Fresh out of Fucks to Give: Critical Reflections on Son of Baldwin’s “I Don’t Give a Fuck About Justine Damond”

Self-Consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. — G.W.F. Hegel

I don’t give a FUCK about Justine Damond and what happened to her… I don’t give a fuck because most white people didn’t give a fuck when police murdered seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones as she lay on a couch, sleeping. What most white people — and some black people — did was blame Aiyana’s family. — Son of Baldwin

Yesterday, I was in the airport. My flight had been changed four times over the last 5 hours (because of maintenance issues, but I digress), so in order to find clarity about the situation, I decided to go to the customer service desk. Standing behind the man in line, I pulled out my phone to pull up my boarding pass. The man in front of me had finished; and, unfortunately for me, a white woman just jumped in front of me as I was on my phone. I was right behind the man.

Anyway, the lady proceeded to take care of whatever business she was dealing with, and was finishing up. Little did I know, another line — the true line — was forming right next to me, filled with white people.

“I’m in line,” I told the lady.

“Oh! I didn’t know you were in line. I thought you were just standing there.”

I rolled my eyes. And the man behind the desk — a black man, mind you — laughed the kind of hearty laugh that only another black person could laugh in this situation. How in the entire hell did a group of about five people not notice the 6'2", 235-lb. man standing right next to them? I know how: because black people are invisible in this country. Enter Son of Baldwin

In his piece “I don’t Give a Fuck About Justine Damond,” SOB (and by SOB, I mean Son of Baldwin) was — rightfully — pissed about the differential responses that occur when a black person is shot by cops over and against when a white person is shot by a black cop. We need not rehearse these realities, but let’s do it anyway, for old times’ sake:

1. When a black person is shot and BLM activists protest and rally behind the victim, the “blue lives matter” folk come out the woodworks, rallying behind the officer in his/her “valiant” efforts to protect public safety. We’re hearing a pin drop from the blue lives matter folk for the officer who shot Damond.
2. When a black person is shot, his or her past criminal record or — as in the case of Tamir Rice — a highlighting of the victim’s bodily characteristics as a pretext for violence. We don’t know anything about Damond, except that she was a blond white woman who was caring and compassionate.
3. When a black person is shot, the officer is almost always painted as the valiant savior. Here, we’re finding the loudest forms of condemnation — particularly from the (former) police chief — of the officer himself.

Black people often remain acutely aware of these “inconsistencies,” as we might euphemistically call them. Charleena Lyles also called the cops and was met with bullets when they came — but the narrative was different. She was “wielding a knife,” and this was enough to kill her. But black people know the difference. Somehow, white people — even many of the most liberal of whites — seem to miss the contradiction. So it falls on folks like SOB to remind them.

Pointing out the contradictions present in the logic of white supremacy, activists and writers alike have continually cried foul when white folks systemically get dissimilar treatment than black people. And I’m not simply talking about the justice system. The media plays a considerable role in perpetuating these contradictions.

But I’m not 45: this isn’t a BS rant about how the media is perpetuating fake news or keeping up a witch hunt (which, as an aside, is an ironic turn of phrase from a misogynists — especially given that the Salem witch trials were one of the most egregious forms of sexism this country might have ever seen. But I digress). No, my critique of the media comes from the fact that it’s truth has never been truth, but instead a manipulation of facts and images aimed at perpetuating a myth of white nationalist jingoistic supremacy. All white supremacists don’t wear hoods; and at a systemic level, news outlets perpetuate white supremacy on an almost daily basis.

Consider it: the New York Times and the Washington Post are reporting on Russia — and believe me, it’s great gossip — even though Jeff Sessions is determined to return us to Jim Crow-era realities. Political pundits still fail to articulate the Republican outrage over Obamacare as what it truly is — racists being racist. And when they do cover black death, they do it because it fuels ratings — not because they’re reporting the facts. If this were the case, we’d hear about the hundreds of black deaths occurring across the country. But we don’t; and it’s because all black death isn’t profitable.

I use the media as an example of what I think SOB is saying: this country doesn’t give a shit about us. And I don’t mean this in the kind of vitriolic white-hood kind of way. I mean it in the sense that black life is merely matter, passive “stuff” that doesn’t require recognition.

When Hegel wrote the sentence that I put at the beginning of this piece, he was saying something quite basic: humanity needs recognition in order for it to be human. People aren’t people unless there are other people who see them as people (yes, I wrote that sentence — thanks, Hegel). And not seeing someone as a person is not simply manifested through acts of violence; it’s also shown through indifference, through forms of apologetics that cannot recognize the truth of black humanity. In a very real sense, America cannot “see” black people; it cannot recognize blackness as woven into the fabric of this country.

We saw this with Clinton’s “three strikes and you’re out” policies.

We saw this when Obama took a trip to Connecticut to mourn the deaths of largely white people who had been killed by a white man — but only made passing remarks about the scores of black children who died in Chicago that same year, and continually refused to call out systemic racism during his presidency (while simultaneously providing police departments with more killing toys — how did the Dallas PD get a bomb in the first place? I’m not saying BHO gave it to them, but somebody did).

We saw this with the 2016 election, when neither Hillary, Bernie, nor 45 had the courage to develop holistic visions of racial and social justice. (If you don’t believe me re: Bernie, take a look at Richard Wright’s Native Son. The socialists who seemed to fight for black life only wanted black people as tokenized caricatures — not as viable strategists who could advocate for justice.)

And we see it again with the Damond shooting.

All of this amounts to a fundamental fact that makes America America: America is built upon black invisibility. In other words, black people are invisible in this country.

I don’t mean this in the sense that black people are apparitions. I mean it in the sense that Ralph Ellison meant when he wrote the preface to Invisible Man:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.

Dehumanization doesn’t start with the word nigger. It begins with an ocular sleight of hand, a political magic trick that suggests that a group of people were never “people” in the first place. When this happens, people get treated as things — cue slavery. Scholars disagree about whether slavery started because of racism or economics, but they agree on this: black folk were routinely described as unthinking brutes, mere material beings whose cognition only rose slightly above that of animals. This was a conjure tool par excellence: it transformed a person into a thing, and in so doing, produced a context wherein white people can’t see black people. They can only see black “things” — and no one gives a fuck about things. Not giving a fuck doesn’t begin with physical violence. It begins with the political violence of indifference.

What I love about SOB’s piece is that it is written in anger, but not concentrated hatred. I could be wrong here, but what I hear him doing is saying that indifference can go both ways. If you refuse to recognize me, then I’ll do the same. Because refusing to recognize me amounts to rendering me invisible — which amounts to not giving a fuck about me. SOB says it better than I ever could:

I will never extend my care to a peoples whose idea of reciprocation is my annihilation. They can mourn over their losses by their goddamn selves. Just like we do… I don’t give a fuck about Justine Damond because there are too many — way too many — white-neglected black bodies I have to climb over before I could even get to thinking about hers.

SOB’s refusal to “give a fuck” comes from the fact that he literally can’t give a fuck — he has no room in his mind, heart, or anywhere else to begin that process because there are countless “white-neglected black bodies” (I love this turn of phrase) that demand his attention and care.

And in making this claim, Baldwin does what many black people are unwilling to do: in refusing to give a fuck about Damond, he also refuses to give a fuck about whether or not white people, white institutions, or even this whiteness-based country see him. Hegel claimed that a person needs another person to recognize him or her as a person. But in his white-man rush to universality, he didn’t qualify this claim. And even if he had, he wouldn’t be able to stop black people from finding their humanity in black communities. What I hear SOB powerfully claiming is that black folk don’t need white people — or even this country as a whole — to recognize us in order for us to thrive and experience the complex vicissitudes of life.

There are waaaay too many black people in this world to worry about whether America sees me as human. Even if SOB didn’t mean this, what I take from his piece is simple: all I need is recognition from those who are willing to do so.

So, for all of the black folk who continually struggle with our invisibility, remember: invisibility can be a blessing. We don’t need substantiation from the media, the president, or even white liberals to know our lives are inestimable.

We don’t need the media playing our deaths on a loop to know that our lives mean something.

We don’t need the president to come and visit us in order to know that our lives are substantial.

And we for damn sure don’t need black organizations who thrive off of white recognition (cue the NAACP) to substantiate our claims that black lives matter.

All we need is each other.

Be well, beloveds.