Keep Talking, and Eventually Racism Will Make Sense
Another year, another senseless killing of a black man, another summer-long maelstrom of media coverage and think pieces and lawmakers spewing platitudes and town halls and social media activism lingering into the winter. With the news cycle self-perpetuating every update and quote from Ferguson and Staten Island, to be immune or not haven an opinion is akin to being a Luddite or purposefully blinding oneself. I can’t get enough of it as a self-professed news cycle-junkie, but honestly, I’m sick of it. What irks me most isn’t the light America cyclically shines on the century-old racial issues, but the tidal wave of explanations and analyses of why incidents like these continue to happen, with no end in sight.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: there is no one reason or explanation for why Mike Brown or Eric Garner were killed. If you were trying to build a flow chart from their deaths back to the underlying reasons for the predicaments, you might have a better chance at reconstructing an Egyptian pyramid from scratch.
The racial tensions plaguing America have such deep-seeded and long-winded roots that it would take a round-the-clock team of sociologists, economists, public policy analysts, preachers, gang members, drug users, mothers, fathers, and everyone in between to trace. The plight of the black experience is unyielding to modern times’ assertion that we live in a post-racial society.
From the genesis of American slavery, — and I say ‘American’ because its was the only form undertaken on a strictly racial basis — to the Three-Fifths Compromise, to the short-lived Reconstruction period, to the Great Migrations, to redlining and block-busting, to the Civil Rights era, to the urban blight of the 70s, to the crack epidemic of the 80s and 90s, to today’s supposed post-racial society, America has never truly been okay with blacks as full citizens.
Apologists and deniers will say different until they’re blue in the face, but the facts and narratives that shape Black America’s current state can never be denied. As a black child, you learn this very early.
When I was a Padawan, I went to a very well-integrated elementary school with a gifted program. Race wasn’t an issue because, standardized tests aren’t intended to see race among our best and brightest. I could pat myself on the back until my hands are sore, but a specific incident awakened my consciousness around 1999. Amadou Diallo’s February 1999 murder was one of the first racially-charged happenings I remember, partly because my Bronx neighborhood inhabited by mostly West Africans and West Indians, but also because it sparked fierce nightly Q&A sessions with my news-junkie father:
*knocks father’s papers off desk and sits down*
“Why did they shoot him, dad?”
“Because they thought he was a criminal.”
“Why did they think he was a criminal?”
“Because they thought he was walking suspiciously in a dangerous neighborhood.”
“Why did they think he was suspicious?”
“If I had to guess, it’s because he was black.”
“But that’s not what Dr. King said… I thought we were free. I thought it didn’t matter what color we were.”
“It doesn’t, but to some people it still does. I honestly don’t know why. The only thing I do know is that a man was killed for no reason, and people are mad. Now go do your homework, and stop asking me questions I can’t answer.”
*walks away confused*
The idea that “being black” was something one could be killed for put the fear of God, Yahweh, Allah, and Buddha in me. I questioned the value of my then-pristine educational record, consumed with the thought that no matter how well I did in school or tucked my shirt into my pants or shined my glasses or remembered the capitols of US states — I was, and still am a huge nerd — I could be murdered by four policemen with itchy trigger fingers and poor eyesight.
It was a harrowing idea for a 9 year-old black child, much less any child to have. For the duration of the Diallo trial proceedings, I was like an information vacuum. Anytime I heard the words ‘Amadou’, ‘Diallo’, ‘grand jury’, or ‘Soundview’, my ears perked up.
Fast forward to March 23rd of that year. Over 200 people were arrested at the NYPD headquarters for protesting, and protests seemed to spring up almost daily. My overly rational yet irrational mind sought to make sense of the protests, wondering, “Why don’t the police talk to them?” and “If Martin Luther King’s non-violent protests worked, why aren’t these helping make change?” Little did I know I’d be asking myself the same questions today.
The ugly truth of the matters of police brutality, black personhood, and every other SEO-boosting buzzword that arises during similar incidents is that change comes way more slowly than anyone would like to admit.
For starters, just over 100 years passed between the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the signing of the Civil Rights Act (1964). Think about that. A century went by before the freedom we were promised actually made it into law. Black men and women born ‘free’ still died as second-class citizens, even though they were American to the bone.
It took 145 years for there to be a black person even considered to be worthy of the Office of the President (sorry, Jesse Jackson). More years have passed between emancipation and Obama’s election than there have been black members of Congress (139). I have almost no doubt that another century will pass before America can truly bury its prejudicial past, though by then, the country might have a new group to vilify unjustly. I say this not to discourage, but to incite you, oh my brothers, to keep talking.
Break out the pitchforks for my unpopular opinion here: after the Civil Rights Movement was forcibly ended by the assassination of its two de facto leaders, Nixon’s War on Drugs, and the wild nature of the 70s, the conversation stopped and so did the progress. American ‘movements’ are noticeably fickle because, quite frankly, people have lives to live. It’s not that no one cares anymore; it’s that there are other things to care about in between coalescing movements.
Look back to the Trayvon Martin and Sean Bell and Ramarley Graham and Oscar Grant cases. The furor that erupted in each of these instances was incredible, and yet weeks after, the news cycles and our collective attentions moved on. Your hashtags and marches and sit-ins and other forms of protest died soon thereafter.
Don’t let that happen. Keep talking, oh my brothers — shouts to the Ludovico treatment — to anyone who will listen. Engage your non-threatening racist friends. Engage the group of hipsters on the train. Engage the guy at the coffee machine. Engage your roommates, your parents, your kids, your siblings, your weed man, your cab driver, your law professor, the guy at your bodega, your job’s doorman, and everyone in between. Talk their ears off until they’re only racist against you for being a motor mouth. Don’t stop. Keep the conversations going. Letting the conversations die a week after the verdicts only serve to slow the process of change.
It’s proven that the more people talk about something, the more it becomes ingrained in their minds that such a thing is real and can happen (see: self-fulfilling prophecy). It might not happen when we want it, but trust that it’s coming. Harkening back to my innocent childhood questioning of the merits of protest, I can only invoke the words of the beloved Dr. King: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
That speech, sadly King’s last, is especially prophetic in light of Obama’s impending departure and the rash of racially-charged conversation going on today. I, my friends, and my peers, most likely won’t live to see a day when being #AliveWhileBlack isn’t a thing. At the very least, we’ll be senile and unable to maneuver whatever mind-controlling contraptions the next generation will be sucked into. That doesn’t mean we shut our traps, though. In fact, that’s all the incentive we need to let our collective responses to these tragedies be heard.
I personally want to be able to say to my children, “You know, there was a time when there weren’t computers implanted in your brains, and if you were to walk suspiciously in a dark neighborhood you might get shot or arrested.” I want them to wonder how such an America could have existed, like I did in 1999. I want them to question me endlessly about things I couldn’t possibly answer succinctly, and then make them go do their homework, because… well, you get it. We might not uncover the reasoning behind, or end racism and police brutality before Blue Ivy Carter runs for President, but we can certainly wear our tongues thin talking about it. Do that, and eventually it will all come to the light.
