtering systems were required and the pool had to be treated with chlorine and other chemicals to maintain the cleanliness of the water. It was also drained once a week and refilled with fresh water.
The sign on the outside of the pool read: “hours 10am to 6 pm Tuesday— Sat. Colored: Sunday from 1 pm – 5 pm.’
After 5:00 on Sunday, my grandfather would drain the pool (125,000 gallons of water) — and on Monday everyone would grab buckets of liquid chlorine and scrub the entire pool.
I asked my grandfather why we did this, and he said that the colored people were unclean and this would kill any bacteria that they would bring in. I also would ask my grandmother if I could go swimming on Sunday, and she would always tell me no, because that was the time when the “colored folks” could swim and I wasn’t allowed to swim with them. This went on till 1957 and at that time the state required the new filtering system and my grandparents closed the pool because of the cost of the new equipment. This was an accepted practice during my early childhood.
Reflecting entrenched ideologies, many white residents resisted efforts to integrate pools in the northern and western U.S. during the 1940s and early 1950s. As these municipal pools, which were largely constructed during the Progressive Era (yes, government creating jobs), began to integrate, many whites fled to suburban and private pools, resulting in systemic divestment from the urban spaces.
Increasingly since 9/11, American political discourse and popular culture has acknowledged, if not celebrated, the sacrifices of members of its armed forces. The often self serving praise of the service of others, which so few with privilege have ever seriously contemplated, has not resulted in heightened care for soldiers and veterans, nor deeper reflection among many on those who opt to serve, and what their service might mean for American democracy.
Unfortunately, Wade Michael Page likely will not foster the needed conversations about these issues, but instead prompt attention to the dispositions and drives that led to Page to commit what has repeatedly been described “as a senseless act.” Yet, as noted by Rinku Sen in Colorlines, these murders “are neither senseless nor random, and the vast majority of such incidents here involve white men. Racism holds a terrible logic, for a concept with no grounding whatsoever in science or morality, yet too many white people don’t see any pattern.” Equally powerful, Harsha Walia reminds readers to break down the walls between extreme and mainstream, between individual and societal, between civilian and military, to look at this violence not as yet another instance of a bad apple but yet another of the rotten tree(s):
The crimes of white supremacists are not exceptions and do not and cannot exist in isolation from more systemic forms of racism. People of colour face legislated racism from immigration laws to policies governing Indigenous reserves; are discriminated and excluded from equitable access to healthcare, housing, childcare, and education; are disproportionately victims of police killings and child apprehensions; fill the floors of sweatshops and factories; are over-represented in heads counts on poverty rates, incarceration rates, unemployment rates, and high school dropout rates. Colonialism has and continues to be shaped by the counters of white men’s civilizing missions.
To our minds, if this properly projects the arc of media coverage, until the next trauma or panic, we fear we will have lost real occasion to put into dialogue two key elements of Page’s biography: he was a veteran and he was a white supremacist. We do not know how these elements of his identity and experience interfaced with one another, though apparently his general discharge in 1998 was not related to bias. We do know, however, that thinking about the connections between white nationalist groups and the U.S. military, between the mainstream and the extreme, will help us better apprehend the shooting in Wisconsin, and more engage their implications more sensibly. “It would be a mistake to dismiss Page was an isolated actor from a lunatic fringe disconnected from the mainstream of U.S. society. In fact, the reality is that white supremacy is a persistent, tragic feature of the American cultural and political landscape,” writes Jessie Daniels. “The extreme expressions of white supremacy – like this shooting, or like some of the violent images and messages previously circulated in print and now online – are part of a larger problem. White supremacy is woven into the fabric of our society and it kills people.” We see this fact in the relationship between white supremacy and the U.S. military.
This is not a new issue, but it one that continues to resurface, often in association with tragic acts of violence. Nearly 25 years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) brought to the attention of the Reagan administration that “active-duty Marines at Camp Lejeune, NC, were participating in paramilitary Ku Klux Klan activities and even stealing military weaponry for Klan use.” Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger acted decisively, clarifying for members of the armed forces that involvement with “white supremacy, neo-Nazi and other such groups…[was] utterly incompatible with military service.”
There is a speech making its rounds in the blogosphere and on social media that seems to galvanizing (parts of liberal) America. Unfortunately, it isn’t Malcolm’s “Ballot or the Bullet,” Fannie Lou Hamer’s brilliance at the 1968 Democratic Convention, King’s “Beyond Vietnam” or Fred Hampton’s inspiring language, but rather Jeff Daniels’ monologue at the beginning of HBO’s Newsroom. Capturing Aaron Sorkin’s propensity for sappy dialogue that is drunk on optimism, this speech also reflects his propensity to see the world through binaries, often erasing the complexities, divisions, and inequalities that define culture, politics, and society. It also embodies a disturbing level of nostalgia that seems commonplace within televisual culture. From Mad Men(more discussion here) to Pan-AM, contemporary TV (and film – The Help) is rooted in nostalgia for the past, one that fails to account for the less than idyllic world for people of color, women, the GLBT community, and others whose dreams remain deferred.
In responding to a young woman’s question about America’s greatness (American Exceptionalism), Will (Daniels) launched into a lengthy monologue:
Will: It’s not the greatest country in the world, professor,
that’s my answer.
Moderator [pause]: You’re saying—
Will: Yes.
Moderator: Let’s talk about—
Will: Fine. [to the liberal panelist] Sharon, the NEA is a loser. Yeah, it accounts for a penny out of our paychecks, but he [gesturing to the conservative panelist] gets to hit you with it anytime he wants. It doesn’t cost money, it costs votes. It costs airtime and column inches. You know why people don’t like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so fuckin’ smart, how come they lose so GODDAM ALWAYS!
And [to the conservative panelist] with a straight face, you’re going to tell students that America’s so starspangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom, Japan has freedom, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom. Two hundred seven sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.
And you—sorority girl—yeah—just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know, and one of them is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies. None of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the WORST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER-period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about?! Yosemite?!!!
As I initially watched this Olberman-esque sermon, I was intrigued, although I didn’t find the information or the argument particularly powerful – it was unusual for mainstream TV. It also did speak to how whiteness operates, whereupon Will or Sorkin can challenge American Exceptionalism without their patriotism or citizenship being questioned; yet people of color cannot offer these same arguments without denunciation and demonization. My interest quickly turned from frustration to annoyance to disgust to outrage as he continued with his myopic and white-colored lecture:
We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.
In a blink of an eye, Sorkin transports viewers from the problems of today to a time worthy of celebration and memory. In erasing the violence, inequality, segregation, dehumanization, and denied rights, the monologue nostalgically imagines an exceptional time in American history. It offers evidence of and potential for the American Dream; it sees the past as time for meritocracy. America’s greatness rests with the hard work and perseverance of previous generation. It exists with a time when anyone could live out his or her dream. At the same time, the show imagined a time where people struggled and triumphed, overcoming obstacles through personal responsibility, hard work, and community.
What a crock; clearly we need to crack open a history book in Hollywood. Ernest Hardy offered his assessment of the clip in a Facebook post:
Ugh. I really, really, really hate this ahistorical bullshit paean to an America that never existed. Every time I watch this clip, I think of Black GI’s who were denied the same loans as their white brothers-in-arms when they returned from WWII; of the Black men used as lab rats in Tuskegee to help America reach those dizzying heights of medical breakthroughs; of the Black women who endured all sorts of emotional/sexual/psychological horrors that ‘The Help’ would never have the balls to really detail; I see Medgar Evers’ assassinated in his driveway in a warm-up to the murders of Dr. King and Malcolm X. Fuck this angry white dude rewrite and whitewash of history.
His comments and the scene itself made me think of a spoken word piece I wrote a few years ago regarding “the greatest generation” and this commonplace racial amnesia:
The greatest generation
You mean the Jim Crow generation
White only signs, lynchings, and the Klan
You mean the Scottsboro generation
One of many incarcerated from the generations of blacks in American
You mean the sharecropper generation
Debt servitude, enslavement, and no protections
You mean the Tom, Coon and mammy generation
Hollywood representations: Amos, Andy, and Mammy
You mean the Emmett Till generation
Murder a boy for whistling, like so many others
You mean the Japanese internment generation
“No Japs allowed,” excepted in Hawaii and in the military
You mean the atom-bomb generation
Killin 1000s, but none It Italy or Germany
You mean the segregated military generation
German prisoners first, freedom and democracy not for you
You mean the St. Louis generation
A war to save the Jews, just not those on the St. Louis or 1000s others
You mean the McCarthyism generation
Red scares, loyalty oaths, and the absence of dissent
You mean the Zoot Suit Riot generation
Soldiers attacking all who are Mexican
You mean the Bracero program generation
Give us your tired, your exploitable, your cheap
You mean the operation wetback generation
Don’t give your brown, black and yellow
You mean the bordering school generation
‘Speak English,” not the savage tongue of your inferior generations
You mean the white affirmative action generation
GI Bills, suburban homes and white American Dreams
Dreams made for a white generation
You mean the restrictive covenant generation
“Whites only,” America’s ghettos become black and brown
The greatest generation
The greatest generation
1960s youth who stood face to face with Exceptional violence
Who stood toe to toe with police dogs, fire hoses, and COINTELPRO
The greatest generation
Malcolm, Martin, Cesar, Shirley, Cha Cha, Fred
The greatest generation
Fredrick Douglas, David Walker, Sojourner Truth
The greatest generation
Ida B. Wells, Clarence Darrow and Zapata
The greatest generation
Curt Flood, Tommie Smith and Muhammad Ali
The greatest generation
Amzie Moore, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hammer
The greatest generation
BPP, Young Lords, TWLF, AIM
The greatest generation
Alcatraz, blowouts, Palante Siempre Palante
The greatest generation
“Serve the people,” “power to the people”
The greatest generation
Hip Hop
The greatest generation
Anti Apartheid
The greatest generation
Carlos Delgado, Etan Thomas, Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul Rauf
The greatest generation
Books not prisons, Books not Bombs
The greatest generation
Walkouts and blowouts,
The greatest generation
Down with 187, 209, 227
The greatest generation?
Ain’t never been THE GREATEST GENERATION TO ME
In other words, despite the nostalgia and the historic amnesia of Newsroom, one that reflects its social location and the refusal to interrogate privilege, America’s exceptionalism isn’t a waning reality in that as noted by Langston Hughes “America has never been America” for countless generations.
Olympic swimmers help erase the historic ‘swimming color line’
by David Leonard | August 5, 2012 at 8:00 AM
Lia Neal competes in the Women’s 200 yard Individual Medley heats on day one of the AT&T Short Course National Championships at McCorkle Aquatic Pavillion on December 2, 2010 in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
As Lia Neal, Cullen Jones, and Anthony Irvin compete in the the 2012 Olympic Games, they are not simply battling the best in the world; they are helping to close the book on a sad chapter in American history. With each start, each stroke, and each flip-turn, the trio of African-American swimmers are putting the historic (and occasionally more recent) exclusion of African-Americans from America’s pools further behind us. Their presence on this year’s Olympic team and their place among the larger history of black Olympic swimmers (they join Maritza Correia, who won a silver medal in 2004) reminds us of a larger history of racism and exclusion.
Indeed, to witness three black Olympians competing as swimmers represents the continued struggle against the longstanding efforts to keep pools white.
“Sports reflect a larger quandary in the land of opportunity, that so many sports have been resistant to inclusion for all races,” writes William C. Rhoden. And for decades, African-Americans were denied access to swimming pools and other municipal activities: and not only in the south. In Pittsburgh at the turn of the 20th century, whites attacked blacks in the name of swimming segregation.
Richard Allietta describes the level of violence and harassment directed at African-Americans within a segregated swimming culture: “As a youngster in Bellaire, Ohio in the early 1950′s, we would go to the public swimming pool on Mondays, ‘colored day,’ and sit in the observer stands and jeer at the colored swimmers.” Similarly, Ted Gaskins’ memories of his childhood in New Mexico, as described to American RadioWorks, illustrates the longstanding connections between American racism and swimming:
During my early childhood days in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early-to-mid 1950s, my grandparents owned and operated the local municipal swimming pool. This was before filtering systems were required and the pool had to be treated with chlorine and other chemicals to maintain the cleanliness of the water. It was also drained once a week and refilled with fresh water.
The sign on the outside of the pool read: “hours 10am to 6 pm Tuesday— Sat. Colored: Sunday from 1 pm – 5 pm.’
After 5:00 on Sunday, my grandfather would drain the pool (125,000 gallons of water) — and on Monday everyone would grab buckets of liquid chlorine and scrub the entire pool.
I asked my grandfather why we did this, and he said that the colored people were unclean and this would kill any bacteria that they would bring in. I also would ask my grandmother if I could go swimming on Sunday, and she would always tell me no, because that was the time when the “colored folks” could swim and I wasn’t allowed to swim with them. This went on till 1957 and at that time the state required the new filtering system and my grandparents closed the pool because of the cost of the new equipment. This was an accepted practice during my early childhood.
Reflecting entrenched ideologies, many white residents resisted efforts to integrate pools in the northern and western U.S. during the 1940s and early 1950s. As these municipal pools, which were largely constructed during the Progressive Era (yes, government creating jobs), began to integrate, many whites fled to suburban and private pools, resulting in systemic divestment from the urban spaces.
Jim Crow, meanwhile, remained a stark reality throughout the South. By the 1960s, however, activists demanded integration in every aspect of American life, including swimming pools and beaches. In St. Augustine, Florida, the owner of Monson Motor Lodge poured acid into the pool after a black man and white women entered the water together.
Can We All…Get It Right?: Remembering the LA Uprising
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
There are few days in life where you can say without a doubt, “I know what I was doing 20 years ago today.” This is the case today, on the 20th anniversary of the start of the Los Angeles Uprising.
Having dropped out of the University of Oregon after 2 quarters, I was living in Los Angeles working and taking two classes at UCLA. Like many middle-class white youth I presume, I paused when the verdict was delivered and noted the injustice that spurred my outrage before getting back to my life. I was angry, like many others, because a jury of THEIR peers concluded that 4 police officers did nothing wrong in beating Rodney King 56 times, but the anger lasted only for that second. That was the reaction from many in West Los Angeles. “That’s outrageous, can I get a cold beverage”; “what an injustice, is the mall open yet?”
I remember thinking little about the case after hearing the verdict,. I headed to work and then to my class at UCLA. Driving to my class, through the wealth of West Los Angeles, all was calm. Entering class, an introduction to sociology course that focused on inequality systemic racism and privileges, it was clear that the verdict changed little. Class was planned as usual. Yet, before long, with news reports of violence breaking out in South Central, Los Angeles, our professor announced the end of class out of concern for OUR safety. In a city immensely segregated, defined by systemic divisions that thwart interaction all while enacting violence on its residents of color, it is immensely telling that the Rodney King Verdicts/LA Uprisings became meaningful, if not visible, when people thought the riots were going to cross La Brea or other markers dividing the two LAs.
For the rest of that night and next day, I was paralyzed, watching television almost endlessly. In retrospect, for myself, and maybe others, the LA Uprising put a crack in the walls of segregation. Although living less than 15 minutes from South Central, Los Angeles, it might as well have been 10,000 miles away. That is the specter of segregation in Los Angeles. Even the media reporting then, and the ways that the verdicts and LA Uprising were being talked about demonstrated this fact as people continued to talk about what was happening “over there” concerned that it might “migrate here.” I was uncomfortable with the detached feeling paralyzing me so I decided to leave the state-protected bubble of West Los Angeles and I drove down to South Central on day 2 to donate some food, clothes, and stuffed animals to the First AME Church.
I was most certainly driven by my desire “to help,” as I imagined what that meant twenty years ago, which most certainly reflected my white privileged understanding of privilege. Yet, I was also angered by the clear segregation of Los Angeles, not only in terms of geography, economics, and daily reality, but sentimentality and emotion.
The lack of sadness and anger within West Los Angeles was telling because the LA Uprising was not happening in our world; it was somewhere else, happening to someone who didn’t look like “us.” The power of race and class in eliciting not only empathy and connection, but also sentimentality and humanity, was on full-display in the days after the King Verdict. When I told people that I was heading down to South Central, they looked at me like I was crazy, as if I was driving into a foreign land amid a war. To them, it was a foreign land, one that they neither visited nor thought about except in moments of fear (“will the rioters come to the West Side) or heading to Lakers’ games. Despite voiced concerns about my driving just a few miles down the 10 Freeway, it was rather “uneventful” except in how this moment transformed me.
The drive forced me to reflect on my own assumptions and stereotypes, to think about why neighborhoods so close to my own were places I had never been (and thought of as so far away); it forced me to think about the violence and destruction that predated April 29th and bare witness to communities that West Los Angeles had abandoned; and finally, it forced me to reflect on the power of community, to see beyond the televisual representation of South Central Los Angeles rioting, to see families collecting food, kids playing, and people coming together. It forced me to look inward, to think about whiteness and privilege, to reflect on my stereotypes and assumptions. Even my ability to get my car and drive to South Central Los Angeles is evidence of privilege given the levels of state violence experienced by black and Latino youth entering LA’s white enclaves in West Los Angeles. What should have been a moment of introspection, of racial reconciliation and systemic change, instead became a moment, one that too many of us retreated as we are driving back to the “comfort” of a gated community.
DEAR WHITE FOLKS: You Don’t Know How Easy You Have It
by David J. Leonard
Dear White folks:
Between the racist comments, the constant use of the race denial card (this country’s most frequently used “race card”) and the absurd claims of White victimhood, you have really grated my last nerve.
Sure, we got teary during The Blind Side and Antoine Fisher; we maybe even gave money to KONY2012 and after Hurricane Katrina; we maybe even donned a hoodie to protest the murder of Trayvon Martin. I don’t even doubt there are individuals out there who are genuinely concerned about racism and injustice; I don’t doubt that there are many Whites that marched with Dr. King and whose “best friends” might be Black. None of this matters if African Americans continue to die at the hands of guns held by security guards and police officers all without justice
I have heard that “we are all Trayvon Martin” over the last few weeks, yet we are not Trayvon Martin – and we never could be. White America is never suspicious. White America can walk to the store without fear of being hunted down. White America can count on justice and a nation grieving at the loss of White life. We aren’t Trayvon Martin, we are George Zimmerman: presumed innocent until proven innocent.
I want you to close your eyes for a second, and imagine that your son or daughter, sister or brother, granddaughter or grandson, ventured to the corner store for some Skittles and tea but never returned? Can you imagine if Peter or Jan were gunned down right around the corner from your house and the police didn’t notify you right away? Can you imagine if little Sydney or Bobby sat in the morgue for days as you searched to find out what happened them? Can you even imagine the police letting the perpetrator go or the news media remaining silent? Can you even fathom learning about background and drug tests on your child? Can you imagine the news media demonizing your child, blaming your child for his own death?
Can you imagine the outcry if seven White youths had been gunned down by police and security guards in a matter of months? Can you imagine the extensive political interest, the media stories that would saturate the airwaves? Can you imagine Fox News or any number of newspapers reporting about a school suspension for one of the victims or doctoring pictures in an attempt to make these victims less sympathetic? Can you imagine a person holding up a sign calling these victims “thugs” and “hoodlums.”Just think about the media frenzy, the concern from politicians, and the national horror every time a school shooting happens in Suburbia or every time a White woman goes missing…can you imagine if women routinely went missing from your community and the news and police department simply couldn’t be bothered?
No, you can’t. And you don’t have to.
Yet, from Florida to Los Angeles, from Atlanta to Wisconsin, from Chicago to Ohio, Black families are burying the innocent and the future. Doesn’t that make you sad; doesn’t that make your angry? Our silence is telling. We can barely say their names much less acknowledge the epidemic in our midst: Stephon Watts. Trayvon Martin. Ramarley Graham. Wendell Allen. Dante Price. Bo Morrison. Rekia Boyd. Kendrec McDade.
All have lost their lives; and we don’t even say their names. All have died under similarly disturbing circumstances. All should have prompted national outrage and action; or at the least for us to say their names.
I don’t care if you cried during The Help and if the ‘feel good’ movie of the year featuring chicken-frying maids and affluent White women made you feel all post-racial tingly on the inside. Did you cry at the report of yet another lost Black life? If so, what have those tears done – have they led you to join a rally, to demand justice? I don’t care if you voted for President Obama; have you demanded dramatic changes to our criminal (in)justice system? It is time for us to check ourselves, to listen and demand a better America starting with ourselves. It is time to stop denying racism and defending White privilege, distracting and deflecting with “what ifs” and excuses. It is time to demand justice for the Trayvons and the Rekias, not because it could have been one of our sons and daughters–it couldn’t–but because it is simply the right thing to do.
In Conversation with History: Speaking Back to Trayvon
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan
In wake of the murder of Trayvon Martin, in the face of anger, sadness, frustration, outrage, sadness, and more anger, I found myself returning to several quotes that reflect on racism, violence, injustice, and resistance. I found myself wanting to dialogue with these thinkers, these organic intellectuals, and those who continue to promote “freedom dreams.” This is my conversation within an experimental dialogue that emphasizes the continuity of violence and resistance throughout our history.
Sojourner Truth: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?”
DJL: Why does this continue to be so true for women, for people of color, for the poor? The parent over there sends their child out to play, without a worry; the child over can go to the park, walk to school, or go to the store, without any fears. Innocence is protected. Nobody can say that for Trayvon Martin; ain’t he a person; ain’t a child?
Frederick Douglas: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them.”
DJL: Mr. Douglas, your words remain true today. Where Trayvon’s was deprived of his humanity, where his rights were ignored, where his future was denied “neither persons nor property will be safe.”
Kahil Gibran: “Learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, I am ungrateful to these teachers.”
DJL: Yes, in just three weeks, we have seen injustice from those responsible for justice, terror from those who claim to protect, and erasure from those responsible for education and informing the collective. We have once again seen the stains and violence of American racism. Yet, we have seen the apathy and ignorance concerning these painful realities.
Shirley Chisholm: “Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degradation, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Americans live. Until a problem reaches their doorsteps, they’re not going to understand. . . Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.”
DJL: Ms. Chisholm, we are still seeing this today. When black and suspicious becomes normalized, racism is invisible; when the murder of black youth is not breaking news “it invisible because it is so normal.” When black death goes unnoticed it has become normal and acceptable. Only when fathers and mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters begin to contemplate “what if,” what if my family or friends couldn’t go to the store without fear, without threat, without potential death will we see change.
Albert Camus: “In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
DJL: Why do people continue to side with the executioners? But not in every case? It must stop. In a world where black youth can’t walk to the store to buy skittles and something to drink, where black youth are deemed suspicious for walking while black, in “a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.” It is the job of thinking people not to silence the critics, the fighters of freedom.
