"Not All White People", yet another conversational red herring

The minute I challenge one of America's fairytales, I hear "Not all White people!" coming at me from the cheap seats. 

This week, I  suggested that America's democracy has always been threatened by racism and that prior to 2016 White folk didn't much care that Black folks votes were being frustrated. They didn't feel the impact so what could be the harm? When whatever happened in 2016 occurred though, suddenly everyone could see how frustrating the Black vote could have a negative impact on an election outcome. in response, a stranger on social media chided me. This was a "terrible assumption" she said. Most White people weren't racists, she opined. "There wouldn't have been any civil rights legislation if they were", she cried.

First, lady please. Clutch them pearls elsewhere.

Second, civil rights legislation was (and remains) necessary only because someone (I wonder who?) was/is frustrating Black civil rights.  

That quick exchange left me thinking about a fuller response to the standard #NotAll foolishness that I encounter all too often. This is the response I plan to offer going forward.

"Dear YOUR NAME HERE

You know what? You're right, it's not all White people. But it is enough of them that an entire war had to be fought to emancipate the enslaved. But you're right. Not all White people..

Not all White people but enough of them that a law had to be written to desegregate schools and still there was this response .....

...and in places like Prince Edward County, Virginia, entire school districts shut down for more than a year. But it wasn't ALL White people, nah just enough of y'all to close schools for five whole damn years. But sure, not all.

Nope, not all White people, but enough of them that lynching, bombing, pillaging successful Black communities was a thing. Y'all called them race riots, but in all the race riots in American history, only one race did the rioting, the other did the suffering. Imma let you guess who is who. 

But no, still not all White people.

Not all White people, but quite enough White people that laws plural had to be written and passed to give Black folk access to the ballot box. But I'm with you, not all White people.

Not all White people, but just enough White people that folks like John Lewis had to be willing to have their heads busted open to bring access to the ballot to Black people. But sure, not all White people.

So yes, I'll drink the "Not ALL White people" beverage that you want to serve, but lemme serve a little beverage of my own: it may not be all White people but it's definitely too damn many. And I'm not about to pretend with you that you're one in whom I should place my blind trust.

Sincerely,
Elle"

Making America Genocidal Again

In a three tweet exchange several weeks ago, I finally understood why bad things - genocide; enslavement; Jim Crow; lynching  - went on as long as they did, and why denial of those realities continues. I also came to understand what Robin DiAngelo refers to as the myth of White innocence and how that myth feeds disbelief in the lived reality of various groups in this nation.

That exchange I had all those weeks ago, finally convinced me how that presumption of innocence limits, indeed prevents, any truthful evaluation of the ugly behavior of White malefactors.

When the default is to presume White innocence, the mind manufactures explanations for bad acts. So if there's an officer involved shooting of an unarmed person of color, we begin our rejection of any Black Lives Matter narrative with claims that observers do not know what came before; because in the unknown, unseen before must lie exculpatory evidence. It must be there, because White = innocent.  Vindication, justification is in that window. Always. "Just wait until the truth comes out, you'll see!", so the mantra goes.

If there are White attorneys showing up in court to make specious (not to mention vile) arguments that children in the government's custody need neither soap nor toothpaste, ii is elitist to ask why these attorneys don't refuse to do their jobs or quit in outrage. Demanding morality in federal workers is elitist. It is unreasonable to demand an ounce, a milligram, a scintilla of integrity and human decency. They have mortgages to pay and those don't get paid with decency! Dollars over decency. Besides, "Why should they have to put their careers in jeopardy" (that's an actual quote from my Twitter exchange) because their boss is asking them to make an immoral argument?

At the end of the day, the performance of American Whiteness is about giving carve outs, exclusions, exceptions for the ugly things it does. This is why ugliness continues in America. Ugly things are done by people in power (and oftentimes by the powerless - c.f every lynching), and Whiteness is automatically exculpated. Kill dozens at Walmart? Mental illness! Vote for a pussy-grabbing lout? Economic insecurity! Show up at an immigrant detention center armed to the teeth and wearing body armor? Youthful folly!

 If history were a graph, the plot points of Rosewood and the theft of Seneca Village would connect to the lynchings up and down the country; to the abuses of POC during the Civil Rights era; to school segregation and school shut downs to avoid desegregation; to redlining and the school-to-prison pipeline and now, to the caging of children at the border.  And at every one of those plot points and everywhee in between, the perpetrators would all look the same: blameless White folk.

Still, I thank the woman with whom I had that brief exchange. She forced me to finally get it. The persistent belief in White innocence leads us down a path that ends with us patting murderous Johnny on the head and calling him a misguided child rather than a toxic product of a particularly putrid societal stew.

How different is justifying others' making of vile arguments in court over what children in detention are due from justifying having children in cages at all?
How different is arguing for a Muslim ban from arguing for the Chinese Exclusion Act?
How different is justifying enslavement from justifying lynching?
How different is justifying 'separate but equal' from arguing that integration would upset White people?
Answer? It ain't. There's no air between the one and the other. The justisplanations and (im)moral equivocations are how we ended up with genocide 400 years ago and how we've managed to wend our way back to it now.

A subconscious default belief in White innocence is dangerous and it is Making America Genocidal Again and Professor Glaude is right, if we refuse to really look at ourselves, we're just going to keep doing this ugliness over and over and over again.
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Moving from mere racism to new terror-tory

I've never been comfortable with the idea that all White folx are racists and although I understand why people (usually Black) make that claim, it has long made me uncomfortable. My discomfort arises from the heavy-handedness of the assessment. I prefer a more nuanced view, so let me offer this instead: maybe all White people aren't automatically racist, but they sure do all have the keys to that particular vehicle and it's just a matter of time until they use the keys handed to them at birth, to get in and run one of us over.

The traditional definition of racism focuses  on antagonism directed at a person or group. But as many have come to realize, we all - people of all colors - have negative feelings (sometimes going so far as to have antagonistic feelings) towards other groups. It is entirely normal to hold negative views, if not exactly healthy. Racism, however, goes several steps further.

Discriminating judgments (where 'to discriminate' is to differentiate or recognize a distinction between/among) are what we use to make thousands of decisions every day. Where that discrimination becomes problematic is where we fail to see the harm our over-generalizations may be causing or worse, when we actively seek to inflict harm with those over-generalizations. It's one thing to fear bees because you were once stung by a bee; or  snakes because some are poisonous but it is another thing entirely to make broad generalizations about Black men because of something that one Black man did to you four years ago, or Hispanic people because of something some ijit said after he got off a golden elevator. 

Racism is necessary differentiation taken to irrational or harm-causing extreme; it is the weaponization of normal sifting and categorizing processes and the application of power to those processes in ways that have lasting consequences for those upon whom the judgments land. 

The critical shortcoming of current dictionary definitions of ~ism and ~ists is that those definitions ignore the power dynamic. Racism doesn't work without power. To be racist one has to have access to the power to encode one's beliefs in law or policy that inflicts harm (see Stephen Miller) or to bring the forces of state down upon others (see BBQ Becky and others who call the police on random Black people trying to exist), or to pick up a gun and kill dozens on account of race or nationality (see this weekend's TX shooter).

So no, #NotAllWhitePeople are racist, but all White people can be racist at any time. This weekend's back to back mass shootings offer incontrovertible proof of this. 

There are people - mostly White - who complain at the overuse of the word 'racist'. They are in fact, quite tired of being called racists. Welp, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, smells like a duck, it ain't tofurkey. I acknowledge folks' frustration, but perhaps if their behaviors didn't so clearly line them up alongside the ~ism, we wouldn't need to use the word quite so much? How 'bout that? Or how about this: let's stop talking about racism and start talking about genocidal impulses and ethnic cleansing. Cuz it sure looks like that's where we're heading.

That the resident of the House of White (Supremacy) is a racist and that his condition is chronic, is self-evident. The real trouble we now face is that he's giving voice to the voiceless and gumption to the gumptionless. Again, this weekend serves as a terrifying case in point.    
When DJT says that, "No human being would want to live there" of Baltimore, a city that is home to thousands of African Americans, he is setting the stage for genocidal violence. When he claims that migrants fleeing instability - much of it caused by our meddlings in their electoral processes I might add - is an "infestation", he is setting the stage for genocidal violence. When he uses terms typically reserved to describe animals to describe people of color, he is setting the stage for genocidal violence. When he leads chants of "Send her back!", he is setting the stage for genocidal violence. This is not hyperbole. The events of this first weekend of August 2019 are your proof. 

We are well beyond "racism" at this point. So far beyond it that the question of who is and who ain't really doesn't matter any more. It is no longer about whether it's racist to say the things he says, or whether it's racist-adjacent to concur with those views. We are in entirely different territory today. Terror-tory perhaps? 

We can certainly continue to pretend that the president's ~ism is a figment of the left's collective imagination, but to what end? Oh yes, the psychic comfort of those who share his views and the politicians who seek their votes. But when his words seem to be moving others to genocidal action? Yeah, your psychic comfort is sh*t and it's time to start telling the damn truth. 

What is this truth you ask?

The truth is that in American culture, the empathy gap between White and non-White is wide. That empathy gap once gave rise to Native genocide, and then to an African genocide, to Chinese exclusion, to Japanese American internment, to a Muslim exclusion (ban) and now to Hispanic genocide at the border. #TellTheTruth

The truth is that what happened in Texas is an outgrowth of that empathy gap which is giving rise to disaffected young White men bent on ethnic cleansing. #TellTheTruth

The truth is that some of  y'all ain't trying to make America great again, you're trying to make it a terrorist state again. When the other is not human, this is all too possible. #TellTheTruth

The truth is that y'all ain't worried about economic woes, you never were. You want to get back to brutalizing POC without challenge. You want to get back to the days of Sunday lynching and nobody paying. #TellTheTruth

The only thing Trump's people are interested in making America again is proudly racist. That's why can't one of those people call out White nationalism without choking. They're busy trying to reach for a bygone era, an era when non-White people knew their damn place and that place wasn't in the halls of power. Oh they deny, deny, deny, but their denials aren't plausible.

Lashing out when one can't have one's way is the quintessence of White fragility, but the actions of this past weekend demonstrate clearly that fragility ain't fragile at all, it's insecurity seeking cover in toxic masculinity. 

4AAAM - forty acres and a mule or something like that

In response to a thread on social media about reparations, some questions were raised: How would reparations be paid? How would we value the labor costs? Who would be paid? and so on. They were good and important questions and I'm grateful for them. It's easy enough to blather about reparations, far less so to figure out the details and mechanics of the doing. 

As I've thought about those questions these last two weeks or so, two things have become clear to me. First, I’ve realized that if we stick with the compensating unpaid labor angle, it becomes almost impossibly difficult to make the reparations argument workable. Not only do you run into the you-were-not-a-slave-why-should-I-pay-you argument, but the value of the labor is nearly impossible to quantify. That alone frustrates the exercise to a degree that is paralyzing. We've been paralyzed on this issue long enough. Time to change directions so that we can move ahead, I say. 

Second, it became clear that just taking the first step of saying “This can be done” started me on a process of thinking and researching; reading and writing that, while not making the doing any easier, did provide me with a potential roadmap for the doing. 

So, here’s where I landed on the whole reparations thing. (Spoiler alert: it’s not where I thought it would be, which is what makes the whole “thinking and researching” thing so fascinating.)

It won't be outstanding unpaid wages (like I said, this didn't go where I thought it would)

In my initial back-of-the-envelope scribbles on this I’d said that unpaid wages were due. I’ve already decided against that approach. Payment of wages owed is unrealistic as the workers themselves are long gone and Lord knows, the resistance to any such payment will mire the efforts in courthouse challenges until 2120. “You weren’t a slave and your parents weren’t slaves! You’re not entitled! Get a damn job like the rest of us Real Americans!^TM ” will be the cry.  

Any attempt to compensate unpaid enslaved labor, in addition to triggering a national case of fragilitis gravidarum, will also have the unintended consequence of sending the message that America’s sins with respect to race are locked into a single time period; that White concern trolls are right about Black people really needing to just “get over” slavery.

But America’s sins against people of a certain hue are ongoing and making the reparations fight all about one particular set of historical wrongs would send precisely the wrong message. We would end up focusing on paying for the old sins, all the while the systems, structures and policies would remain in place to commit new ones daily. Sounds like a losing proposition to me. As it is, America's sins with respect to race haven’t stopped and they certainly don’t seem to be decreasing in either frequency or intensity (cf  the Holden Matthews case in LA). Fixing the reparations conversation in the antebellum period would allow us to continue to hold the entirely wrong-headed view that Emancipation was all that was required, and that good White people done did all they needed to to wipe the slate clean.

While the generations since emancipation are grateful (I use that word very advisedly) for their freedom, they’d really have liked to be free in deed rather than just in word.  Freedom for enslaved people is a process, or it should be. Emancipation was the beginning of that process, Reconstruction, which was an attempt at a reparative justice framework, was to have been the next step but it was sabotaged. We ain’t reach the end of the process yet as is pretty clearly evidenced by the racial wealth gap (among other measures), and it’s time to finish this process.  From my vantage point, I'd say that 'Murica’s still got plenty work left to do. 

America’s sins against Black people are not time-bound, they continue to this day. Rather than giving you a long list, I’ll just link you to a few of my previous essays that speak to some of those sins. 

Briana Brochu: Made in America;

50 years of Black people not being oppressed:

And 50 more years of Black people not being oppressed.

The truth is out there and if you doubt that you should do some research (or maybe click some of the links I’ve provided). 

Reparative justice is due to those who were enslaved, but since they’re long gone, I say we should cast that debt into the sea of forgetfulness. Though this suggestion will bring great relief to some, it comes with a sting in the tail. While we may be willing to forgo unpaid three and four hundred year old bills, what we ain’t finna do is forgive the debt owed to generations that are still very much alive; generations that continue to suffer the financial consequences of ugly America anti-Black policies. Those we can easily identify, quantify and yes boo, rectify. . 

Here’s how I propose we do it

A new 40 acres compact

The Homestead Act of 1862 gave (White) citizens 160 acres of freehold land for moving west. 160 acres. It's worth considering a new Homestead Act. Land doesn’t actually need to be transferred, but the value of it should be. And in instances where people do want land, that too should be possible. We can haggle over how many acres later.

Where land values are being paid out, we should determine the average acreage homesteaders received during the height of homesteading, and then calculate the average value of an acre of that land (by region). If the Brown family of New Jersey decides they want to move to Nebraska, we look at the average homestead in Nebraska and give the family a payment - in land or coin - equivalent to that average. That's how  a reparative compensation system would work. (There's a rabbit hole I won't go down here: how do we discourage people from all moving to the highest land value states to exploit the compensation system. Rabbit hole. Not going there.)

And before you ask, yes, I favor using today’s land values. What would be the point of giving a recipient some arbitrary 1800s land value? The White families who benefited from the land giveaways of 1862 have reaped value over multiple generations, including many of today’s farmers who proudly claim their farms have been in their families for 4 or 5 generations. It was primarily White families that benefited from the homesteading of the 1800s, so it's only fair that those who were shut out of those giveaways on account of White supremacy should be given the opportunity to benefit today. Stupid ahistorical arguments about how unfair this compensation system is will not fly. Read your history.

So who do we pay? 'Lucky' for us, America's been so busy discriminating, that there's plenty of recent events that need to be 'repaired' financially. 

America will need to pay reparations to folks who have been redlined, sidelined, and prison-pipelined to death. We need to do reparative justice to those who are today experiencing the consequences of the US government’s policies that have shut them out of every large-scale giveaway to the American people. And funnily enough, those people just happen to be the descendants of the enslaved, so there’s your fix. Funny how that worked out huh?

The Who's Who of reparations recipients

So all that said, here’s my new list. These are the things I can think of right this minute that need to be repaired.

The family of every single lynching victim;
Seneca Village (mid-19^th century) descendants;

Tulsa Massacre (1921) descendants;

Rosewood Massacre (1923) descendants;

Tuskegee syphilis experiment (1932) descendants;

Henrietta Lacks (1951) family and descendants;

The family of Emmett Till (1955);

The Little Rock 9 (and every school child of that time who was harassed and brutalized by students and teachers);

Families impacted by unequally funded schools;

Families impacted by redlined housing that depressed the growth of Black wealth

Lagniappe (bonus): Black GIs unable to access GI benefits

And these are just a short list of fairly recent acts that need to be repaired. There are, of course, many others. 

As it turns out, there is no need to know what plantation Black folks’ people built; what cotton Black folks’ people picked because there is so much recent ugliness about which can find out a great deal without any real hard labor. And you know majority America ain't about to do no hard labor....that's what they have us for. 

There’s no necessity to run around looking for boogeymen in white hoods or plantation owners' garb. Save that  energy, y'all gon need it to fight the logic of this argument: White America owes Black America for what it did yesterday..Looking at recent injuries forecloses the “get over slavery” argument entirely. We arent talking about slavery. And look at us, foreclosing on somebody else. LOL. Turnabout is fair play they say. 

Y’all know Becky and Chad do tho. They are endlessly inventive and when it comes to avoiding culpability for racism’s impact on the lived realities of Black and brown folk? “Endlessly inventive” is an understatement. I anticipate that even this reasonable compromise will land like a loud fart in church. This here is us saying, “See? We got over it. Now can we talk?” I’m pretty sure the answer will still be no but there you have it. . 

Why AllLivesMatter-ing the question of reparations is a non-starter with me

Reparations are much in the conversation, on the Dem side, in the run-up to 2020. Setting aside any question of whether such discussions are red herrings or serious conversations of what recompense is due; questions of how "fair" it would be (to whom??) to pay such monies or how the White majority would likely respond to any such payment, I want to share a few thoughts on why candidates who are dismissive of the idea won't get a second look from me and how i think reparations could be done.

First and foremost, there's the obvious question, the one you know folks are asking: why do we need to have this discussion at all? Why can't it be tabled for later?

In three words: now is later. In a four more words: if not now, when? Isn't 2019 'later' enough for us as a nation? It's been 400 years. C'mon people, it's time; time to stop dilly dallying and shilly shallying. 

Any suggestion that talking about reparations is somehow divisive or otherwise unhelpful to national unity (hahaha!) is first, laughable and second, translates simply into "We don't really care what has been done to Black Americans historically even when we say we do. Certainly, we don't care enough to work at redress. Can't we all just get along? Kumbaya."  Yeah well that kind of response is no longer going to satisfy. 

There's a great deal of focus on 1619 as the beginning of the slave trade. Whether we agree or not that 1619 was the start of the inhumane trade we can, at the very least, agree that it's been at least 400 years since the trade and the brutality of White supremacy in this place made its first marks. Surely, at the 400th anniversary we should be ready to have this discussion; ready to take some kind of reparative action? Or maybe it's been 400 years because America #ReallyDontCareDoYou? 

First lady Melania Trump at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland wearing a jacket with the words "I REALLY DON'T CARE. DO U?" after her visit Thursday with migrant children who are being detained at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The data are pretty conclusive, the descendants of the enslaved have fared far worse economically than every other group - bar the Native Americans - who live on this land mass. That ain't no accident. And while the data usually focus on the facts and figures, I haven't seen too many researchers focus on the underlying whys, perhaps because answering the why question involves making inferences about motivation and that's not what researchers typically do. I am not a researcher however, I'm an essayist and I will infer the hell outta some findings. 

Here's what I infer: White supremacy is the cause of the racial wealth gap; White supremacy is the cause of the ongoing economic insecurities of Black and brown families; hell, White supremacy is also why we don't have universal health care; White supremacy (with a healthy dash of nihilistic Christianity thrown in) is why we currently have a government that thinks defunding Planned Parenthood and the Special Olympics is good policy.  

The data is out there and to me, it's pretty clear. But data only gets us so far. We have to choose to believe what the data is telling us, and many of us just don't. 97% of scientists, for example, say that climate change is real and yet climate change denialism is still a thing; voting against one's on best interests (unless that interest is the protection of unearned privilege) is a thing; voting for people who suppress others' right to vote (all while holding your nation up as a beacon of democracy) is a thing.  

So yeah, White supremacy is the problem and reparations would be the beginning of a solution. Reparations need to be talked about and then we need to stop talking and we need to get to acting on that talk. The talk needs to occur despite the objections of heartland and frankly many liberal cities' White folx to Black people getting two coins. Cuz let's face it, that is at the root of the objection. 

I'm not a politician dependent on peoples' votes, so I can say, "Screw 'em" and carry on. Buttigieg and others cannot. Frankly though, the politics are not my concern, the payment of the long overdue moral debt is. 

It is past time to stop trying to make Whiteness comfortable with equity adjustments for Black people (no one has to explain lawsuits. Consider reparations a big ole lawsuit with a big ole settlement);
It is past time to stop feeling like an explanation of equity adjustments is even necessary (history books are free);  
It's past time to stop pretending that "policies" that are broad and general will impact Black people the way they impact White people (don't play like y'all don't know how to game the hell outta any policy so that the intended beneficiaries gain the least. The data is out there. Go look and see who benefits the most from affirmative action. I'll wait.) 
And it's surely past time to have some politicians who have the intestinal fortitude to hold these views. 

If we are serious about economic inequality as a 2020 issue, some part of our focus has to be on the racial wealth gap; some part of our focus has to be on Black economic insecurity and the dual legacies of economic insecurity on account of discrimination and wealth theft on account of White supremacy. And all of this is why Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders who both blithely dismiss all considerations of reparations can get little love from me. And I say this as one who was  #AllBernieAllTheTime in 2016.

I'm compelled to commit these words to 'paper' on this issue because Pete Buttigieg, my (former) front-runner candidate, was asked about reparations in an Esquire interview, and he totally and absolutely All Lives Mattered the response. Here's his response in full:

"I've never seen a specific, workable proposal. But what I do think is convincing is the idea that we have to be intentional about addressing or reversing harms and inequities that didn't just happen on their own. The cleanest way I can think of to do it are through policies. So we know in housing and criminal justice, to some extent in basic economic policies around wages and taxation, that some policy improvements that are also the right thing to do will have a disproportionate benefit to people of color. I think that's one way that we can be intentional and make a difference on this. I've just not seen a cash transfer mechanism that’s been laid out that you can envision working that most people would think is fair."

Yeah, that's a no from me dawg. Nope. No. Nah.

He said he hasn't seen a workable proposal? here's my back of the envelope, 5 minute plan. Sure this is basic and sure it'll need to be teased out and some ideas will be found to be unworkable but the enslavement and forced breeding of millions should have been unworkable too, no? If we can do that, we can do any-facking-thing. 

1. Create lists: identify potential recipients. Not all Black people in America today are entitled. I, for one, am not. My reparations have to come from the Queen as an immigrant from a former British colony. So step one must be to  identify recipients. This alone could take two decades. 
2. Calculate the value of forty good acres (note: I said *good*)
3. Calculate a reasonable rate of growth that careful husbandry of the investment would have yielded. We love conservatism don't we? Let's determine what "conservative" estimates of growth would have been for the 40 acres' value. And before you even ask the question, no not all emancipated persons would have carefully and successfully managed their 40 acres, but that's not the point. The point is that they weren't given the opportunity to even try. They weren't given opportunity to build anything. As a matter of fact, their every attempt to build was frustrated. That's in your history. I'm not just making that up off the top of my pointy head. And God knows, even if they had been given opportunity to build, they would have been robbed of its yield. (see anything written about theft of sharecroppers' livelihoods or this about bad seeds)
4. Divide by descendants
5. Pay

I'll develop these ideas in my next essay. Hopefully I can get it done in a week. 

How the lie of supremacy + fact of fragility leads to the toxic myth of blamelessness

If you listened to Judge TS Ellis saying of Manafort that despite copious evidence to the contrary, Manafort had led an "otherwise blameless life" you might conclude that White men can do no wrong. Even when they've obviously done (and been convicted of) wrong. Such is the power of Whiteness. 

There may be some who are conflicted about whether Paulie did in fact lead a blameless life prior to his prosecution but I ain't among them. I am not conflicted or in any way confused. He's a crook. He's been a crook. He will ever be a crook. But since the concept of blamelessness is now in doubt, since we're now not sure what blamelessness looks like, lemme help you out with that. Let me offer for your consideration, some truly blameless lives....

Emmett Till, 14. Fourteen. "Blamed" by a nice White lady (NWL) of sexually aggressive behavior. Kidnapped and brutalized by NWL's husband and brother. Over a lie. A lie she admitted to in 2017. She's not in jail or even threatened with jail though because she has, since this unfortunate incident, led an otherwise blameless life.

Chaney, Goodman & Schwerner, In Freedom Summer - 1964 - these three young men worked to register Black voters. While driving to Meridian, Mississippi after visiting the charred remains of a KKK-burned church, the three were arrested, held, and eventually kidnapped from jail and executed.

Trayvon Maritn, 17. Executed by a wannabe cop on the sidewalk in Sanford, FL. Because he was Black and unexpected. That's a life otherwise blameless.

Tamir Rice, 12. Murdered in 2014 by a rookie police officer who had been let go by his previous employer for being unfit for police work. Tamir, 12, playing alone with a toy gun in a park. Some Chad called in a report  and the rest, as they say, is history. Tamir's life? Blameless. 

Richard Collins III, college student brutally murdered while minding his own business (this is a theme with many of these murders) for the dual crimes of Blackness and not stepping out of the way of a White man/child. Life? You guessed it: blameless. The malefactor, whose life is not blameless, is awaiting trial on murder and hate crimes charges. 

Aiyana Stanley-Jones, 7. She didn't have enough time on the planet to be blamed for anything. Police, executing one of their infamous "no knock" warrants, shoot her dead while asleep on her grandmother's couch. The police officer who ended her life was cleared of all charges.

And there are so many others. There's Renisha McBride; Jordan Davis; John Crawford III; Terrence Crutcher; Alton Sterling; Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William "Henry" Stewart and on and on and on the list goes. The endless list proves there exists a surfeit of White supremacist-fueled entitlement and rage that can and do capriciously seek to end or constrain others' lives. It is our refusal to deal with this reality that gives supremacy cover; cover to spew its violence - physical, economic, and/or legal - upon the rest of us.

White supremacy is a fascinating thing. The same supremacist-built justice system that calls Manafort blameless, takes seventy years to exonerate George Stinney, who was in fact without blame. 

The same system that calls Manafort blameless, has yet to pour out any blame on the people who killed Terrence Crutcher; Alton Sterling, Tamir Rice and Stephon Clark. 

But the justice system is just one fruit of the larger tree of White supremacy. As I see it, the tree's two contradictory roots are the intractability of supremacist thinking and the fragility of White belief in its competence. As strong as the belief in (the fallacy of) supremacy purports to be, it is clearly undermined by a lack of faith in that so-called supremacy. I guess it is as my mother always said, superiority complexes are in fact inferiority complexes trying to make themselves feel good.

The tension between these opposing views must cause no end of emotional stress and in an effort to resolve this cognitive dissonance of mammoth proportion, Whiteness has become fearful of every damn thing and every-facking-one non-White. 

The fear is not an unreasonable one. Having stolen from everyone, everywhere; having oppressed people everywhere; having struck out with a conquistador's zeal and created colonies everywhere, developing a fear of retributive justice was inevitable. Sensible even. The colonizer now fears colonization. How could he/she not? But rather than step back from its colonizer past, change its approach and do better, supremacy chooses to stand firm with teeth bared, ready and willing to tear what it fears to shreds. And so, here we are.

Stories of White blamelessness arise out of all of this. Colonizers and their descendants have all too often avoided difficult discussions of their history of purloined wealth. They have also avoided any culpability for the state of the world's poorest nations and people. And they have continued to claim entitlement to benefits of their theft. But such hiding from the truth creates dank spaces where dangerous beliefs can fester. 

In the time that it has taken me to marshal my thoughts on this question of blamelessness, yet another blameless White man has struck. And naturally there are those who fix their mouths to suggest that his actions were understandable (that's  another euphemism for blameless). Even the president has suggested that White terrorists are few and far between and, of course, mentally ill (ergo, not culpable). 

It is supremacy-speak 101 to claim - even as a man stands accused of unspeakable evil - that even though his  actions are abominable, he is without culpability. Mental illness; understandable rage against immigrants; fear of invasion....all these are creative ways to say that he is blameless. 

White criminals, whether mere fraudsters like Manafort or terrorists like the Aussie in New Zealand, are either blameless, mentally ill, or justified. Never straight up wrong or evil, because Whiteness means perpetual exculpation, even as White malefactors hold the literal smoking gun in their hands. 

To be White is to have access to the "Yes, he's guilty but" form of sentencing..

*This option only available in the US. New Zealand looks poised to do different. Thank heaven.

To be White is to be innocent even when proven guilty. 

To be White is to be entitled to everything good in the world even when you bring the bad to others. 

To be White is to be held to a different standard or to no standard at all.

To be White is to be blame retardant, Teflon and to be blameless is to learn nothing from your punishment and to teach others nothing by your punishment.

To be White and blameless is to repeat problematic behaviors again and again in expectation of the same result.

Ah to be White and blameless! 

Environment matters - why Ralph Northam's hometown needs a close look

At the end of the weirdest (or perhaps most honest) Black history month evah I just wanted to say to ytfolx, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our America, where Blackface is still a thing, where nooses are a style and little Black Sambo-esque iconography as fashion statement.  Welcome to a world where thirty years ago, when some of us were Black and young and trying to make our way, young men (and women I'm sure) were using klan robes and blackface as a source of entertainment. And yes, some of the people so entertained were future lawmakers, doctors, bankers, police officers and sundry other professionals upon whom Black lives and livelihoods would depend. But hey, that's American life right? No big deal!

The Northam story broke on Feb 1, and while this was hardly first story of its kind, this was Black History Month 2019's inauspicious beginning. Here's the troubling truth though, there have been other similar stories. The Northam story is sad on its face, as it speaks to a disturbing level of toxic ignorance. Yes, the actions described are thirty years old, but Northam was grown. Full damn grown. Twenty-two. So the fact of that the actions occurred (allegedly) three decades ago?Immaterial. 

But Northam ain't the only politician with an interesting past. Here's another story that highlights how close our so-called leaders are to America's ignominious past and how truly unprepared most of them are to deal with the truths of that past.  

A candidate for governor of South Carolina who once said she was “proud” of the Confederacy now claims she didn’t know her ancestors owned more than 60 slaves humans.

 During a campaign speech at Bob Jones University earlier this month, Republican candidate Catherine Templeton touted her Southern heritage and her family’s involvement in the Confederacy.

During the speech, Templeton was vague about her slave-owning ancestors, telling the audience: “I think it’s important that my family didn’t fight because we had slaves. My family fought because the federal government was trying to tell us how to live. We didn’t need them to tell us how to live way back then and we don’t need them to tell us how to live today.”

(from a NY Post article about a SC gubernatorial candidate. See more here)

Templeton's ancestor, William Brawley inherited the family’s working plantation from his father. He managed it for two years, before serving in the South Carolina infantry during the Civil War and later being elected to Congress and then appointed as a federal judge in 1894.

“I’m proud of the Confederacy,” Templeton has said. Um, OK. That's a conversation for another day.....or is it? 

Bearing in mind that pride, what policies do we imagine Ms. Templeton might champion as Congresswoman? As a member of Gov. Nikki Haley's cabinet? Like her ancestor before her, Templeton went into public service. What's the likelihood that she went in to serve all the public equally? I'm going to take a wild guess and say that William Brawley, Ms. Templeton's great-grand-pappy, wasn't there serving anyone who looked like me. Mayhap neither was she.  

History matters. Family history especially matters, which brings us to the Northam family.

In light of Ms. Templeton's story, it's definitely worth asking who were Ralphie's forbears. As a native Virginian with roots in the tiny Nassawadox, VA  community, a community where in the 1600s the Onancock wharf was the site of importations of enslaved persons primarily from Barbados and the Caribbean, Mr. Northam's family history matters. 

Nassawadox is a town - per the 2000 census - of 572 people and 121 families. It lies at the intersection of America's two great sins: genocide (the land is stolen native land hence the Native name) and enslavement (the town is a mere twenty miles from a port where enslaved persons made land in these United States). All of America lies at that intersection it is true, but this particular town occupies that space in an obvious way. Between its name and its proximity to a landing site for the enslaved, it's hard to escape questions about what kind of place it might once have been; what kind of place it might be today as a result.

So who are Northam's forebears? What roles did they play in the trade in the 1600s and in the society writ large, since? And perhaps most importantly, what has Ralph learned about or at the feet of those various forebears and in the bosom of that society? With whom did Ralph go to school (think a little about what desegregation might have looked like in Nassawadox)? What was he taught? By whom? Who taught the people who taught the teachers who taught Ralph? What casual racism did Ralph hear or participate in during his formative years? What noxious racism did he hear or participate in as a child and young adult? 

Given these questions about Ralph's place of birth, should the 2019 discovery of his medical school year book really have been in the least bit surprising?  

The Northam Incident (incidentS if you include his wife's profoundly stupid "Imagine you had to pick cotton all day" business) forces us to consider that perhaps we come by our racism honestly and that we might need to do a great deal of work (and over an extremely long period of time) to change our subconscious scripts. Pro tip: the answer to "how long?" is forever.

I began to have a discussion about these very issues with someone (White) recently and the immediacy of the push back was hardly surprising. The responses were variously - unsurprisingly - "You can't blame someone's family...." and "You can't assume that because someone came from a racist family that....". Um, yeah. You can. You really can. 

If you come from a family of musicians, is there not a high likelihood that you too will be a musician?

If you come from a family of dancers, are you not likely to be a dancer?

I come from a family of teachers, guess what my niece wants to be?

To simplify it further, you put your chicken in a seasoning environment will it not eventually have some flavor? And no, that's not shade. That's just how seasoning works. You create the environment, you get a particular result. Y'all should maybe try it sometime. That is shade. 

Environments matter, they have an impact. Explain to me why that truth applies to every environment except a racist one? 

If in 1984 Ralph Northam allegedly did an ugly thing, there are only a couple of questions we need to ask: First, "Who the hell raised him?" and second, "What work has he done shaking that ugliness off?" 

I don't want to hear about his Black friend. I want to hear how he has had his own personal truth and reconciliation process. And based on his poor showing at his press conference, I'm gonna say that he hasn't even begun the "truth" portion of that process, so I'm definitely a hard pass on the "reconciliation" piece. Reconciliation is impossible without acknowledgement of wrongdoing and Ralph ain't there yet. 

Count me out of the Kumbaya chorus on this one. I'm not about to give Ralph (or his wife) a pat on the head and a cookie.

Thank God Black History month is over. Forget history, this BHM started and ended with some cold Black present. This BHM was exhibit 49,000,001 to prove (for those who missed the previous 49,000,000 exhibits, that racism ain't over and that the Northams are not some exception that proves the rule.  

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