A New Notoriety?

An open letter to the no-longer-quite-so-notorious RBG

Dear Justice Ginsburg:

My disappointment couldn't be greater. I thought you were a champion of my rights, but I see now that perhaps I gave you more credit than you deserved. When you suggested (who am I kidding, you did not merely 'suggest', you were pretty clear) that the protest of Kaepernick and others in support of Black life was dumb and disrespectful, I found myself utterly disappointed.

I appreciate every opinion you have written and the overall effect of your work on the bench, but I have to say that your referring to Colin Kaepernick's protest as arrogant and stupid really shook me for a moment. Fortunately, my distress was only momentary.

I keep finding myself having to re-learn that in this society the label liberal doesn't necessarily translate to passionately committed to equality. The great epiphany your utterances forced upon me is this: equality for you is a matter of law whereas for me, it is a matter of existence.

There is no part of my existence that isn't challenged by continuing efforts to erode the notion - at this point it really is only a notion - of equality in these United States. My economic life? Shaped by others' willingness to accept the idea of equality. My professional life? Shaped by others' willingness to accept the idea of equality. My access to health care, education, environmental justice? All, shaped by others' willingness to accept the idea of equality. Reading most of our country's history, as I know you have, one cannot but acknowledge that the journey to equality has long been a helluva challenge for the majority. Pick an era when people of color made the tiniest step forward, then take a look at the era subsequent, and the effort to erase or reverse that step is certain to be found. The truth is out there.

It is in this that we differ.  For you it seems 'equality' is this thing you talk about Monday to Friday, from nine o'clock in the am until five o'clock pm. For me, equality is the journey of every one of the 86,400 seconds of every blessed day. There is no moment when my 'equality' or my 'freedom' can be readily accessed without the possibility of challenge. This is why Kaep kneels.

While you are free to dismiss (and then return a few days later chastened) the protests born of Black folks' reality, that is a privilege to which I do not have access. While you are free to not even know what the protest is about and yet, ignorant of the details, know with an alarming degree of certainty that it is dismissible, that is a privilege I do not have. This is why Kaep kneels. 

You are, of course, absolutely entitled to your opinion on Kaepernick, just as I am entitled to my opinion of your opinion. That's what freedom is.

However, freedom begins to end, and something else begins, when your opinion coupled with your relative power, has the capacity to negatively impact my access to basic safety. When your opinion + your power have the capacity to ennoble the unlawful (and often deadly) actions of police officers, vigilantes, right wing zealots, and various internet trolls against people like me. That is not freedom. Well, to be certain, in that situation, you continue to enjoy freedom, but it is a version of freedom that undermines and negates mine. 

Herein lies another thing that differentiates between us.

For you, the SCOTUS serves to solidify the law; to establish clear, hard lines that must not be crossed. Yet, don't those lines get crossed anyway? Don't people get executed who shouldn't? Don’t people spend decades in jail who oughtn’t? Don't bad things happen to good people (and sometimes to bad ones as well)?

In your SCOTUS-world, justice requires that I first be harmed. That is justice to you. It ain’t no justice to me, however. I’m not surprised that you’re OK with this version of American justice though, since you’re not the one being shot at, brutalized, or worse, killed.

We would prefer not to be harmed at all. This is why Kaep kneels.

We would prefer a system that seeks to prevent our injury, rather than one that offers a Band-Aid for our bullet wounds. Your comfort with reactive justice works for you because that is the privilege that your position and race afford you. My commitment though, must be to pre-emptive justice; proactive justice; justice at the initial point of contact with the system, rather than at the end. 

After 400 years of America’s reactive approach to ‘justice’, people of color have cottoned on to the fact that the time for a proactively just system is now. This is why Kaep kneels.  This is why others now join him: because there is no effective redress for the fatal harms the system so giddily metes out.

It matters not what your opinion is on the case of Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Jeremy Mardis, or the hundreds of other men, women, and children slaughtered by police, because they’ve all gone to glory, and there is still no treatment for that. There’s no assessment you and your sister and brother justices can offer that will bring redress. And so we kneel.

It matters not the results of your ex post facto review of the case of X or Y prisoner held on Death Row for a crime he/she did not commit. Those days, weeks, months, years are lost. Forever. We seek justice first. We seek a system wherein equality is the basis, the starting point, not a result insisted upon by a judge and which – like the SCOTUS school desegregation order of 1954 – can be flouted by the powerful.

The courts' eventual adjudication of innocence for the dead or the falsely accused/incarcerated serves no purpose other than to give the system and those who hold privilege within it a reason to feel good; such adjudication is but an opportunity for the society to pretend it is evolving. The reality is that those who were harmed in the first place remain eternally harmed.

This form of redress is a Pyrrhic victory of the meanest sort. SCOTUS justice, with all due respect, is a Sponge Bob Square Pants Band-Aid on a gaping, festering sore. The financial, social and emotional consequences of having been fatally wronged can never be fixed. There can be no ‘justice’ after the fact. This is why Kaepernick kneels.

It would have cost you nothing but the discomfort of shrugging off your privilege, to acknowledge any of these truths. Thank you for showing me that even that shrug is a bridge too far.

Until now, I have presumed that your decisions meant that you actually cared about the people about whom you were deciding. Your recent interview tells me that that was a mistaken assumption on my part. My bad. I won't do it again. 

Regards,

Me

The sweet comfort of four words: I Have A Dream

This is an open letter to the goodly gentleman (GG) who invoked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's name and his famed 'Dream' as GG sought to police Black voices raised in protest. This is also an open letter to those who joyfully claim the benefits of Dr. King's work but have never comprehended its true nature nor participated in the work involved in securing its benefits.

Dear Sir, 

You seem to be contending that every protester must be above reproach for the protest movement to be valid. This is an excellent way to invalidate the core premise of a movement without ever considering what it is that pushed people to action in the first place. It's also a little disingenuous don't you think? Is it your contention that the movement is without basis in fact? The 1,000+ persons shot dead by police in 2015 alone, without benefit of warrant, arrest, charge, trial or verdict might give the lie to any such notion.

You mentioned the story of Mike Brown as you denigrated the Black Lives Matter movement. Whether Mike Brown had his hands up is not really material is it? The point is that (1) Brown was shot dead in the street, without benefit of arrest, warrant, charge, trial or verdict; and (2) that's not how the law is supposed to work! What about Tamir Rice, shot dead a mere two seconds after the police rolled up to him? What about John Crawford III, shot dead while carrying an air rifle in the store where it was being sold, in an open carry state? When will it be the right time to demand different behavior from our police forces across the land? 

You also invoked the memory and work of Dr. King. Sigh. May I point out that the work of the Civil Rights era was to demand rights to which POC were entitled as citizens, but which were being casually withheld from them by the White, many of them professing Christian, majority? And yet you raise your Dr. King flag as if he were a point of pride for you. Don't tell anyone I said so, but he isn’t! He was, and remains, the proof of your endless shame. And every time people of color have to fight for something that should be theirs under natural law, the shame is refreshed. 

The Civil Rights movement, and the King whom we all revere, was not about gaining new rights for people of color, but rather about forcing the White majority to honor the natural rights of America's Black citizens. The Civil Rights movement forced the majority - of which you and your forebears are a part - to give people of color access to equal education; access to fair housing; access to labor unions' protections; access to the vote; freedom from domestic terror (aka Sunday after church lynching); access to the right to a fair trial; access to a jury of their peers - to include people of color (an idea only recently (May 2016) upheld by the SCOTUS). All of these rights were natural to the White majority but had to be fought for by people of color. King should not be a source of pride for White America but a source of everlasting humiliation and a challenge to do better next time. That a man had to spend his life fighting for the rights into which he was born? That such a man would be shot dead fighting for those rights? What exactly is it that you celebrate?  

White America gleefully waves its "Dr. King preached peaceful protest" flag, never mind it was toxic White supremacy that assassinated him. White America uses that flag to police today's protesters' behavior and demand their silence, but never seems to realize that Dr. King exposes rather than covers their perfidy. How do you not see the shame? King got nothing by asking for it nicely. Remember the shutting down of the Edmund Pettus Bridge? Remember the Montgomery Bus Boycott? Remember the sit-ins at lunch counters? Remember the billy clubs and the police dogs? You talk about Rev. King with great pride as if you sent him; as if it were not people like you against whom he was preaching and protesting.  You talk about his protests as if all he had to do was show up and all was right with the world. You talk about him as though people just like you did not meet him with demands for silence, just as you are demanding ours now.  King spent the last years of his life fighting tooth and nail with White supremacy and its commitment to deny him and his kin. He spent the last years of his life trying to embarrass politicians into living up to their much vaunted Bill of Rights. Rather than recognize how he chastened people just like you for their greater interest in peace than in justice, you talk about his 'I Have A Dream' speech and wallow in the sweet comfort of those four words. And even there, you get it wrong.

What was King's dream? Was it that his children would see all men as equals, or that yours would? Was it his dream that his children would learn to judge others by the content of their character or was it that yours would? As with the entirety of the Civil Rights era, this ain't about us, it's about you and once again, you have entirely missed the point. 

As Stokely Carmichael said, and as I quoted at length in White Privilege: a 5 point primer, “I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people" (emphasis mine). Likewise, the 'I Have A Dream' speech was written and delivered for White America not Black. We know ourselves to be equal. Do the police? The banks? The realtors? Yelp? Do you?

White America really ought to be ashamed to say MLK's name because in the face of the twenty-first century's new fight for Civil Rights - the right not to be executed on the street because the police are afraid of your skin - you are doing exactly as the majority did in the sixties: standing in your shoes and wondering; policing our tone and behavior as we demand the right to live. All the while, you're doing precisely nothing to help secure our lives. That being the case, your platitudinous invocations of Dr. King's legacy have no currency here, so just stop. 

I am about five minutes from saying y'all can't invoke Dr. King's name no mo' cuz you just don't get it.

You know what? Forget the five minutes. Consider the ban in full effect until White America is ready, willing and able to act in concert with people of color, and ensure the preservation of their lives and rights.

Kaepernick: Miss me with that

PSA

I see folk complaining about Colin Kaepernick's actions. Let me be real clear: polite protest ain't win nothing for the Negro (or any person of color) in this country yet. Look at how the Native Americans are still fighting to have the land respected. Today. Right this minute. Cuz 500 years of begging ain't quite enough. And look at how many of us sit quietly by, drinking the clean water that their actions are seeking to protect WHILE DOING NOT A DAMB THING IN SUPPORT OF THEM. We are, as usual, quite content to drink the clean water; celebrate the Civil Rights Act and the Marriage Equality laws but to actually get up off our duffs and DO? To put anything, never mind everything, on the line to secure those rights? Hell naw! But we want to tell Kaepernick that he's disrespectful? Yeah, miss me with that.

Until people of all colors start offending sensibilities, ain't nothing gonna change. White supremacy is quite content to steal your land, your labor, your woman, your man, your children, your life and expect you to clean up the blood and guts they leave behind. It has ever been thus. Y'all can miss me with the "That's so disrespectful" BS. Miss me with that entirely.

Nothing changes until enough enraged people stand up and say "No more!". Kaepernick sat down to stand up for what he believed in. Martin, Bayard Rustin et al, did the same. Rosa sat to stand up for what she believed. Men and women walked miles during the Montgomery Bus Boycott for what they believed. Folk sat at lunch counters to stand up for what they believed. Thousands marched on Washington for what they believed. And now you wanna tell me about respect? Look! Miss me with the whole respect thing. 

When Black men wore suits and Black women wore gloves and stockings, the dogs were still set upon them. Respect? It is well past time for this 'respect' business to become a two way street. We have been respecting and respecting and "Yessir"-ing and "No ma'am"-ing forever. The way I see it, as soon as I see some of that respect traffic rolling in my general direction, we can return to a system based on mutual respect but the whole, "I respect you and you piss on me and tell me it's rain"? Nuh uh! When y'all ready to bring the respect train, I'm ready. Until then, I'm sitting so I can stand. 

As you were.