Beyond Deservedness: Black Death and the Reclamation of Humanity Beyond the White Gaze.
I have yet to watch the video capturing the murder of George Floyd. The reasons for this are many, but mostly because the still shots I have seen bring to mind my father. Bring to mind my son, my brothers, my cousins. Bring to mind the men I have loved. I cannot bring myself to watch the 8 minutes and 46 seconds of his slow and torturous death as he calls out to his dead mother, any more than I could stand to watch the demise of any of the Black men I have shared familial and intimate space with. I know once I watch the full contents contained on that recording, that my night musings will be animated with replays of the scenario replaced by all of the Black men I hold so closely to my heart.
While I can’t bring myself to even watch the recording, there are others who can not only watch it, but then go on to suggest that his murder was not worthy of the Black community’s loud and righteous indignation. Candace Owens spent 18 minutes and 12 seconds suggesting that Black America should be silent over George Floyd’s death because he was undeserving of martyrdom due to his criminal past. (As Dave Chapelle so eloquently points out, the officers who killed George Floyd made him a martyr). She quotes Shelby Steele as saying that Black people are, “unique from other communities because we are the only community that caters to the bottom denominator of our society.” The bottom denominator of our society? This sentiment smacks of the dogma of disposability long espoused in this country as Native Americans were killed for land, Black folks were swung from trees, and Latinx children are kept in cages.
I don’t want to spend too much time on Candace. Watching and reading what she does and says makes me nauseous and I believe any attention we give her, gives her breath. Yet, I feel the need to point out her tactics. She uses the criminal background of George Floyd along with uncited, flawed or challenged data to falsely support the deficiencies she purports to be the unique achilles heel of Black culture. She then uses these ideas to catapult herself to the real claim of her video: That the racialized violence against Black people at the hands of the police is a myth.
This claim is grounded in classic Blame Black Culture 101 rhetoric. It’s a lazy premise that rests on the facile reasoning that Black folks’ inequitable outcomes are the result of individual shortcomings regardless of societal or historical context. It further concludes that Black folks have a disdain for personal responsibility due to their acculturated desire for ease and release from accountability. Therefore, by extension, the unfortunate circumstances the Black race in America finds themselves in is credited to the shortcomings of the Black culture which are comprised of these significantly problematic individuals. The logic follows that if Black folks individually and culturally behaved “well” and worked harder, they would not be overrepresented in negative quality of life categories.
The heavy lifting of such ideology is in its ability to shift accountability away from systems, institutions and histories of practice, and to excuse any potential impropriety as the naturally expected response to an inherently uncivil group. In this case, Black people. Therefore, institutionalized injustices are nonexistent because the real issue lies in the individual and group. In response to these beliefs, Black people are often motivated to scamper endlessly to prove our humanity and ability to in fact be “civil.” We march in suits to prove we can clean up well. We publicly forgive monstrous, unimaginable acts to prove our human capacity for grace. We trade in cultural markers of speech, hair, dress and relations to prove that we can be as good “as them”. We most readily recognize this as respectability politics.
As a strategy, respectability politics has long been employed to fight for the rights and recognition of the Black community. It rests on the premise that we can eradicate racism by proving ourselves worthy of respect by our actions and presentation. That our verified deservedness can supersede the need for policy or structural change. One of the outcomes of this approach is divisiveness between those deemed proper and respectable negroes and the rest of ‘dem’. “Dem’” is those Black folks that don’t follow the script or put on the gear carefully curated by the costume designer for lack of want or lack of ability. Many, Black and white folks, consider these transgressors the lower class or the “bottom denominators” of Black society. There are multiple lines of distinction modeled on eurocentric dictates of appropriateness, via proxies for respectability and thus, deservedness: Dress, education, income, hair texture and style, neighborhood, background, speech pattern and intonation, marital status, and parental status, just to name a few. These become the demarcations between good Black folks and ‘dem’ aka the Black bourgeois and niggas.
The thing is, that progress has only ever been truly made in the Black community on the backs of those very individuals of the “lower classes” or “dem". While some evidence of the capture of African royalty is documented in the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the overwhelming majority of those captured and enslaved were in fact commoners, even criminals in their respective homeland. Thus, the many revolts that took place on slave ships and plantations were largely led by “dem” people. The abolitionist movement was most helped by the likes of Harriet Tubman, who by virtue of escaping her enslavement was deemed a criminal who was also illiterate. While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other fine heeled Black men became emblematic of the Civil Rights Movement, the labor of the day-to-day struggle maintenance were individuals like Georgia Gillmore, the single mother of six that helped fund and feed the faces of the movement. The powerful actions on the streets were undergirded by the young people, who skipped school and sacrificed their literal bodies to reveal to the world the honey-laced double-talk and hypocrisy of the United States.
These examples of resistance countered the de’ jure and de facto protections for the abuse and murder of Black folks at the hands of state actors and private citizens, which has been a feature of this country since its’ founding. For example, many of the southern colonies in the 1600’s provided legal cover for the killing of enslaved Blacks in situations that otherwise would have been recognized as commonlaw murder. In the rare case that the death of an enslaved Black person was deemed a murder, the punishment for the white perpetrator was minimal, many not even seeing a trial. Does any of this sound familiar?
When Ida B. Wells first began her historic journalistic crusade chronicling the lynchings of Black people, in the 1900’s, “Like many middle-class African Americans, Wells had accepted the myth that only poor blacks were lynched for heinous crimes. Wells was now shocked into recognizing that even innocent middle-class black people could be targets.” What Wells came to realize through her extensive data collection was that respectability could not save Black people. Deservedness was of no consequence in a system dependent upon the terror of a race for its sustainability. Malcolm, Martin and Medgar were killed in their Sunday best. Conformity is fool’s gold and of no value towards purchasing our salvation.
Still, the dissonance caused between the idea of the United States and the truth of the United States, requires that a rectifying narrative be framed. This is a desire of both white folks and Black folks so endeared with the fairy tale. That redemption is clothed in the narrative, regardless of iteration and time period, that Blacks are inhuman, Blacks are incapable of civility and Blacks are inherently criminal and complicit in their own demise. Even when there are overwhelming illustrations of unequal opportunities, police brutality, employment exclusion, electoral blockades and disparate outcomes regardless of credentialing, some of us prefer to wear the mask dipped in anti-blackness hoping to be invited to the table on good behavior.
Meanwhile, our children can’t afford the luxury of developmentally appropriate behaviors for fear of what that could mean to their continued existence. Merely Black existing makes Black bodies seem deserving of excess death in all of its presentations. Whether it is due to exclusionary practices in our schoolhouses, exorbitantly high rates of death due to disease and virus or the snuffing of our breath at the hands of those sworn to protect and serve.
Not a single one of the Black men I love are perfect. Not even close. They have shortcomings. A few have committed crimes and made huge mistakes-some more than others. But if I were to ever see a recording of any of them being unjustly murdered at the hands of state actors I would yell, scream, get my folks together and start some shit. Any of them would deserve us to protest on their behalf not by virtue of some imperialist idea of deservedness, but by virtue of their humanity. The same humanity white supremacy has fought so long to convince us that we do not naturally possess. None of us are the ‘bottom denominator of our society” and unworthy of our peoples’ raised voices challenging unjust murder. We should never mimic the oppressor’s dismissal of the lives of any of our people. Any adoption of the eurocentric sentiment of disposability serves us ill. Especially those most marginalized among us. It only serves as blatant hypocrisy to their proclamations of all lives mattering.
I have long grown weary of the performative dance we engage in to display our worthiness for salvation and consideration. I tire of us scurrying about like caged puppies in the animal store hoping some family will see fit to take us home. Until we are released from our desire to prove deservedness by the standards of the white gaze, our protestations will never be justified. And we will never be truly free.
I pray the streets keep talking. LOUD. AS. HELL
