Overdue thoughts on Ferguson

On the night the grand jury of Ferguson made its decision, everyone’s first course of action was to leap to their laptop screens. I, too, was tempted to jump on the bandwagon, but I stopped myself. Did I really have enough information to make an informed conclusion? For months, public opinion has been based on speculation whereas only the jury had been granted access to structural evidence. As much as I disagreed with the final decision, I had to wonder: could it be that something brought up in court had turned the tables? I didn’t feel comfortable indiscriminately *liking* all of the profound statuses that popped up on my newsfeed (many of which were just paraphrases of one another) -- not because I had any qualms about the value of black lives, but because I did not want to risk discrediting such an important piece of history by being ignorant on the subject matter. There was simply no moral prerogative I could expect to gain from tagging along with the “hashtag advocacy” culture.

In light of the Garner and Brown cases I began to wonder why some white-on-black police brutality cases get more exposure than others, and though I wasn’t really able to come to a definitive conclusion, I can say this: the unfortunate and unwarranted fate of Michael Brown did receive a lot of attention because of the racially charged context, but it was not a respective, isolated episode -- his death marked the boiling point for a population’s intolerance for systematic racism. In other words, I don’t think the shooting necessarily set the bomb, rather, it detonated it. I have to be honest, hearing my classmates repeatedly associate Bigger Thomas sympathies with the situation made me cringe. To some extent, I agree with people who say that we should be giving people like Michael Brown the benefit of the doubt by trying to understand their mindset rather than immediately assigning them a victim complex. Unfortunately, there are people who severely butcher this rationale by going as far as frivolously blaming the dead:

Trayvon Martin should not have been wearing a hoodie.

Michael Brown shouldn’t have stolen Cigarillos.

Eric Garner shouldn’t have been selling loose cigarettes.

As useful it is to take Ferguson as a teaching experience on the continued pervasiveness of systematic racism, I think it’s important for us to distinguish that aspect from the second main protest that has emerged from this incident: the increased militarization of police. To encapsulate this sentiment, I present you with Bob McManus, a bold columnist from the New York Post who commented: “Eric Garner and Michael Brown had much in common, not the least of which was this: On the last day of their lives, they made bad decisions. Epically bad decisions. Each broke the law — petty offenses, to be sure, but sufficient to attract the attention of the police. And then — tragically, stupidly, fatally, inexplicably — each fought the law.” REALLY? Are we supposed to passively condone police abuse of power? Having some respect for differing opinions, I had assumed the Ferguson controversy was a matter of conflicting interpretations of evidence and witness accounts. Come to find out, overt negligence of the Ferguson law enforcement played a significant role in why there are so many holes in the story. Not only did the investigators fail to recover fingerprints on the weapon, but Wilson washed away blood evidence, and the medical examiner did not take any pictures of the body because his camera apparently ran out of battery -- the list goes on. The existence of these critical pieces of evidence could have made all the difference.

Law enforcement continued to disappoint me with their response to civilian protests. Demonstrations across the board from peaceful to violent were met by officers armed in military-grade riot gear, which if you ask me, is very poor strategy in easing the public’s unrest and distrust in law enforcement. If you dress in riot gear, you’re more likely to engage in one, and if you throw in some tear gas (plural chemical equivalent to the chokehold, anyone?), you’re just inviting confrontation. As expected, the protesters returned the crackdown with more aggression, sparking a relentless back and forth cycle that has done nothing but erode the police force’s reputation. Apparently, the Ferguson police department basically managed to flag the area off as a temporary no-fly zone, allegedly because they “feared their aircraft would be shot at”, privately because they didn’t want any news helicopters hovering over any violent protests.

Is Sethe Crazy?

There have been an awful lot of blog posts regarding the morality of Sethe’s controversial decision to kill Beloved that have all come to pretty much the same general conclusions. Inspired by Jack’s recent blog post, I’ve decided to look at Sethe’s condition from a medical standpoint.

I have it on good authority (Wikipedia) that a principal characteristic of an insane person is their inability to separate physical reality from imagination. For Sethe to be, for instance, schizophrenic, would mean that it was not a ghost that drove her sons away, in fact there was no ghost to begin with. Of course, in order to evaluate someone’s perception of reality, we need to be able to distinguish it ourselves on the authority of the novel, which becomes a bit of a problem when all of the characters seem to accept the existence of a haunting. Thus, in order to rule out Sethe’s insanity for this particular trait, we would have to put Denver, Paul D, Baby Suggs, Stamp Paid and basically all of the townspeople in the same category for acknowledging something that in our physical world, doesn’t plausibly exist. But then again, we have to remember that none of them committed the same moral infraction she did.

Alternately, we could assume that in this parallel Ohioan universe, the baby’s ghost truly does exist. If we assume it does, then we can look in the direction of psychopathy. It’s common knowledge that psychopathy is often induced by a trauma, which certainly applies in Sethe’s situation. Though she endured years of brutal slavery, it’s almost too easy to diagnose the isolated incident. By raping her and stealing her milk, schoolteacher and his hooligans contributed the single most agonizing experience to Sethe’s life, one that could potentially have acted as a trigger to her suppository insanity. Finally, we arrive at the central discussion; the moral dilemma -- in order for Sethe to be a psychopath, she must not be able to discern right from wrong. Though we could say she generally conducts herself with rationale and sensibility, how you classify this particular characteristic rests solely on your moral stance of her decision to commit infanticide.

*I’m almost positive none of you think Sethe is insane (I don’t either). But given how we’ve struggled with the supernatural aspects and the moral aspects, it’s definitely interesting to contemplate why they may be there and how they affect the images of the characters.

Nikki-Rosa

childhood remembrances are always a drag   

if you’re Black

you always remember things like living in Woodlawn   

with no inside toilet

and if you become famous or something

they never talk about how happy you were to have   

your mother

all to yourself and

how good the water felt when you got your bath   

from one of those

big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in   

and somehow when you talk about home   

it never gets across how much you

understood their feelings

as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale

and even though you remember

your biographers never understand

your father’s pain as he sells his stock   

and another dream goes

And though you’re poor it isn’t poverty that

concerns you

and though they fought a lot

it isn’t your father’s drinking that makes any difference   

but only that everybody is together and you

and your sister have happy birthdays and very good   

Christmases

and I really hope no white person ever has cause   

to write about me

because they never understand

Black love is Black wealth and they’ll

probably talk about my hard childhood

and never understand that

all the while I was quite happy

Yesterday in class I chose to present the poem Nikki-Rosa by Nikki Giovanni (OA 246). When I first read it, I was immediately overcome by a sense of guilt, because while I'm often susceptible to seeing the “rags-to-riches” narrative as the most important if not only side of a person’s story, I have simultaneously taken what I have for granted. It’s important to note that the poem itself does not intend to invoke guilt, in fact the author makes it clear that pity is the last thing she wants. The mix of nostalgia, irritation, and bitterness summarizes how she remembers her childhood and how she feels about the way others try to portray it. In class I likened this to how you feel when people keep asking “what’s wrong?” no matter how many times you tell them you’re fine. They don’t understand.

The artist wants to set a good example for other members of her race but is constantly hindered by other people’s one-dimensional marginalization of her experiences; in the process, these perhaps well-intentioned “white biographers”  misrepresent her. And it isn’t just the happy remembrances that they misinterpret -- in addition to focusing on the lack of an indoor toilet and bathtub instead of how warm the water felt, or her father’s drinking and her parents’ fighting instead of the closeness of their family, they also don’t understand “your father’s pain as he sells his stock”. To these people, this is just another sad fact of her hard black life, part of the feel-good, strength-in-the-face-of-adversity tale they want to sell. Or perhaps they think that by presumptuously highlighting and magnifying these specific perils they are somehow dignifying African Americans, as if suffering is the only thing that made them who they are.

Neil expertly pointed out the line “they never talk about how happy you were to have your mother all to yourself”, which just reiterates the ignorance of American media and how inclined they would be to fixate on the absence of her father and not how much she enjoyed the attention from her mother. This kind of pessimism is not only patronizing and condescending but also characteristic of the self-righteous morality that exists in this country. When I asked the class if they could think of any contemporary examples of glamorizing misfortune, it went from athletes to popstars, some of whom were not black but all of whom missed the point that “black love is black wealth”.

It’s not difficult to identify that the root of this transgression comes from materialism and is not just a “white” issue. I’m aware that the artist herself has even expressed that it’s “important for us to be the tellers of our own stories; because only then would they be as authentic as we are. And by we I don’t mean just Black people, I mean all human beings. I wholeheartedly believe in autobiographies. And I don’t care much for biographies.” I will leave you on this note; all of us at Uni are relatively fortunate, and you've at least had the luxury of a peaceful childhood, the luxury to complain, or the luxury to ask for expensive gifts on your birthdays and Christmases. But if you ever become famous or something, no one will ever question if you were happy -- please remember that that too is a luxury.

"cool funny black guy"

To too many people, the only manifestation of racism they recognize is in its antiquated, truly blatant, KKK-civil-rights-movement-era form, and because this degree of racism has for the most part been extinguished, they believe racism virtually doesn’t exist. In a rudimentary sense it would seem that erasing racism would be a progressive move, but the consequence of such a skewed perspective is that it becomes increasingly difficult for mainstream society to imagine the real-life experiences of minorities and yet more prone to misidentifying latent racism. Beatty successfully points out how this misconception has impaired the public education system; Gunnar’s classmates and teachers ignorantly perpetuate these minor offenses, giving him seemingly harmless labels like the “cool funny black guy”, and while he good-naturedly plays along, he is subject to many instances of stereotyping.

If this novel had a central protest, I think it would be against the contradictory nature that is so ubiquitous in the context of our multicultural environment. In Gunnar’s own words: “My early education consisted of two types of multiculturalism: classroom multiculturalism, which reduced race, sexual orientation, and gender to inconsequence, and schoolyard multiculturalism, where the kids who knew the most Polack, queer, and farmer's daughter jokes ruled.” However well-intentioned, classroom multiculturalism is exceedingly inconsistent: on the one hand, Gunnar’s instructors naively embrace eracism, on the other, they try to show how forward-thinking are by acknowledging and attempting to address what they believe are his racial obstructions. These inconsistencies contribute to his general state of confusion upon moving to Hillside, in the sense that he is unsure what image to adopt in order to be accepted now that he is no longer the “cool funny black guy”. Though Gunnar is eventually able to overcome these impasses, I think Beatty makes a profound point by pointing out a seemingly not so profound transgression, one that is muted and much harder to detect or evaluate.

Chameleon

The White Boy Shuffle is very much a novel that defies stereotypes. Gunnar Kaufman is able to identify with so many different groups that he isn’t compatible with any of them. The best way I can articulate Beatty’s use of this phenomenon is that Gunnar is an example of a transcendent outlier that redefines, if not undefines what it means to be black. Of course, this is not to say that Gunnar isn’t black, but that his qualities too frequently contradict one another for him to be defined in any one light. In fact, he is fluent in so many cultural settings that it’s impossible to classify him as anything other than an individual. As anticipated, we as socially apprehensive adolescents, had high expectations for him and were most bewildered by why, with such high aptitudes in so many fields, he refuses to take the role as a precursor for any of them -- who wouldn’t want to be a basketball star or attend Harvard? In terms of individual identity and not allowing race to limit one’s potential, Beatty’s message is reminiscent of Invisible Man as opposed to the naturalistic leanings of Native Son, but the difference is that while the narrator seeks recognition, Gunnar is a unique individual only for the sense of himself and not for the sake of standing out from others.

Ethnic Notions

The degree to which society has been willing to speak for African Americans from the moment they became Americans never ceases to amaze me. Whilst maintaining ever-insulting misrepresentations, I have found that America’s systematic approach to black racism has also been incredibly cunning. Our past has been tainted with a medley of inaccurate and hyperbolic portrayals of African Americans, each adjusted to accommodate the historical circumstances, resulting in an often paradoxical hodgepodge of characters. For those who missed the Ethnic Notions movie night, this may be a convenient summary.

Jim Crow is probably the black imitation with the most name recognition. Playing a fidgety, dancing caricature meant to impersonate an old handicapped black man, the actor by no means put any effort into accuracy… but alas, his impression impacted the public perception of African Americans indefinitely. Simultaneously, minstrel/Sambo-type characters reinforced the notion of slavery by depicting African American laborers as happy servants. The version of this character I found particularly interesting was “Mammy”, essentially a plump auntie figure who is both happily obedient and fiercely loyal to her white household. What I learned from Ethnic Notions was that she is intentionally not illustrated as a sex symbol so that she will not pose a threat to the mistress. At the same time, she is the matriarch of “her own people”, which while I might add is a stark contrast to women of the “civilized culture” who are designed to remain subservient, it is also an affront to the masculinity of black men. In essence, the general trend of these compliant black characters was to represent harmless menials, thus justifying the institution of slavery.

Before the Abolitionist movement really gained momentum, the media was careful to depict slaves as docile and faithful in order to effectively validate their debasing servitude. Once freedom became a possibility, this was completely reconstructed into two main manifestations. More civil of the two was Zip Coon, an arrogant, ex-slave who bore a flamboyant appearance and equally frivolous speech. His failed attempt at respectability was aimed at mocking the supposed failure of newly freed blacks to adapt to their liberation. Presented in a much more unpleasant format was the “brute”. Too primitive to even deserve a characteristic name, the brute image was especially popular during the Reconstruction era and was intended to demonstrate not only that blacks were incapable of adapting to their freedom, but that they were also incapable of self-control. In the apotheosis of scientific racism, the brute justified a reversion to slavery as well as the killing of African Americans.

In the three centuries since these stereotypes were first introduced, African Americans have been pigeonholed into various roles based on the particular oppression they are facing at any given point in time. For example, the brute image, however prevalent during the Reconstruction Era, would have never been employed during the slave era because it would have suggested that the slaves wanted to be freed and not, as we believed, happy Sambos. I think it is important to remember that between the Sambos, minstrelsy, Jim Crows, Zip Coons, and brutes, this compartmentalization of African Americans has not only been an injustice but also regularly contradictory within itself. So if you’re gonna be racist, at least be consistent.

Wright vs. Hurston

Though the topic of dialect in Their Eyes Were Watching God has been exhausted, thanks to Richard Wright I think there’s just enough oil for me to give it one last run.

While most of us have been receptive to Hurston’s use of vernacular speech, our good friend Richard Wright was quick to accuse Hurston of “[exploiting] that phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint’”, in other words, he felt she that had reduced her characters to exotic spectacles. He goes on to describe the novel as a work of literature tailored for a white audience, because by his logic, these supposedly primitive mannerisms would be a wonted expectation to such readers. Furthermore, Wright claims that the use of dialect does not go beyond contributing an organic effect, and that the novel’s resemblance to oral tradition is highly antiquated. The most profound indictment Wright makes is when he criticizes TEWWG of carrying “no theme, no message, no thought”. By all means, in comparison to a highly aggressive writing style like Wright’s, Hurston’s does not attempt to be nearly as combatant--her pace is much more balanced. Though I cannot say for sure, my assessment is that Wright may have only interpreted the novel as a one-dimensional narrative because he was distracted by the potent use of diction. I have yet to confirm this prognosis!

If you would like to see Wright's full critique, here is the link: http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam358/wrightrev.html