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.