Black Girl Unmagical

I am not magical. I may be smart; fairly well-educated; exposed to art, literature, and music; gifted in various ways; hardworking and capable but what I am not, is magical. I don't think I need to be. Given the list of things I know I can do, what need have I of magic? I'm perfectly comfortable saying that there is no Black girl magic in me. There is hard work, blessings and more hard work. Magic is entirely superfluous. Would that I lived in a world that could accept me as I am: entirely unmagical but no less brilliant and capable. Yeah, I said it.

The BGM terminology is something POC have created to communicate that we too are human; that we too are valuable; that we too have much to offer. I understand it, but honestly, I want no part of it. 

Some in the majority find it difficult to comprehend that Black folk are more than conquerors, more than capable and *whispers* from time to time, more powerful, more brilliant, more gifted than they. And so, we birthed a label to aid comprehension but does it really help?

For me, the major problem with the language of "Black girl/boy magic" is that it gives an oppressive system one more way to divide and conquer those whom it oppresses; one more way to consider some marginalized people worthy of consideration and others not...as if it needed one more way. It's one more tool to separate human wheat from chaff.

Personally, I want no part of it but then I'm grown and I grew up in a place where anything was possible from someone who looked like me. African-American youngsters need this phrase because they're growing up in a place where so much is damn near impossible for many of them. They need to be told that they can be magic, and do wondrous things, because the system works overtime to grind them into the dust. And yet, even with our hashtags and attempts at affirming them, the system routinely brutalizes them for having the temerity to hold a positive view of themselves as young people, and as adults, it will likely brutalize them for arrogance when they present themselves in the world believing in their effort and achievements. Seems like we can't win for losing.

My take is that the idea of #BlackGirlMagic is only partially for us and our children. Mostly, it's a push back and a push in to the systems in which we live. It's our attempt at inoculation against the ugliness and an attempt to change the prevailing stories about us.

But I say again: we are not magic. Some of us may be better than a good number of folk at a few things or even many things, but that is not magic, that's the bell curve. Magic is not required because nature is quite sufficient.

The problem is that labels are rarely for the labeled. Whether good or bad, labels are an attempt to communicate. Affirming labels tell the world what you believe or know about yourself. Negative labels tell the labeled what the world thinks it knows about you.

Take for example, James Baldwin's words about The En Word (about which word I've written a few thoughts). He pointed out in the clip below, that the language used to describe Blackness tells us more about those doing the describing than it does about those so described. Fast forward 50 or so years, and, we have got in on the labeling game, in another effort to aid the process of the humanization of the negro. Remember the Black is Beautiful movement of the sixties and seventies? BGM is more of that. Probably likely to be just as successful.

It's 2017. Tell me again why we're still doing this? 

In spite of the fact that:
Maya Angelou & James Baldwin have written great words; 

Marian Anderson & Paul Robeson have sung great songs;

James Earl Jones & Cicely Tyson have masterfully trod the boards;

John Coltrane & Miles Davis have played and created wondrous music;

Jacob Lawrence done painted and Edmonia Lewis have sculpted gloriously;

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson & Mary Jackson has calculated and star-gazed their way into history; 

John Urschel has worked his sums and written his peer-reviewed papers.

And yet, with all that achievement (and those are just from the twentieth century), despite hurdles erected by the system and moving goal posts, and we need to be magic too?

Clearly, there is little appetite to see Blackness as real. Our offering up this language won't help. It is willful blindness that prevents true acknowledgement of us. That blindness has been necessary to survive the brutality of the plantation and everything that has occurred here before and since. And given the obvious continuing unwillingness to own up to the nation's brutalities, there will be no return of sight in the foreseeable (smirk) future.

I don't think African-Americans do themselves any favors by adding to the fantastical narratives around Blackness. Already, we're stuck with the myth that Blackness that feels less pain; myths about Black strength; myths about Black sexuality (which frequently led - and still do - to dangerous rape accusations); myths about Black intelligence and general myths about Black inferiority. And to all this we add magicality? As if one more myth were needed.

America is a land of fairy tales. We've believed in noble savages; simultaneously lazy and job stealing immigrants (Schrodinger's immigrants); bullet-dodging young Black men; the threat of looming Sharia law; the gay agenda; the trans agenda and pizzagate. Clearly, there is a deep unwillingness to deal exclusively in the land of truth and each fantasy believed makes the next one even easier to believe. 

In the midst of all of America's fairytaling, is it possible to see someone else's truth and reality? I don't think so. As long as America clings to the blinding fantasies of who and what America is and has been, it will be impossible to make reality (including the real humanness of POC) visible. We cannot live in reality and in fantasy simultaneously. By refusing to see its own truth, America ensures that the lies it has long told about the marginalized continue.

So here I am, telling you the truth. Here it is, straight, no chaser: there is no magic. There are natural gifts + hard work and lucky breaks and more hard work. There are gifts, hard work, no breaks, years of sweat and toil, and sometimes a moment of recognition. Or not. There is success, there is failure, there is blood, sweat, and tears, but there is no damn magic.

Blackness is not magical. If it were, wouldn't we all be sitting on top of the world? 

We are not magical, We work, we study, we practice our crafts, and if we are a success, you best believe we worked very, very hard for it. There's no "Abracadabra!" in any of that.

My Well of Empathy is Running Dry

Two or three times in quick succession, a writer whose work I admire (Son of Baldwin), has written about Black apathy in the face of White injury. In Let them F--king Die - written after the mid-June shooting at a Virginia baseball diamond; Palindrome - written days later on the return from North Korea of Otto Warmbier; and I Don't Give A F--k About Justine Damond - written in the shadow of the Minnesota police officer shooting of the 'most innocent victim' Justine Damond, he explores this idea of the withholding of empathy. Son of Baldwin has made a single point (which you can probably glean from the titles): "I'm done witcyall. I have no tears to shed." 

I see myself as a decent human being and I know that decent human beings feel and express empathy but just about now, I gots nothin'. Sadly, in the case of Justine - her name is NOT Damond - Ruszczyk, all I can summon by way of response is emptiness. There's simply nothing there. 

Perhaps it is that this has occurred in the same Minnesota that quite recently managed to find Philando Castile's murderer not guilty? Is it that these very same Minnesotans not a month ago, watched the Castile dashcam video and managed to determine that the shooting was reasonable and yet now, without dashcam proof, find themselves of one accord? Is it perhaps that the convenient White rage that appears now on Justine's death was entirely absent at Philando's? I don't know which of these it is, but what I do know is that the well of empathy from which I would normally be filling myself, is running quite dry and I'm already parched. Can empathetic death be far away? 

Clearly, if Son of Baldwin's writing (and his readership) is anything to go by, Black wells of empathy are nearly as dry as the Mo-ephing-jave Desert.

I read each of those three Son of B pieces carefully. I was very uncomfortable as I read the first but by the third, I knew what to expect and I had no trouble with the conclusions I was sure he would draw. They were now close to my own. And anyone who knows me well, knows that in all things, I lead with kindness. For me, this is a long (and previously unimaginable) emotional distance to have traversed.  

When I was no more than 13, a dog was run over by the car in front of us. Both of my siblings and I were in the back seat. My mother, driving, shouted immediately, "Elle, don't look!" I don't like the word 'tender-hearted' but that's who I've always been. It's who I've always been known to be. In that moment, my mother's first thought was, "If she sees this thing, she won't sleep for weeks." She wasn't wrong. 

The me of even three weeks ago, would have had something, even some little tickle over this latest death. I am sorry Justine is gone. But rage? Despair? Grief? They, as Son of B puts it, are all quite busy: Aiyana, Tamir, Jordan, Richard, Renisha, Michael, Sandra. My grief is busy. I swear to you, it is absolutely at capacity. I have nothing left over. 

That I could reach this point of simply having no emotion with which to respond to so awful an event, is - or was previously - unthinkable.  

Here's what my transition tells me: none of us is inured to the violence in our surroundings. None of us is unaffected by it; none of us escapes the consequences of the dehumanization of others. This shouldn't need to be said, but apparently it does. We cannot be surrounded by toxins and maintain a pure system. It is not possible. Science won't allow it. 

I read this thought on a Native American history page once, [paraphrasing and unable to give credit because I didn't save the link, foolishly]: colonization is as harmful to colonizer as it is to colonized. Do we think, as a nation, that hundreds of years of mistreatment and willfully selling a narrative that some people are not worthy; years of holding a belief that "the Black [and brown, and Native] man had no rights that the White man was bound to respect" (Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Taney's opinion), has had no effect on the soul of this nation? It's just not possible.

I've written about this before, but it's worth restating. We cannot escape the consequences of our history: soulless is who we are; empathy-less is who we are. Black folk may just now be catching up but you know how it is, what with racism and exclusion, we're always last to the party. Our invitation may have been lost in the mail, but we're here at last!!!!!! We have arrived. Let the soulless party begin. 

What will we do when Black empathy dries up? When Native empathy evaporates? When Chinese empathy is withdrawn? When Hispanic empathy goes 'Poof!"? When every excluded or brutalized minority's empathy shrivels like a raisin in the sun? Who will we be then, as a nation? WHAT will we be? 

My guess? We will be precisely the thing that some nations already know us to be. 

The phrase from Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) keeps coming to mind, 

"No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."  

Poor, nasty, brutish and short. For some of us, we're already there. For those of you newly arrived or daily arriving, come on in! Get comfy. You're gonna be here a while........ 

I have an empty hole in my gut over this killing and I'm sorry for that but I have nothing. There is a space where empathy should be. There's no emotion, neither disgust nor a lack thereof. Just nothing. Zero. I would say that America broke me, but that's bound to get me in trouble. 

It is said that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. I'm not quite there yet, but I see it in the middle distance. I'm trying to slow my rate of approach, but if there are brakes on this train, they ain't working.

I'm just trying to brace for impact at this point. 

Deficits - moral and spiritual

Over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about the dearth of empathy, the shortfall of empathy, so obviously at work in these United States of America today.

When Evangelical Christians can get behind a party that champions the Second Amendment but never flinch at the thousands of gun deaths nationwide, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When so-called people of good conscience can get behind public policy that routinely demonizes the poor as lazy and shiftless, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When good citizens swear up and down that they're not prejudiced in any way and certainly not racist, but can manage every blessed time a person of color is shot dead by the police, to claim that the dead are responsible for their own deaths, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When good citizens quote MLK Jr every third Monday of January, squawking about Martin's 'dream' but fail to see Colin Kaepernick & BLM as pointing out how far we are from awaking to the realization of that dream, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When 'conservatism' shouts more loudly about freedom (which they get to define) and free markets than about health care, education, environmental protection or equal rights, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When neither party can manage to speak to the needs of all people without resorting to identity politics as if poor people of one race need something entirely different from poor people of another race, I think we have an empathy deficit.

When a nation can refer to itself as God-fearing, or at least Christian (since the two things seem to be quite distinct and possibly mutually exclusive), and yet have both a defense budget that dwarfs every other nation's, and the sad history of being the ONLY nation on the planet to unleash a nuclear weapon (two in fact) and be incapable of apology for that horror, I think we have an empathy deficit.

from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation
PGPF.org

When a nation has a president who talks of grabbing women's gentalia and refers to women as dogs and yet has Christians claiming that he is sent by God. I think we have more than just an empathy deficit. We are badly broken at a spiritual level.

But then, as I said in an earlier piece:

"This is no ordinary Christianity, but rather it is the founding fathers' slave-holding, slave-raping, child-stealing, Black pogrom-supporting, Native land-stealing, Chinese immigrant-excluding, Jim Crow-loving, lynching party-having, American Christianity."

When, if ever, do we plan on addressing this deficit? We work on trade and budget deficits all the time. They are ever in our mouths and minds. But our empathy deficit? Are we even aware of its existence? Do we even care?

I have to be honest and say that I'm not expecting the Evangelical church to address it since so much of American Christianity is a peculiar animal. Large swaths of American Christianity (Southern Baptists, I'm looking squarely at you) gave their members plausible deniability for the enslavement and brutalization of an entire group of people or the genocide of another. So many American Christians beat their slaves Monday to Saturday and then rolled up in church on Sunday in conveyances driven by those same enslaved people, so it's probably unwise to anticipate much aid and succor from that particular quarter.

Who does that leave as moral leaders though? Politicians? Civil society? EJI's Brian Stephenson? The ACLU? The SPLC? The Heritage Foundation? The Family Research Council? Reverend William Barber and Repairers of the Breach? Who?

And still more important than who will lead us, is the question of what do we do when those upon whom the greatest ugliness has been heaped, eventually cease to extend the empathy upon which this society is wholly dependent? I don't really know, but I can say this: that day is coming. It is surely coming.