To the tick-tock and you don’t stop. Writing for my life. And perhaps yours. Disturbing the peace in order to find it. No sleep ’til Crooklyn. Let’s get free.

Mar 2, 2016

Choice of Demons

[Photo description: Indoors. Screen capture of a Donald Trump rally. A black woman (center) is surrounded by a crowd of hostile white people.]

I couldn’t watch the video for the same reason I can’t look at lynching postcards: The destruction and demoralization of black people doesn’t thrill me.

But it is definitely not lost on me how America has abandoned even the veneer of civility in regard to how it treats black people. There was a time when it lied to itself about it, denied genocide in the same breath that it mangled bodies and held picnics over the corpses.

America has moved its deficiency out of the shadows and back into sunlight, bold as 1802. The question, always, is whether we are going to tolerate it, if we have any other choice but to tolerate because power is risky.

What video am I talking about? The one with the black women at the Trump rally and the white people who dared put their hands on them.

I guess the question that I’m afraid to ask both you and myself is: How can it be that we allowed those people the continued use of their limbs?

On another level, I’m still scratching my head over how Hillary Clinton got REAL Missy Anne/Miss Millie with the young woman who asked her polite, though challenging and direct, policy questions in that other video going around the Web.

[Photo description: Indoors. Daytime. In a cafe. Hillary Clinton, left, looking at a young black woman, right. Clinton is holding a paper cup in her hand and a plastic cap in the other. She is gesturing toward the woman. In the background, Clinton’s aides and others.]

Like, why did Clinton boss-/massa-talk her like that? What did that young woman do to warrant such a disrespectful reaction? What does her response in that situation mean? And how do we reconcile that with the fact that black people have been voting for Clinton in the primaries with untold verve and commitment?

Is it that black folks have three demons to contend with and are siding with the most familiar?

Goodness.

James Baldwin ain’t never lie: The devil DOES find work.

(H/T to Rishi Verma for asking for my POV)

Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer from Brooklyn, N.Y. He is the creator of the social media community, Son of Baldwin, which can be found on Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter.