And while I’m at it, just because BIPOC people are also racist does not excuse or validate white people’s racism towards BIPOCs because that is a false-equivalency. The power balance is so skewed and since we white folk still control basically everything, so it’s actually far worse when white people are racist. Eyeroll. I guess I do know what they’re teaching kids in schools these days, so I shouldn’t be surprised at their hazy grasp of a false narrative of history and lack luster critical thinking skills.
A good example of just how dangerous it is for a white person to be individually racist, or even to just “not like” BIPOC people, versus a BIPOC person just not liking white people, is this scenario:
It’s bad because when someone, a white female police officer, say, might have such deeply held internal biases about Black men, that she may “accidentally” use her gun on him rather than her taser because of an imaginary threat.
And that is literally the kindest analysis I can give as to why a veteran cop would be terrified of a 20 year old with expired tags. I can’t wait to see what bullshit excuse gets her off the hook. It all makes me wish hell is real and that it’s the actual bad people who go there.
In other news…
I just finished Ya Gyassi’s spell blinding first novel Homegoing (it is rumored she got a one million dollar advance, and now that I’ve read it, I say it was well worth that and more).
I won’t ruin the plot, but the book follows the descendants of two African sisters, one of whom marries a white man and lives in the “white castle” where beneath her are thousands of Africans stacked like sardines in the holding cells used to house Africans about to be taken on the Middle Passage (this 'castle' still exists, and you can check it out [here] in this cool article about Ghana's slave castles (https://theculturetrip.com/africa/ghana/articles/ghana-s-slave-castles-the-shocking-story-of-the-ghanaian-cape-coast/)).
The other sister is sold into slavery as the other one is trying to manage the whims of a white male husband above her (s/o to the wives reading this, y’all the real MVPS). As the tale weaves the stories of them and their descendants across time and space, one story focuses on a newly freed slave living in Alabama during the 1880s.
He is arrested for “looking at a white woman” and sentenced to 8 years of prison labor in a coal mine. This is historically accurate. This happened all the time. This happens all the time. In the 1880s, Black men were jailed for whatever the fuck the white cops wanted to arrest them for, and worked alongside white criminals who did real crimes, like murder people. The coal mine in Gyassi's Homegoing is bleak. The conditions are excruciating, inhumane, and of course insanely dangerous. I couldn’t help but wonder: how much have things really changed?
If you are living while Black in America, you can still get killed if you are a 20 year old with justifiably poor impulse control, who panics and tries to flee when a white police officer pulled them over for AND I QUOTE “having too many air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror.”
And isn’t that the most terrifying thing of all?
Heaven forbid. Unpaid tickets AND more than one air freshener?!?
And the cruel reality of it all is-- he was right to be terrified.
There is a long history of using the illusion of white women's 'purity' as an excuse to arrest or lynch Black men, whose masculinity has always made white men desperately want to disavow Black men of their right to exist. Talk about an inferiority complex.
So, you have hundreds of years of social conditioning that Black man = rapist of white women, hundreds of years of social conditioning that Black men are violent animals. Pair that with 26 years of being indoctrinated into the systemic racism of a police department, and you get a rather drab looking white woman emboldened by white supremacy and the belief that Black men are all criminals, who “accidentally” shoots a 20 year old instead of tasing them-- when she shouldn't have even done that!
That, my friends, is the difference between BIPOC people not liking white people (all for 100% justifiable reasons, I might add) and white people who “aren’t racist” but just don’t “like” Black people. See who ends up dead there? That’s why reverse racism isn’t real.
What a fucking farce, since that's really what SHE and white cops are-- they're the brutes incapable of being civilized.
It’s well established that men’s pre-frontal cortexes, which controls decision making and impulse control, do not finish developing fully until about 22. Duante was 20, he made a bad decision to try to flee an arrest-- but that decision was a fully human one as well. I looked at his picture and saw my students. They’re amazing, but also dumb af because they’re young. It’s the universal human condition of youth. They should have the right to make a mistake and not get killed for it.
This week is another reminder there is no justice. There is no peace. And now say the rest of it with me, fellow protestors: Fuck these racist ass police.
Shit, if I were a Black man pulled over in Minneapolis for “having too many air fresheners” I’d probably have such a massive panic attack that all of my decision making would be relegated to fight or flight as well.
We all would be. To be Black and pulled over by the police in America is tantamount to when a Gestapo officer asks a Jew for their papers: it's not going to end well, no matter what you do.
And don’t even get me started on the Prison Industrial Complex, but if you want to know more about that, Ava Duverney’s documentary 13th is a good place to start. It's on Netflix, ffs, so if you haven't seen it yet, get on board. That too, is a form of reparations. It’s the missing link between Homegoing’s falsely incarcerated Black man for the express purpose of using him for free labor, and our dark reality of what America truly is.
I’ve been reading a lot of fiction lately since reality is pretty bleak. After I finished Homegoing, I turned to one of my favorite novels of all time: Octavia Butler’s Kindred, which is about a Black woman being inexplicably pulled from her present tense in modern day Los Angeles and plopped into a plantation in the Slave south sometime well before the civil war. As she is tugged between times, the real terror in the book is that you and the heroine have no idea when that jerk into slavery is going to be, nor what is awaiting you.
Octavia Butler, and her writing represent imo some of the best Black speculative fiction has to offer. "Speculative" fiction, btw, is a more elevated form of sci-fi. Butler's works all feature a Black female main character, and the reason we ALL should be reading her is she limns a future beyond societal constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. This ability to imagine a better future, at times called Afrofuturism, is something that can be seen across the works of BIPOC theorists, writers, and artists (here's a cool article about Afrofuturism as an architectural blueprint for the future. Octavia Butler just happens to be one of my favorites-- her work is accessible, and frankly, I'm obsessed with how she can pull the reader in with her very first sentence (a writing feat that is in and of itself impressive #goals).
Butler's *Kindred* is truly horror at its finest because it taps into a fundamental reality that Black Americans carry with them from generation to generation: the deep seated knowledge that, at any moment, you can be ripped from your life and placed back into slavery.
**Reparations Opportunity: **
This is why I love Black futurism, or Afrofuturism: It allows an honest inspection of the past in order to re-imagine the future. Afrofuturism evaluates the past and future to create better conditions for the present generation of Black people through the use of technology, art, music, and literature.