The Heart of Darkness in the Hood
How George Floyd’s death exposes the settler/native relationship between African Americans and the relationship between immigrant business owners.
The death of George Floyd is really terrifying, but what is worst, is people watched it, filmed it, and did nothing. This is like a Turkish cartoon that I saw once, where a couple sees a house on fire and the husband asks the wife, “Did you call the fire department? “No,” she replies. “I posted it on Twitter.”
Similarly, we, who witness these crimes, are pretending, as if hashtags and the social media protest of those who have no real experience living as an African American with the day-to-day structural violence of a white supremacist society, can really affect change.
If this was so, Mumia Abu-Jamal would have left prison thirty years ago.
These socially distanced protests, metaphorically, that is, can not. Instead, they serve mostly as a way of absolving those who may have also, wittingly or unwittingly played their part, in the racial hierarchy America is built upon.
I hate to be cynical, but a post on Facebook has got me sort of miffed.
“Asian and Middle Eastern shop-owners who have businesses in Black neighborhoods and then choose to call the cops over petty stuff (counterfeit $20 = petty stuff OK you are not direct murderers but you DO have a degree of complicity in this murder insofar as you continue to have or defend the protocol of escalating to the police. You know full well the economic conditions of some of your customer base. If you’ve ever heard the #blacklivesmatter hashtag and you have, you know full well the risk you are putting your Black customers’ lives in over essentially nothing.”
Cognitive Dissonance
Zareena Grewal, a Yale professor, wrote this angry post on her Facebook page. She has since retracted this statement and apologized for it, after a reading a post from Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist, who stated that she also was the daughter of store owner and it was not fair that the shop owner was being targeted, in response to the Floyd murder. She then went on to to say, there were some facts that needed correcting.
No doubt, this was a clear an effort to save the shop owner, also, a Palestinian, whose life is being threatened.
So, where is her alliance with George Floyd?
Sarsour also said, that racists within the Arab community did exist, but Mikey, the owner of Cups, wasn’t one of them. Recognizing racism, is not the same as taking action to change it.
One of the facts that Sarsour posted was, the owner, Mahmoud “Mikey” Abumayyaleh was not at the store with the event took place, he arrived later on. Which was true, but how much does this matter? He is the one that made the rules.
Later on, in an interview, Mikey, was trying to save face. “When I saw what was happening (the chokehold of Floyd), I said, “Call the cops on the cops,” this seems pretty lame and he knew it. Afterwards, he wrote on his FB page, “I and my PR crew, were Bamboozled, by NBC.” He has a PR crew? Luckily for him, he had Sarsour to plead his case.
Among her list of ‘facts’ was his teenage employee was following the statewide “practice protocol,” which was to call the police when any counterfeit money came their way. During his NBC interview, he mentioned this protocol several times, as if he and his employees were doing the right thing.
How to Handle Them
What Agerwal’s post inadvertently exposed is not just the tensions between the police and African Americans, also the relationship between the immigrant, merchant, class who plant their businesses in the middle of African American communities.
Responses to Grewal’s rant had similar, ‘did the right thing’ stories in the comments. These were stories of how former workers in these shops faced threats and abuse from their customers whose goal was “to cop some free stuff.” Their words, not mine. This was under the guise of providing ‘nuance’, but they were also making excuses for calling the cops on their customers, who were most likely, African American.
Robin D.G. Kelly in talking about the Killing of Michael Brown, said, “In this case even the Black body is seen as a danger.”
Many see African Americans by nature as threatening. There are even times, some of us, myself included, use their Blackness as a power, but other than a momentary show of bravado, it means nothing more than that. As we have learned many times, it can not stop us from getting systematically arrested, shot, and killed.
Practice Protocols
This situation has been made even more complicated by Abumayyaleh, who maintains that his employee followed the “practice protocol,” which means calling 911 on a person passing off fake $20. Even more telling is, his statement in a NBC interview, that Floyd, a regular customer, whom he knew. So, why call the cops?
The situation definitely escalated beyond his expectations. Which is a risk anytime anyone calls the police. Which why he is trying to distance himself from the cops who killed Floyd.
Despite Abumayyaleh being in the ‘hood’ as he claimed for three decades, what he understood, was there was a difference between him and the people who came in his store. To his credit, many of his customers on his Facebook page defended him, but this can be broken down to African American culture, where, the “He is cool by me,” sentiment goes a long way.
Merchant Settlers
Yet, the real social dynamics playing out in the situation are much sinister as exposed by Grewal’s post’s comments. Highlighting the fact that there an entire class of people, who claimed to have learned how to handle Blacks. In Franz Fanon’s Concerning Violence, describes this situation as that of the settler and native:
“The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native out loud that there, he alone is master.”
The shop owner and others who think that they can use their position of privilege, be it from their status, wealth, or skin color, play the role of settler against the native.
If this seems to make no sense, well, this is how it works in the settler/native system. As Fanon also states, “Where individuals are concerned, a positive negation of common sense is evident.” What we keep seeing over and again is the madness of a racialized system.
As people start to parse out the episodes of George Floyd’s life, one can see like many strangled by structural racism, caste and class, there are those who commit ‘economic crimes’ where people are just trying to make it. Yet, if you lived in what sociologist, Terry Williams calls ‘zones of indifference’ where there are little jobs and if there are any, then, they are not for you.
Places like Newark, New Jersey, where many of workers and professionals are not Black and do not live in the city. Where they are often hidden from the view of the locals because there is a network of tunnels, bridges, and minibuses, that ferry them to and from parking lots, and the local railways. Creating a lack of viable job opportunities and making seem as if there is no way out. One journalist called it ‘insidious architecture’. Imagine the frustration, the anger and hopelessness this causes amongst those who are just trying to make it.
As Kenneth Clarke, in Dark Ghetto, remarked in 1964, “The Negro has been in danger of becoming the permanent proletariat, because he has been left out of the swelling prosperity and social progress of nation as a whole.” This was 56 years ago and with the ratio of African American wealth to that of Whites being 41% to 71%, this has only change by a margin.
Then, add to that, some newcomers who seem to be able to just lay down a tens of thousands of dollars and open up a store on your block. At first they will hire a few locals, may be some kids, or some women, but after a while, this will change to staff that looks more like themselves.
The truth is, when it comes to these corner stores like Cups Foods, in African American communities, regardless of which immigrant owns them, they seem to see the local community as outside themselves.
I have even seen this within the Muslim community where, there is supposed to be no racism. Yet, racism can be vicious there too, even when Africans, Arabs, West Indians, and African Americans all live together. So, when Grewal called for the mosque to take care of this race problem, it was quite unrealistic.
These merchants are more like overseers, on the plantation. Some may pretend to be one of the locals, but are many part of a settler class. Whom will give a few people whom they view as ‘good’ with a job, but is not interested in doing much other than that. They are not interested in improving the neighborhood, nor do they have ability to. But that’s another story.
A more savvy shop owner, Ruhel Arshad, seems, a local celebrity, whose restaurant caught fire during the protest, took another view. “Let it burn. He said, let justice prevail.” Of course this when viral was highlighted in the New York Post. Since his daughter posted her father’s words on FB, his customer base, which is mostly White, have started a fundraising account and he will be ok; offers of services and money are pouring in from all over the country. Here, we can see again how the settlers support each other, just like those who came to Abumayyaleh’s defense.
I’ve lived in neighborhoods where these supermoarkets, chicken shacks, and pizza joints thrive. I have seen the kind of understanding that goes on between these communities. It is a sort of tug of war, where each side tries to get as much out of the other as they can. However, it is the native, that ends up with the shorter end of the stick.
Sudhir Venkatesh, in Gangster for a Day, in his ethnography of a Chicago neighborhood, documented his observations on how these relationships play out. It is often times the case, were the men working in these shops entice local women, with free stuff in exchange for a ‘friendship and other benefits’. This works out fine until, the Arab guy gets his fill of the locals, then goes to the motherland to get married or chooses a local bride of the same culture and religion.
More than once, I have seen, face to face, the yelling and screaming of those jilted lovers, sometimes, Afro-Arab baby mamas.
This is just what happens.
Sometimes they make each other honest, which is why Abumayyaleh was happy to say, he has a nephew who is ‘half Black’.
This creates something similar to the plantation sexual system where these merchants take access to local women and this thereby, creates a fissure between African American men and these store owners. Adding to this mix a bunch of social ills, like extreme structural poverty, economic abandonment, and substance availability and addiction, not to mention with the past ten years of fragmented education, this is no doubt a lethal formula.
Unity?
No, there will not be any sort of a social contract between Arab/Muslim/Asian merchants who run businesses in predominantly poor, African American neighborhoods. Instead as we have seen, there will only be a defense of Abumayyaleh and others like him. Where the practice protocol is to call the cops on a regular customer.
