White III OR #NMOS14 OR The Grief of Broken Promise
Reflections on my Whiteness III
This entry was supposed to be a continuation of my reflection of my own whiteness as I went to college and then into the professional work for. That part will be quick. But, considering #Ferguson and its aftermath, I have to jump to the present instead of so much detail of the past.
Private university, mostly white students; English Literature major = mostly white students. When English Literature is discussed, it is almost always the "dead white man" variety, postcolonialism notwithstanding. It's disheartening today to see syllabi of American Lit and even British Lit nearly full of dead white men, ignoring a) more women writers than we like to admit; b) American Native (Canadians use the better term, "First Nations") writers; then c) the constellation of authors of color who are routinely given only token notice. Every Lit professor knows Cisneros, but I'll bet $10 that most can't name ten Hispanic American authors. They know Langston and Brooks and Douglas, but few know Wilson and Jacobs and fewer have really read Lorde. The Anglophiles will cite Equiano of course, but likely haven't read Pinnock. It is what it is. English literature in the US is usually meant to be white English literature, and that's how I saw literature for four years, with the occasional addition of black pepper for seasoning. Many of the literature professors I know actually shy away from post-co, though our students would be more engaged if we taught that as literature instead of Emily Dickinson. Just telling it like it is. "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" has yet to be made into a feature film, but both the novel and film Life of Pi was an international blockbuster. Just saying.
After graduating with a Lit degree, I realized I didn't want to become an attorney like I had planned, and stumbled around bookkeeping for a few years (how an English major becomes a bookkeeper is a long story). There I worked with blacks for really the first time. I was trained on the books by a black woman, but I was promoted over her quickly. I was grateful for the money and freedom to make my hours, but I didn't think to talk to her about how it made her feel. Yes, my manager and all the assistant managers were white, but this was Memphis and that's the way it is there. Still is.
I left that job and went into tech support, then programming, then systems admin. While still in Memphis, our company had four distinct units -- from sales and A/R, to IT, to IT mechanical support (largely shipping our materials and making sure ancient IBM printers stayed alive), to the warehouse. The dichotomy between body and mind was obvious there: only blacks worked in the warehouse, and only blacks and a white woman worked in IT mechanical support. Only whites worked in sales and A/R and only whites worked in IT. Whites smart. Blacks strong. I spent more time with the IT mech support than most and Floyd, a large black man who would talk with me frankly about being black in Memphis but he never said anything about being black in a white corporation. The other black men -- one an ardent Nation of Islam member and the other a younger man who transferred with me to Houston -- and I would sometimes eat lunch together, but we never did anything social off the company property. Our friendship was a 9-5 one. I was transferred to Houston and never saw Floyd again.
All this shows that too often our relationships between whites and blacks are hardly "real" relationships that can be considered community -- they are institutional relationships, artificial in that we are civil to each other essentially because we're paid to do so. I was paid to be professional and get things done. Floyd was paid to be professional and to get things done -- usually the things I told him needed to get done. Once, I recommended a film Rosewood to him and he watched and came back and told the others that I was the one who recommended it. The others seemed to be surprised that a white man would like that film and then recommend it so openly to a black man. The NOI man said, "That Bruce is pretty cool." But ... really? I suppose using film as a mediator of frustrations, experiences, hopes, sorrow, is a first step to an honest engagement about race and manhood, but it's hardly the honest engagement that we need.
Last night I attended the National Moment of Silence at MacGregor Park in Houston with two friends (both Latino, incidentally). When I first drove into the park, ten minutes before 6:00p, I saw perhaps 20 people there, six Houston Police Department cars, and all the media trucks. I was disappointed with the turnout, but I shouldn't have been. I was ultimately very pleased.
They came by pairs, two by two across the grass.
They came solo, walking across the parking lot.
They came black and white and brown.
They came wearing red, faces somber.
Mostly young, mostly black,
They came together in the cooling of the afternoon.
They came to stand in the shade of the live oaks.
They gathered candles, poems.
They clustered in small groups,
Mostly strangers, a community forming.
They came by pairs, two by two.
They came solo and then
Two hundred men and women and children
Two hundred men and women and children
Two hundred men and women and children
Stood silent.
After the moment of silence, the organizer, Ashley, invited people to stand on the picnic table and say what they had to say. I listened to a young writer talk about his youth, which involved crime, but started with police abuse before the crime. Jail time, conversion, now a writer, still harassed. I heard a black woman thank everyone for showing up but reminded us that this is really a black thing -- that it's blacks who are harassed more, black men who are killed more, black men who are jailed more. I heard a young Latino man who couldn't raise his voice over the crowd because that very morning he had been accosted by HPD and he wore his voice out -- out of frustration, anger at what had started in Ferguson, perhaps just being pissed for being a young brown man pulled over one more time. I heard a young woman tell of being harassed by the police on her way home from work at age 18, her pre-teen brothers and cousin interrogated as if already criminals, separated and then her mother threatened. I heard a poet narrate the life of Kenneth Cunningham of White Plains, from his military service in Vietnam to his final breaths, killed by police. I heard a man remind everyone to vote for those who would change the system, though I don't believe the system can be changed. I saw the media's cameras pointing and scanning, as if 200 people, 200 black and brown and white people, couldn't convene for a peaceful rally in silence and sadness at what has happened. Peculiar, these people.
On Saturday 9 August an 18 year old black man walked down public streets in impoverished Ferguson, Missouri with two friends. The story is told elsewhere better than I could, except for this: if I and two white men walked down public streets in Ferguson, a white policeman would not have told us to get off the streets, or if he had, I wouldn't have been shot.
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| Michael Brown's Mother |
Like Mr. Smith, Kevin Goff, 19, a freshman studying film, did not protest Mr. Paterno’s firing. He came out just to see the show.“My friends were like, ‘I don’t want to get Maced,’ ” he said. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to miss seeing this, so I guess that means I do kind of want to get Maced.’ ”
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| Kevin Goff. Not Dead Yet |
Wednesday I had to get some reading done, so I came to a local Starbucks where everyone in the place was white. Ferguson, Missouri by that time in the evening had become an occupied territory, with militarized police -- thanks to Homeland Security -- with full riot gear and Bearcat vehicles, their automatic rifles on tripods aimed at unarmed American civilians wearing t-shirts and shorts and with their hands up ...
I watched the Twitter feed for hours, #Ferguson immediately trending, hundreds of thousands in America, thousands in #Gaza sending their support, seeing an impoverished neighborhood filled with tear gas, verbal threats, two journalists jailed while the officers mocked them and ignored the pleas of another man with breathing problems, the police attacking an Al Jazeera news team, then tearing their news equipment down, while the whole world was watching.
Except that it wasn't the whole world watching. The major corporate networks weren't covering the oppression and today most Americans don't care. POTUS stayed on The Vineyard. The Governor of Missouri stayed home that night. The religious right response the next day of course blamed the violence on those who own homes there, who walk the streets there, who apparently find police harassment not unusual.
I admit I've been depressed for a few weeks. Lots of things. But Ferguson 2014 really brought me to tears. It's not just all the broken promises one nation, but all the empty rhetoric under God, the two-faced police and politicians with liberty, practiced in plausible deniability and justice for all, ignoring the sorrow and grief and fear of real humans with real hearts and minds.
1514
1614
1714
1814
1914
2014 -- Europeans and their descendants have been here for over five centuries now. Winthrop's Model of Christian Charity needs to be a discussion for another time, but it also needs to be reintroduced to our understanding of power and oppression in whatever is the broken promise that America is.
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