#about racism and society and prejudice and so on and so forth | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 6 years ago

Text

Against Innocence Race, Gender, and the politics of Safety

Saidiya V. Hartman: I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the status of the other. It’s as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.” That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day — the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to ...

Frank Wilderson: [laughter] A nigga on the warpath!

While I was reading the local newspaper I came across a story that caught my attention. The article was about a 17 year-old boy from Baltimore named Isaiah Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in 2007 when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining him for hours. After he stopped responding they dumped his body in the snow and did not call for medical assistance for over 40 minutes. In late March 2012, the case was thrown out completely and none of the counselors involved in his murder were charged with anything. The article I found online about the case was titled “Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.” By emphasizing that it was a juvenile offender who died, the article is quick to flag Isaiah as a criminal, as if to signal to readers that his death is not worthy of sympathy or being taken up by civil rights activists. Every comment left on the article was crude and contemptuous — the general sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society. The news about the case being thrown out barely registered at all. There was no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of the many issues bound up with the case — youth incarceration, racism, the privatization of prisons and jails (he died at a private facility), medical neglect, state violence, and so forth — though to be fair, there was a critical response when the case initially broke.

For weeks after reading the article I kept contemplating the question: What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons? Which cases galvanize activists into action, and which are ignored completely? In the wake of the Jena 6, Troy Davis, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and other high profile cases,1 I have taken note of the patterns that structure political appeals, particularly the way innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of anti-racist political campaigns. These campaigns often center on prosecuting and harshly punishing the individuals responsible for overt and locatable acts of racist violence, thus positioning the State and the criminal justice system as an ally and protector of the oppressed. If the “innocence” of a Black victim is not established, he or she will not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause. If you are Black, have a drug felony, and are attempting to file a complaint with the ACLU regarding habitual police harassment — you are probably not going to be legally represented by them or any other civil rights organization anytime soon.2 An empathetic structure of feeling based on appeals to innocence has come to ground contemporary anti-racist politics. Within this framework, empathy can only be established when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity, which requires Black people, in the words of Frank Wilderson, to be shaken free of “niggerization.” Social, political, cultural, and legal recognition only happens when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made unthreatening. The “spokesperson” model of doing activism (isolating specific exemplary cases) also tends to emphasize the individual, rather than the collective nature of the injury. Framing oppression in terms of individual actors is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression and diverts attention from the larger picture.

Using “innocence” as the foundation to address anti-Black violence is an appeal to the white imaginary, though these arguments are certainly made by people of color as well. Relying on this framework re-entrenches a logic that criminalizes race and constructs subjects as docile. A liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of Blackness with guilt (criminality). Perhaps association is too generous — there is a flat-out conflation of the terms. As Frank Wilderson noted in “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” the cop’s answer to the Black subject’s question — why did you shoot me? — follows a tautology: “I shot you because you are Black; you are Black because I shot you.”3 In the words of Fanon, the cause is the consequence.4 Not only are Black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, Blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt. Authentic victimhood, passivity, moral purity, and the adoption of a whitewashed position are necessary for recognition in the eyes of the State. Wilderson, quoting N.W.A, notes that “a nigga on the warpath” cannot be a proper subject of empathy.5 The desire for recognition compels us to be allies with, rather than enemies of the State, to sacrifice ourselves in order to meet the standards of victimhood, to throw our bodies into traffic to prove that the car will hit us rather than calling for the execution of all motorists. This is also the logic of rape revenge narratives — only after a woman is thoroughly degraded can we begin to tolerate her rage (but outside of films and books, violent women are not tolerated even when they have the “moral” grounds to fight back, as exemplified by the high rates of women who are imprisoned or sentenced to death for murdering or assaulting abusive partners).

We may fall back on such appeals for strategic reasons — to win a case or to get the public on our side — but there is a problem when our strategies reinforce a framework in which revolutionary and insurgent politics are unimaginable. I also want to argue that a politics founded on appeals to innocence is anachronistic because it does not address the transformation and re-organization of racist strategies in the post-civil rights era. A politics of innocence is only capable of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist violence while obscuring the racism of a putatively colorblind liberalism that operates on a structural level. Posing the issue in terms of personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual intention, feeling or personal prejudice, though there is certain a psychological and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the individual in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. The liberal colorblind paradigm of racism submerges race beneath the “commonsense” logic of crime and punishment. This effectively conceals racism, because it is not considered racist to be against crime. Cases like the execution of Troy Davis, where the courts come under scrutiny for racial bias, also legitimize state violence by treating such cases as exceptional. The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that Davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent Black man. Innocence, however, is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other Black men — the bad ones — and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is the constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out (wishful last-minute appeals to the right to a fair trial reveal this — as if trials were ever intended to be fair!). The State is imagined to be deviating from its intended role as protector of the people, rather than being the primary perpetrator. H. Rap Brown provides a sobering reminder that, “Justice means ‘just-us-white-folks.’ There is no redress of grievance for Blacks in this country.”6

While there are countless examples of overt racism, Black social (and physical) death is primarily achieved via a coded discourse of “criminality” and a mediated forms of state violence carried out by a impersonal carceral apparatus (the matrix of police, prisons, the legal system, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, etc). In other words — incidents where a biased individual fucks with or murders a person of color can be identified as racism to “conscientious persons,” but the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of Black Americans under the pretense of the War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined. When it is visible, it fails to arouse public sympathy, even among the Black leadership. As Loïc Wacquant, scholar of the carceral state, asks, “What is the chance that white Americans will identify with Black convicts when even the Black leadership has turned its back on them?”7 The abandonment of Black convicts by civil rights organizations is reflected in the history of these organizations. From 1975-86, the NAACP and the Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans was understood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons from the civil rights organizations related imprisonment to the general confinement of Black Americans. Imprisoned Black men were, as Wacquant notes, portrayed inclusively as “brothers, uncles, neighbors, friends.”8 Between 1986-90 there was a dramatic shift in the rhetoric and official policy of the NAACP and the Urban League that is exemplary of the turn to a politics of innocence. By the early 1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison program and stopped publishing articles about rehabilitation and post-imprisonment issues. Meanwhile these organizations began to embrace the rhetoric of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance that encouraged Blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their neighborhoods, even going as far as endorsing harsher sentences for minors and recidivists.

Black convicts, initially a part of the “we” articulated by civil rights groups, became them. Wacquant writes, “This reticence [to advocate for Black convicts] is further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W.E.B. DuBois, that the tenuous position of the black bourgeoisie in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethren: to offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans must forcefully communicate to whites that they have ‘absolutely no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who has committed a crime.’”9 When the Black leadership and middle-class Blacks differentiate themselves from poorer Blacks, they feed into a notion of Black exceptionalism that is used to dismantle anti-racist struggles. This class of exceptional Blacks (Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the collective delusion of a post-race society.

The shift in the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is perhaps rooted in a fear of affirming the conflation of Blackness and criminality by advocating for prisoners. However, not only have these organizations abandoned Black prisoners — they shore up and extend the Penal State by individualizing, depoliticizing, and decontextualizing the issue of “crime and punishment” and vilifying those most likely to be subjected to racialized state violence. The dis-identification with poor, urban Black Americans is not limited to Black men, but also Black women who are vilified via the figure of the Welfare Queen: a lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society (particularly hard-working white Americans). The Welfare State and the Penal State complement one another, as Clinton’s 1998 statements denouncing prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or social security reveal: he condemns former prisoners receiving welfare assistance for deviously committing “fraud and abuse” against “working families” who “play by the rules.”10 Furthermore, this complementarity is gendered. Black women are the shock absorbers of the social crisis created by the Penal State: the incarceration of Black men profoundly increases the burden put on Black women, who are force to perform more waged and unwaged (caring) labor, raise children alone, and are punished by the State when their husbands or family members are convicted of crimes (for example, a family cannot receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been convicted of a drug felony). The re-configuration of the Welfare State under the Clinton Administration (which imposed stricter regulations on welfare recipients) further intensified the backlash against poor Black women. On this view, the Welfare State is the apparatus used to regulate poor Black women who are not subjected to regulation, directed chiefly at Black men, by the Penal State — though it is important to note that the feminization of poverty and the punitive turn in non-violent crime policy led to an 400% increase in the female prison population between 1980 and the late 1990s.11 Racialized patterns of incarceration and the assault on the urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence because, in the eyes of the public, convicts (along with their families and associates) deserve such treatment. The politics of innocence directly fosters this culture of vilification, even when it is used by civil rights organizations.

WHITE SPACE

[C]rime porn often presents a view of prisons and urban ghettoes as “alternate universes” where the social order is drastically different, and the links between social structures and the production of these environments is conveniently ignored. In particular, although they are public institutions, prisons are removed from everyday US experience.12

The spatial politics of safety organizes the urban landscape. Bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space that white people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor Black bodies (as well as certain non-Black POC, trans people, homeless people, differently-abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so these bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. Prisons and urban ghettoes prevent Black and brown bodies from contaminating white space. Historically, appeals to the safety of women have sanctioned the expansion of the police and prison regimes while conjuring the racist image of the Black male rapist. With the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s came an increase in public awareness about sexual violence. Self-defense manuals and classes, as well as Take Back the Night marches and rallies, rapidly spread across the country. The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public campaigns targeted at women in urban areas warning of the dangers of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad declared that “[s]ingle women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”13 In The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (1975), women were told, “a little paranoia is really good for every woman.”14 At the same time that the State was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the US saw the massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of Blackness. It could be argued that the State and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized Penal State while simultaneously controlling the movement of women (by promoting the idea that public space was inherently threatening to women). People of this perspective might hold that the media frenzy about the safety of women was a backlash to the gains made by the feminist movement that sought to discipline women and promote the idea that, as Georgina Hickey wrote, “individual women were ultimately responsible for what happened to them in public space.”15 However, in In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Kristin Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society”: by insisting on “aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism,” feminists assisted in the creation of a tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment.16

Regardless of what perspective we agree with, the alignment of racialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning women about the dangers of the lurking rapist was not a coincidence. If the safety of women was a genuine concern, the campaigns would not have been focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since statistically it is more common for a woman to be raped by someone she knows. Instead, women’s safety provided a convenient pretext for the escalation of the Penal State, which was needed to regulate and dispose of certain surplus populations (mostly poor Blacks) before they became a threat to the US social order. For Wacquant, this new regime of racialized social control became necessary after the crisis of the urban ghetto (provoked by the massive loss of jobs and resources attending deindustrialization) and the looming threat of Black radical movements.17 The torrent of uprisings that took place in Black ghettoes between 1963-1968, particularly following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, were followed by a wave of prison upheavals (including Attica, Solidad, San Quentin, and facilities across Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Illinois, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania). Of course, these upheavals were easier to contain and shield from public view because they were cloaked and muffled by the walls of the penitentiary.

The engineering and management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettoes and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places that are removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of a “void” zone that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an “injustice” does register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms.

When I think of the public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, it seems significant that these murders took place in spaces that the white imaginary has access to, which allows white people to narrativize the incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Trayvon was gunned down while visiting family in a gated neighborhood; Oscar was murdered by a police officer in an Oakland commuter rail station. These spaces are not “alternate universes” or void-zones that lie outside white experience and comprehension. To what extent is the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroachment of violence on spaces that white people occupy? What about cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort zones? When describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon writes about “a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region,” where “Black is not a man.”18 In the regions where Black is not man, there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects seen as worthy of having a story of their own.

TRANSLATION

When an instance of racist violence takes place on white turf, as in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, there is still the problem of translation. I contend that the politics of innocence renders such violence comprehensible only if one is capable of seeing themselves in that position. This framework often requires that a white narrative (posed as the neutral, universal perspective) be grafted onto the incidents that conflict with this narrative. I was baffled when a call for a protest march for Trayvon Martin made on the Occupy Baltimore website said, “The case of Trayvon Martin – is symbolic of the war on youth in general and the devaluing of young people everywhere.” I doubt George Zimmerman was thinking, I gotta shoot that boy because he’s young! No mention of race or anti-Blackness could be found in the statement; race had been translated to youth, a condition that white people can imaginatively access. At the march, speakers declared that the case of “Trayvon Martin is not a race issue — it’s a 99% issue!” As Saidiya Hartman has asserted in a conversation with Frank Wilderson, “the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced.”19

In late 2011, riots exploded across London and the UK after Mark Duggan, a Black man, was murdered by the police. Many leftist and liberals were unable to grapple with the unruly expression of rage among largely poor and unemployed people of color, and refused to support the passionate outburst they saw as disorderly and delinquent. Even leftists fell into the trap of framing the State and property owners (including small business owners) as victims while criticizing rioters for being politically incoherent and opportunistic. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, responded by dismissing the riots as a “meaningless outburst” in an article cynically titled “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” Well-meaning leftists who felt obligated to affirm the riots often did so by imposing a narrative of political consciousness and coherence onto the amorphous eruption, sometimes recasting the participants as “the proletariat” (an unemployed person is just a worker without a job, I was once told) or dissatisfied consumers whose acts of theft and looting shed light on capitalist ideology.20 These leftists were quick to purge and re-articulate the anti-social and delinquent elements of the riots rather than integrate them into their analysis, insisting on figuring the rioter-subject as “a sovereign deliberate consciousness,” to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.21

Following the 1992 LA riots,22 leftist commentators often opted to define the event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight the political nature of people’s actions. This attempt to reframe the public discourse is borne of “good intentions” (the desire to combat the conservative media’s portrayal of the riots as “pure criminality”), but it also reflects the an impulse to contain, consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white, Euro-American traditions. When the mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical, criminal, and devoid of meaning, leftists often respond by describing them as politically reasoned. Here, the confluence of political and anti-social tendencies in a riot/rebellion are neither recognized nor embraced. Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed with sharp analyses of structural violence and explicitly political messages — the rioters were obviously not politically or demographically homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are fucked and act without first seeking moral approval. Some leftists and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive perspectives, like those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London who said, “We’re not all gathering together for a cause, we’re running down Foot Locker.”23 Or the excitement of two girls stopped by the BBC while drinking looted wine. When asked what they were doing, they spoke of the giddy “madness” of it all, the “good fun” they were having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that “we can do what we want.”24 Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence — rioters, looters, criminals, thieves, and disruptors are not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors. Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize.

With that being said, my reluctance to jam Black rage into a white framework is not an assertion of the political viability of a pure politics of refusal. White anarchists, ultra-leftists, post-Marxists, and insurrectionists who adhere to and fetishize the position of being “for nothing and against everything” are equally eager to appropriate events like the 2011 London riots for their (non)agenda. They insist on an analysis focused on the crisis of capitalism, which downplays anti-Blackness and ignores forms of gratuitous violence that cannot be attributed solely to economic forces. Like liberals, post-left and anti-social interpretive frameworks generate political narratives structured by white assumptions, which delimits which questions are posed which categories are the most analytically useful. Tiqqun explore the ways in which we are enmeshed in power through our identities, but tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an investment in life (sometimes call biopolitics) rather than, as Achille Mbembe writes, “the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who must die” (sometimes called necropolitics).25 This framework is decidedly white, for it asserts that power is not enacted by direct relations of force or violence, and that the capitalism reproduces itself by inducing us to produces ourselves, to express our identities through consumer choices, to base our politics on the affirmation of our marginalized identities. This configuration of power as purely generative and dispersed completely eclipses the realities of policing, the militarization of the carceral system, the terrorization of people of color, the institutional violence of the Welfare State and the Penal State, and of Black and Native social death. While prisons certainly “produce” race, a generative configuration of power that minimizes direct relations of force can only be theorized from a white subject position. Among ultra-left tendencies, communization theory notably looks beyond the wage relation in its attempt to grasp the dynamics of late-capitalism. Writing about Théorie Communiste (TC), Maya Andrea Gonzalez notes that “TC focus on the reproduction of the capital-labor relation, rather than on the production of value. This change of focus allows them to bring within their purview the set of relations that actually construct capitalist social life – beyond the walls of the factory or office.”26 However, while this reframing may shed light on relations that constitute social life outside the workplace, it does not shed light on social death, for relations defined by social death are not reducible to the capital-labor relation.

Rather than oppose class to race, Frank Wilderson draws our attention to the difference between being exploited under capitalism (the worker) and being marked as disposable or superfluous to capitalism (the slave, the prisoner). He writes, “The absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is symptomatic of [an] inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capital’s over-accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories that structure conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.”27 Historian Orlando Patterson similarly insists on understanding slavery in terms of social death rather than labor or exploitation.28 Forced labor is undoubtedly a part of the slave’s experience, but it is not what defines the slave relation. Economic exploitation does not explain the phenomena of racialized incarceration; an analysis of capitalism that fails to address anti-Blackness, or only addresses it as a byproduct of capitalism, is deficient.

SAFE SPACE

The discursive strategy of appealing to safety and innocence is also enacted on a micro-level when white radicals manipulate “safe space” language to maintain their power in political spaces. They do this by silencing the criticisms of POC under the pretense that it makes them feel “unsafe.”29 This use of safe space language conflates discomfort and actual imminent danger — which is not to say that white people are entitled to feel safe anyway. The phrase “I don’t feel safe” is easy to manipulate because it frames the situation in terms of the speaker’s personal feelings, making it difficult to respond critically (even when the person is, say, being racist) because it will injure their personal sense of security. Conversation often ends when people politicize their feelings of discomfort by using safe space language. The most ludicrous example of this that comes to mind was when a woman from Occupy Baltimore manipulated feminist language to defend the police after an “occupier” called the cops on a homeless man. When the police arrived to the encampment they were verbally confronted by a group of protesters. During the confrontation the woman made an effort to protect the police by inserting herself between the police and the protesters, telling those who were angry about the cops that it was unjustified to exclude the police. In the Baltimore City Paper she was quoted saying, “they were violating, I thought, the cops’ space.”

The invocation of personal security and safety presses on our affective and emotional registers and can thus be manipulated to justify everything from racial profiling to war.30 When people use safe space language to call out people in activist spaces, the one wielding the language is framed as innocent, and may even amplify or politicize their presumed innocence. After the woman from Occupy Baltimore came out as a survivor of violence and said she was traumatized by being yelled at while defending the cops, I noticed that many people became unwilling to take a critical stance on her blatantly pro-cop, classist, and homeless-phobic actions and comments, which included statements like, “There are so many homeless drunks down there — suffering from a nasty disease of addiction — what do I care if they are there or not? I would rather see them in treatment — that is for sure — but where they pass out is irrelevant to me.” Let it be known that anyone who puts their body between the cops and my comrades to protect the State’s monopoly on violence is a collaborator of the State. Surviving gendered violence does not mean you are incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence. Likewise, people can also mobilize their experiences with racism, transphobia, or classism to purify themselves. When people identify with their victimization, we need to critically consider whether it is being used as a tactical maneuver to construct themselves as innocent and exert power without being questioned. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors — but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and being conscientious of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts.

On the flip side of this is a radical queer critique that has recently been leveled against the “safe space” model. In a statement from the Copenhagen Queer Festival titled “No safer spaces this year,” festival organizers wrote regarding their decision to remove the safer-space guidelines of the festival, offering in its place an appeal to “individual reflection and responsibility.” (In other words, ‘The safe space is impossible, therefore, fend for yourself.’) I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing, and unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit, as part of a historical shift from queer liberation to queer performativity that coincides with the advent of neoliberalism and the “Care of the Self”-style “politics” of choice).31 By reacting against the failure of safe space with a suspicion of articulated/explicit politics and collectivism, we flatten the issues and miss an opportunity to ask critical questions about the distribution of power, vulnerability, and violence, questions about how and why certain people co-opt language and infrastructure that is meant to respond to internally oppressive dynamics to perpetuate racial domination. As a Fanonian, I agree that removing all elements of risk and danger reinforces a politics of reformism that just reproduces the existing social order. Militancy is undermined by the politics of safety. It becomes impossible to do anything that involves risk when people habitually block such actions on the grounds that it makes them feel unsafe. People of color who use privilege theory to argue that white people have the privilege to engage in risky actions while POC cannot because they are the most vulnerable (most likely to be targeted by the police, not have the resources to get out of jail, etc) make a correct assessment of power differentials between white and non-white political actors, but ultimately erase POC from the history of militant struggle by falsely associating militancy with whiteness and privilege. When an analysis of privilege is turned into a political program that asserts that the most vulnerable should not take risks, the only politically correct politics becomes a politics of reformism and retreat, a politics that necessarily capitulates to the status quo while erasing the legacy of Black Power groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. For Fanon, it is precisely the element of risk that makes militant action more urgent — liberation can only be won by risking one’s life. Militancy is not just tactically necessary — its dual objective is to transform people and “fundamentally alter” their being by emboldening them, removing their passivity and cleansing them of “the core of despair” crystallized in their bodies.32

Another troublesome manifestation of the politics of safety is an emphasis on personal comfort that supports police behavior in consensus-based groups or spaces. For instance, when people at Occupy Baltimore confronted sexual assaulters, I witnessed a general assembly become so bogged down by consensus procedure that the only decision made about the assaulters in the space was to stage a 10 minute presentation about safer spaces at the next GA. No one in the group wanted to ban the assaulters from Occupy (as Stokely Carmichael said, “The liberal is afraid to alienate anyone, and therefore he is incapable of presenting any clear alternative.”)33 Prioritizing personal comfort is unproductive, reformist, and can bring the energy and momentum of bodies in motion to a standstill. The politics of innocence and the politics of safety and comfort are related in that both strategies reinforce passivity. Comfort and innocence produce each other when people base their demand for comfort on the innocence of their location or subject-position.

The ethicality of our locations and identities (as people within the US living under global capitalism) is an utter joke when you consider that we live on stolen lands in a country built on slavery and genocide. Even though I am a queer woman of color, my existence as a person living in the US is built on violence. As a non-incarcerated person, my “freedom” is only understood through the captivity of people like my brother, who was sentenced to life behind bars at the age of 17. When considering safety, we fail to ask critical questions about the co-constitutive relationship between safety and violence. We need to consider the extent to which racial violence is the unspoken and necessary underside of security, particularly white security. Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies that they project hostile feelings onto, which allows them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence. The precarious founding of the US required the disappearance of Native American people, which was justified by associating the Native body with filth. Andrea Smith wrote, “This ‘absence’ is effected through the metaphorical transformation of native bodies into pollution of which the colonial body must constantly purify itself.”34 The violent foundation of US freedom and white safety often goes unnoticed because our lives are mediated in such a way that the violence is invisible or is considered legitimate and fails to register as violence (such as the violence carried out by police and prisons). The connections between our lives and the generalized atmosphere of violence is submerged in a complex web of institutions, structures, and economic relations that legalize, normalize, legitimize, and — above all — are constituted by this repetition of violence.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE

When we use innocence to select the proper subjects of empathetic identification on which to base our politics, we simultaneously regulate the ability for people to respond to other forms of violence, such as rape and sexual assault. When a woman is raped, her sexual past is inevitably used against her, and chastity is used to gauge the validity of a woman’s claim. “Promiscuous” women, sex workers, women of color, women experiencing homelessness, and addicts are not seen as legitimate victims of rape — their moral character is always called into question (they are always-already asking for it). In southern California during the 1980s and 1990s, police officers would close all reports of rape and violence made by sex workers, gang members, and addicts by placing them in a file stamped “NHI”: No Human Involved.35 This police practice draws attention to the way that rapeability is also simultaneously unrapeability in that the rape of someone who is not considered human does not register as rape. Only those considered “human” can be raped. Rape is often conventionally defined36 as “sexual intercourse” without “consent,” and consent requires the participation of subjects in possession of full personhood. Those considered not-human cannot give consent. Which is to say, there is no recognized subject-position from which one can state their desires. This is not to say that bodies constructed as rapeable cannot express consent or refusal to engage in sexual activity — but that their demands will be unintelligible because they are made from a position outside of proper white femininity.

Women of color are seen as sexually uninhibited by nature and thus are unable to access the sexual purity at the core of white femininity. As Smith writes in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Native American women are more likely to be raped than any other group of women, yet the media and courts consistently tend to only pay attention to rapes that involve the rape of a white woman by a person of color.37 Undocumented immigrant women are vulnerable to sexual violence — not only by because they cannot leave or report abusive partners because of the risk of deportation, but also because police and border patrol officers routinely manipulate their position of power over undocumented women by raping and assaulting them, using the threat of deportation to get them to submit and remain silent. A Mexican sociologist once told me that women crossing the border often take contraceptives because the rape of women crossing the border is so normalized. Black women are also systematically ignored by the media and criminal justice system. According to Kimberle Crenshaw, “Black women are less likely to report their rapes, less likely to have their cases come to trial, less likely to have their trials result in convictions, and, most disturbingly, less likely to seek counseling and other support services.”38 One reason why Black women may be less likely to report their rapes is because seeking assistance from the police often backfires: poor women of color who call the police during domestic disputes are often sexually assaulted by police, criminalized themselves, or have their children taken away. Given that the infrastructure that exists to support survivors (counseling, shelters, etc) often caters to white women and neglects to reach out to poor communities of color, it’s no surprise that women of color are less likely to utilize survivor resources. But we should be careful when noting the widespread neglect of the most vulnerable populations by police, the legal system, and social institutions — to assume that the primary problem is “neglect” implies that these apparatuses are neutral, that their role is to protect us, and that they are merely doing a bad job. On the contrary, their purpose is to maintain the social order, protect white people, and defend private property. If these intuitions are violent themselves, then expanding their jurisdiction will not help us, especially while racism and patriarchy endures.

Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and rapeable, even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to protest violence committed against one of our comrades. When we challenge sexual violence with appeals to innocence, we set a trap for ourselves by feeding into the assumption that white ciswomen’s bodies are the only ones that cannot be violated because only white femininity is sanctified.39 As Kimberle Crenshaw writes, “The early emphasis in rape law on the property-like aspect of women’s chastity resulted in less solicitude for rape victims whose chastity had been in some way devalued.”40 Once she ‘gives away’ her chastity she no longer ‘owns’ it and so no one can ‘steal’ it. However, the association of women of color with sexual deviance bars them from possessing this “valued” chastity.41

AGAINST INNOCENCE

The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the State as “criminals.” When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the State. This ignores that the “enemies” in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are racially defined, that gender and class delimit who is worthy of legal recognition. When the Occupy movement was in full swing in the US, I often read countless articles and encountered participants who were eager to police the politics and tactics of those who did not fit into a non-violent model of resistance. The tendency was to construct a politics from the position of the disenfranchised white middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy movement from the “delinquent” or radical elements by condemning property destruction, confrontations with cops, and — in cases like Baltimore — anti-capitalist and anarchist analyses. When Amy Goodman asked Maria Lewis from Occupy Oakland about the “violent” protestors after the over 400 arrests made following an attempt to occupy the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, I was pleased that Maria affirmed rather than excised people’s anger:

AMY GOODMAN:Maria Lewis, what about some of the reports that said that the protesters were violent?

MARIA LEWIS:Absolutely. There was a lot of anger this weekend, and I think that the anger that the protesters showed in the streets this weekend and the fighting back that did take place was reflective of a larger anger in Oakland that is boiling over at the betrayal of the system. I think that people, day by day, are realizing, as the economy gets worse and worse, as unemployment gets worse and worse, as homelessness gets worse and worse, that the economic system, that capitalism in Oakland, is failing us. And people are really angry about that, and they’re beginning to fight back. And I think that that’s a really inspiring thing.

While the comment still frames the issue in terms of capitalist crisis, the response skillfully rearticulates the terms of the discussion by a) affirming the actions immediately, b) refusing to purify the movement by integrating rather than excluding the “violent” elements, c) legitimizing the anger and desires of the protestors, d) shifting the attention to the structural nature of the problem rather than getting hung up on making moral judgments about individual actors. In other words, by rejecting a politics of innocence that reproduces the “good,” compliant citizen. Stokely Carmichael put it well when he said, “The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here that violence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right, nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.”42

The practice of isolating morally agreeable cases in order to highlight racist violence requires passively suffered Black death and panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current paradigms of racism. While it may be factually true to state that Trayvon Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous sense of satisfaction. What if Trayvon Martin were armed? Maybe then he could have defended himself by fighting back. But if the situation had resulted in the death of George Zimmerman rather than of Trayvon Martin, I doubt the public would have been as outraged and galvanized into action to the same extent.

It is ridiculous to say that there will be justice for Trayvon when he is already dead — no amount of prison time for Zimmerman can compensate. When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that requires passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead Black boy to make its point. It’s not surprising that the nation or even the Black leadership have failed to rally behind CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who was recently convicted of second degree manslaughter after a group of racist, transphobic white people attacked her and her friends, cutting CeCe’s cheek with a glass bottle and provoking an altercation that led to the death of a white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attackers are criminalized for their survival. When Akira Jackson, a Black trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with a baseball bat, she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter.

Cases that involve an “innocent” (passive), victimized Black person also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify and morally ennoble itself by taking a position against racism. We need to challenge the status of certain raced and gendered subjects as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies that can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify white suffering (“slavery” being the favored analogy). Although we must emphasize that Troy Davis did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail, maybe we also should question why killing a cop is considered morally deplorable when the cops, in the last few months alone, have murdered 29 Black people. Talking about these murders will not undo them. Having the “right line” cannot alter reality if we do not put our bodies where our mouths are. As Spivak says, “it can’t become our goal to keep watching our language.”43 Rejecting the politics of innocence is not about assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective — it is a lived position.

1 This article assumes some knowledge of race-related cases that received substantial media attention in the last several years. For those who are unfamiliar with the cases:

The Jena 6 were 6 Black teenagers convicted for beating a white student at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, on December 4, 2006, after mounting racial tensions including the hanging of a noose on tree. 5 of the teens were initially charged with attempted murder.

Troy Davis was a Black man who was executed on September 21, 2011 for allegedly murdering police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia, though there was little evidence to support the conviction.

Oscar Grant was a Black man who was shot and killed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California on January 1, 2009.

Trayvon Martin was a 17 year-old Black youth who was murdered by George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman, on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida. 2 This was a real situation that I heard described by Michelle Alexander when I saw her speak at Morgan State University. While she was working as a civil rights lawyer at the ACLU, a young Black man brought a stack of papers to her after hearing about their campaign against racial profiling. The papers documented instances of police harassment in detail (including names, dates, badges #s, descriptions), but the ACLU refused to represent him because he had a drug felony, even though he claimed that the drugs were planted on him. Later, a scandal broke about the Oakland police, particularly an officer he identified, planting drugs on POC. 3 Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9.2 (2003): 225-240. 4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Uniform Title: Damnés De La Terre (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 5 Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13.2 (2003): 183-201. 6 H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, Die, Nigger, Die! : A Political Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002). 7 Loïc Wacquant, “Social Identity and the Ethics of Punishment,” Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University, 2007. Conference presentation. 8 Ibid. 9 Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3.1 (2001): 95-134. 10 Ibid. 11 Cassandra Shaylor, “‘It’s Like Living in a Black Hole’: Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex,” New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement 24.2 (1998). 12 Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners, “Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1: ( 2011) 270-290. 13 Georgina Hicke, “From Civility to Self-Defense: Modern Advice to Women on the Privileges and Dangers of Public Space,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1 (2011): 77-94. 14 Mary Conroy, The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1975). 15 Hickey, “From Civility to Self-Defense.” 16 Kristin Bumiller, In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 17 Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis.” 18 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 19 Hartman and Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought.” 20 Zygmunt Bauman described the rioters as “defective and disqualified consumers.” Žižek wrote that, “they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive.” 21 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Harasym Sarah, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990). 22 Riots erupted in LA on April 29, 1992 after 3 white and 1 Hispanic LAPD officers were acquitted for beating Rodney King, a Black man, following a high-speed chase. 23 Zoe Williams, “The UK Riots: The Psychology of Looting,” The Guardian, 2011. 24 “London Rioters: ‘Showing the Rich We Do What We Want,’” BBC News, 2011 (Video). 25 Biopolitics and necropolitics are not mutually exclusive. While the two forms of power co-exist and constitute each other, necropolitics “regulates life through the perspective of death, therefore transforming life in a mere existence bellow every life minimum” (Marina Grzinic). Writing about Mbembe’s conceptualization of necropower, Grzinic notes that necropower requires the “maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes that are unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” Though Mbembe focuses primarily on Africa, other examples of these deathscapes may include prisons, New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Palestine, and so forth. 26 Maya Andrea Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,” Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (New York: Autonomedia, 2012). 27 Frank B. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order 30.2 (2003): 18-28. 28 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 29 This tactic is also used to silence and delegitimize other people, such as femmes who are too loud, or queers who engage in illegal actions. 30 In “Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work,” Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners offer the following definition of affect: “Affect is the body’s response to the world—amorphous, outside conscious awareness, nondirectional, undefined, full of possibility. In this framing, affect is distinct from emotion, which is understood as the product of affect being marshaled into personal expressions of feeling, as shaped by social conventions.” Affect is useful to think of the way ‘the criminal’ and ‘the terrorist’ become linked to certain racialized bodies, and how people viscerally respond to the presence of those bodies even when they consciously reject racism. Jackson and Meiners, “Fear and Loathing.” 31 Post-leftists, perhaps responding to the way we are fragmented and atomized under late-capitalism, also adamantly reject a collectivist model of political mobilization. In “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,” Maya Andrea Gonzalez advocates “inaugurating relations between individuals defined in their singularity.” In “theses on the terrible community: 3. AFFECTIVITY,” the idea that the human “community” is an aggregate of monad-like singularities is further elaborated: “The terrible community is a human agglomerate, not a group of comrades. The members of the terrible community encounter each other and aggregate together by accident more than by choice. They do not accompany one another, they do not know one another.” To what extent does the idea that the singularist (read, individualist) or rhizomatic (non)-strategy is the only option reinforce liberal individualism? In The One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power discusses how individual choice, flexibility, and freedom are used to atomize and pit workers against each other. While acknowledging the current dynamics of waged labor, she shows how using the “individual” as the primary political unit is unable to grapple with issues like the discrimination of pregnant women in the workplace. She asserts that thinking through the lens of the individual cannot resolve the exploitation of women’s caring labor because the individualized nature of this form of labor is a barrier to undoing the burden placed on women, who are the primary bearers of childcare responsibilities. She also discusses how the transition from a feminism of liberation to a feminism of choice makes it so that “any general social responsibility for motherhood, or move towards the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities is immediately blocked off.” Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender.” Nina Power, One-Dimensional Woman. (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). 32 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. 33 Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (New York: Random House, 1971). 34 Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005). 35 See Amy Scholder, Editor, Critical Condition: Women on the Edge of Violence, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993) and Elizabeth Sisco, “NHI—No Humans Involved,” paper delivered at the symposium “Critical Condition - Women on the edge of violence,” San Francisco Cameraworks, 1993. 36 New Oxford American Dictionary gives a peculiar definition: “the crime, committed by a man, of forcing another person to have sexual intercourse with him without their consent and against their will, esp. by the threat or use of violence against them.” To what extent does this definition normalize male violence by defining rape as inherently male? 37 Ibid. 38 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241-99. 39 Because the sexuality of white women derives its value from its ability to differentiate itself from “deviant” sexuality, such as the sexuality of women of color. 40 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” 41 Early rape laws focused on the “property-like” aspects of women’s sexuality that liberal feminists are today attempting to reclaim. Liberal feminists frame debates about women’s health, abortion, and rape around a notion of female bodies as property. But using bodily self-ownership to make our claims is counter-productive because certain bodies are more valued than others. Liberal feminists also echo arguments for free markets when they demand that the State not intervene in affairs relating to our private property (our bodies), because as owners we should be free to do what we want with the things we own. In order to be owners of our bodies, we first have to turn our bodies into property—into a commodity—which is a conceptualization of our corporeality that makes our bodies subject to conquest and appropriation in the first place. Pro-choice discourse that focuses on the right for women to do what they want with their property substitutes a choice-oriented strategy founded on liberal individualism for a collectivist, liberationist one. (Foregrounding the question of choice in politics ignores the forced sterilization of women color and the unequal access to medical resources between middle class women and poor women.) While white men make their claims for recognition as subjects, women and people of color are required to make their claims as objects, as property (or if they are to make their claims as subjects, they must translate themselves into a masculine white discourse). In the US, juridical recognition was initially only extended to white men and their property. These are the terms of recognition that operate today, which we must vehemently refuse. Liberal feminists try to write themselves in by framing themselves as both the property and the owners. 42 Carmichael, Stokely Speaks. 43 Spivak and Harasym, The Post-Colonial Critic.

#jackie wang #anarchism #race #identity #crime #communism

8 notes · View notes

sa-x · 6 years ago

Text

so in one of our sessions, one of my players was looting and found a book. i just kinda came up with an idea off the top of my head for a book by a philosopher critiquing the racism against orcs and other races whose cultures are different from races that tend to be city-dwellers, and this is what i’ve got. i have titled it “The Question of Civilization” by a tiefling named Ms. Excellence

The question of civilization. We must ask this question, of ourselves, of others, of the world itself. What is civilization? Is it mighty buildings, mechanical innovation? Is it the worship, tended by the clergy? Is it the exchange of ideas between the people? Or is it simply the people themselves?

There are myriad peoples in Toril, spanning its beautiful sprawl. On the land and beneath it, in the waters we swim, in the planes we hear tell of. As a girl, I was made painfully aware of our differences: the more fair of the races calling attention to my horns and my skin, bearing resemblance to a lineage beyond my control. I was called names I will not repeat, but throughout these insults it was clear I was made equal to those devils. Creatures who commit evil atrocities, power-hungry and willing to sacrifice anyone to that end.

Now, are devils the only guilty parties? Even the inexperienced adventurer knows there is no shortage of those twisted by their desires; devils, demons, drow, duergar (a damning amount of d’s, dare I say) all have their reputations as corrupted groups. With dark elves and dwarves, their moral leanings are the result of generations of worshiping the less favorable members of the pantheon: Lolth by the elves, and Laduguer by the dwarves (more assonance? I must be mad). The first members of their races had knowingly set a course for their descendants: a path paved with deceit, treachery, and abuse, that would cement their statuses as outcasts among most others. These individuals undoubtedly saw their decisions as not just correct, but necessary. Their foolish brethren wouldn’t understand, COULDN’T understand the steps that should be taken. And thus a schism (which had most likely already existed) widened, and a dichotomy officially formed.

Demons and devils are another matter entirely. Their methods, their reasoning, and their very nature are alien to most. Little research (if any) has been conducted on their home planes. The conceptions we have of these realms are based on the recollections by (very few) individuals who have survived them. The Abyss tortures one’s mind and dares you to stay sane, filled with who knows how many demons, all bloodthirsty and ruthless; the Nine Hells are both psychologically and physically tormenting, home to calculating and cruel devils that would betray their most trusted ally to gain favor with a higher power. These are 2 distinctly different cultures whose people share one similar trait: malice. Both demons and devils alike invade this world, with the demons sowing hate and antagonism, or to twist the most noble into merciless killers. Devils seek to rule us, our peoples, our cities, our lands, and to conquer yet another plane. They differ from the peoples of our plane, in that they are directly descended from Asmodeus, a being of power beyond any that I have seen in my travels. Little is known about this frightening creature, other than his physical appearance (an extremely tall humanoid with red skin and fine robes) and his ambition knowing no bounds. He is the one responsible for these ungodly creatures that torture our world.

You may ask: Why are these creatures beyond redemption? What about the kingdoms who slaughter, the evil clerics who sacrifice, the criminals that infect our cities? The difference is in their origin. A mortal is born, is forged by their experiences, and makes their own choices. Sometimes they become noble, a good force in the world. Sometimes they become morally corrupt, seeking wealth or power at the expense of others. But the power lies in the choice; The road does not diverge, but twists, a series of decisions one makes throughout their life. And this path formed represents one’s moral affections. Demons, devils, and other creatures born of the dark side of the divine are created in chaos and hatred, and see their slaughter, torture, and general promotion of strife as correct. Within mortal creatures, this undoubtedly promotes a moral dilemma: I want that person’s money, but I would have to either lie to, or kill them. Is this the right choice? Is my need for money worth that betrayal? Some say yes. Some say no. And whichever path you choose, one generally finds it easier to err on that side of morality. In this case, it becomes easier to hurt or lie to others in order to gain influence. This is the path of most criminals and other unfavorable members of society: a series of bad decisions born of personal want. This is in contrast with the aforementioned extraplanar creatures, who are born in, created from, and encouraged to enact evil and hatred from the very dawn of their existence. There was no origin of nobility, or even the chance to become good. There was only chaos.

And in this argument, I feel it necessary to distinguish our definition of evil, from that of a definition beyond this realm. Giants, goliaths, orcs, etc., do not have a culture of inherent malice. This is put upon them by other races (namely humans and elves). Rather, these races have a different method of interacting with the world around them: politically, interpersonally, and economically. Goliaths, as one example, do not have the same social dichotomy between their sexes. The women do bear children, but are warriors nonetheless. They are not considered or treated as lesser. They are still expected to fight, forage, and defend. Goliaths have their character forged in combat. From a very young age, they are encouraged to spar with their peers, and as they grow older, to seek out fiercer combatants in the world. It is not right or wrong, it is their way. They see other tribes and settlements as potential expansions, not to subjugate those peoples, but to widen their sphere. Humans play as if they are beyond these politics, but invade and war just the same, on a larger scale, with their neighboring rulers. At its core it is the same: A want for a larger empire, a stronger legacy.

Compare this to devils, who scheme and overthrow all the same. However, they relish in the torture they enact. They see it as necessary for their rule. They need not to be respected, but feared. And there is no length to which they will not go to achieve this. Contrast both of those with demons, who simply try and achieve the greatest amount of general unrest possible. They have no greater goal in mind besides turmoil. These groups care not for others or even their fellows, they simply seek to hurt.

The answer, that I attempt to convey in all this writing, is that the people of Toril are civilizations in themselves, and the only disagreement in that stems from historical prejudice and an abstinence from being informed. Horrible atrocities have been committed by those of all races, and yet the majority of the blame is put upon the less favorable of our peoples, by those who hold more power than us. The question of civilization is not WHO is civilized, but how we define civilization. And there is no one unified group in that regard. Humans will disagree with dwarves, who will disagree with halflings, who will disagree with dragonborn, and so on and so forth. We all have our differences, personal and cultural. This however, should not separate us. We should recognize and rejoice in that which makes us different, not use it as a source of jeering and harassment.

I am descended from both manners of these evils: Mortals who chose to make an abhorrent arrangement, and the devils that granted them that power. I do feel the sway of the Nine Hells from time to time: voices I do not know, promises of infernal power. I do not linger on it. I eschew these empty promises and look towards that which truly gives my life purpose. I make my choice.

#pbp #it might seem short but i consider a). the message trying to be conveyed and b). a realistic shortage of ink and parchment

3 notes · View notes

outoftheforestshow · 6 years ago

Text

Letter From Birmingham Jail A U G U S T 1 9 6 3 by Martin Luther King, Jr

From the Birmingham jail, where he was imprisoned as a participant in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in longhand the letter which follows. It was his response to a public statement of concern and caution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South. Dr. King, who was born in 1929, did his undergraduate work at Morehouse College; attended the integrated Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, one of six black pupils among a hundred students, and the president of his class; and won a fellowship to Boston University for his Ph.D. WHILE confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms. I think I should give the reason for my being in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the argument of "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every Southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliate organizations all across the South, one being the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Whenever necessary and possible, we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago our local affiliate here in Birmingham invited us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promises. So I am here, along with several members of my staff, because we were invited here. I am here because I have basic organizational ties here. Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid. Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider. You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being. I am sure that each of you would want to go beyond the superficial social analyst who looks merely at effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative. IN ANY nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of police brutality is known in every section of this country. Its unjust treatment of Negroes in the courts is a notorious reality. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in this nation. These are the hard, brutal, and unbelievable facts. On the basis of them, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the political leaders consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation. Then came the opportunity last September to talk with some of the leaders of the economic community. In these negotiating sessions certain promises were made by the merchants, such as the promise to remove the humiliating racial signs from the stores. On the basis of these promises, Reverend Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to call a moratorium on any type of demonstration. As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. The signs remained. As in so many experiences of the past, we were confronted with blasted hopes, and the dark shadow of a deep disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except that of preparing for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community. We were not unmindful of the difficulties involved. So we decided to go through a process of self-purification. We Letter From Birmingham Jail 2 started having workshops on nonviolence and repeatedly asked ourselves the questions, "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" and "Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?" We decided to set our direct-action program around the Easter season, realizing that, with exception of Christmas, this was the largest shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this was the best time to bring pressure on the merchants for the needed changes. Then it occurred to us that the March election was ahead, and so we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that Mr. Conner was in the runoff, we decided again to postpone action so that the demonstration could not be used to cloud the issues. At this time we agreed to begin our nonviolent witness the day after the runoff. This reveals that we did not move irresponsibly into direct action. We, too, wanted to see Mr. Conner defeated, so we went through postponement after postponement to aid in this community need. After this we felt that direct action could be delayed no longer. You may well ask, "Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. We therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue. One of the basic points in your statement is that our acts are untimely. Some have asked, "Why didn't you give the new administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this inquiry is that the new administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one before it acts. We will be sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Mr. Boutwell will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is much more articulate and gentle than Mr. Conner, they are both segregationists, dedicated to the task of maintaining the status quo. The hope I see in Mr. Boutwell is that he will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from the devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was "well timed" according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "wait." It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say "wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodyness" -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Letter From Birmingham Jail 3 YOU express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all." Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an "I - it" relationship for the "I - thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn't segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong. Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically structured? These are just a few examples of unjust and just laws. There are some instances when a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I was arrested Friday on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong with an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade, but when the ordinance is used to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest, then it becomes unjust. Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws. I MUST make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn't this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical delvings precipitated the misguided popular mind to make him drink the hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because His unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to His will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see, as federal courts have consistently affirmed, that it is immoral to urge an individual to withdraw his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest precipitates violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. Letter From Birmingham Jail 4 I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time. I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said, "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. YOU spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodyness" that they have adjusted to segregation, and, on the other hand, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable devil. I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the do-nothingism of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest. I'm grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, I am convinced that by now many streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble-rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who are working through the channels of nonviolent direct action and refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies, a development that will lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come. This is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom; something without has reminded him that he can gain it. Consciously and unconsciously, he has been swept in by what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, he is moving with a sense of cosmic urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. Recognizing this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand public demonstrations. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sitins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, "Get rid of your discontent." But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized. But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love? -- "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice? -- "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? -- "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist? -- "Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God." Was not John Bunyan an extremist? -- "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience." Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? -- "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? I had hoped that the white moderate would see this. Maybe I was too optimistic. Maybe I expected too much. I guess I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent, and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some, like Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, and James Dabbs, have written about our struggle in eloquent, prophetic, and understanding terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They sat in with us at lunch counters and rode in with us on the freedom rides. They have languished in filthy roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of angry policemen who see them as "dirty nigger lovers." They, unlike many of their moderate brothers, have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Letter From Birmingham Jail 5 LET me rush on to mention my other disappointment. I have been disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand this past Sunday in welcoming Negroes to your Baptist Church worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Springhill College several years ago. But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say that as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say it as a minister of the gospel who loves the church, who was nurtured in its bosom, who has been sustained by its Spiritual blessings, and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen. I had the strange feeling when I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery several years ago that we would have the support of the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be some of our strongest allies. Instead, some few have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows. In spite of my shattered dreams of the past, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and with deep moral concern serve as the channel through which our just grievances could get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed. I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say, follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother. In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sidelines and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, "Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with," and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between bodies and souls, the sacred and the secular. There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators." But they went on with the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven" and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's often vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson scratched across the pages of history the majestic word of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. For more than two centuries our foreparents labored here without wages; they made cotton king; and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation -- and yet out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. I must close now. But before closing I am impelled to mention one other point in your statement that troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I don't believe you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its angry violent dogs literally biting six unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I don't believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you would watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you would see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys, if you would observe them, as they did on two occasions, refusing to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I'm sorry that I can't join you in your praise for the police department. Letter From Birmingham Jail 6 It is true that they have been rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators. In this sense they have been publicly "nonviolent." But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. I wish you had commended the Negro demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested." They will be young high school and college students, young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience's sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage. Never before have I written a letter this long -- or should I say a book? I'm afraid that it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else is there to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts, and pray long prayers? If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me. Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright © 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; August 1963; The Negro Is Your Brother; Volume 212, No. 2; pages 78 - 88.

#Martin Luther King

6 notes · View notes

thevisibilityarchives · 2 years ago

Text

Homegoing (2016), Yaa Gyasi

BIPOC

Summary: In the heart of Africa’s Gold Coast, two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, fall victim to the West African Slave Trade in drastically different ways. Their experiences plant the seeds for what their ancestors will undergo in the centuries to come in Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel exploring the familial roots essential to blackness in America.

Full review: What does it mean to be an African-American? Because it has ranged for decades, it can be easy for younger generations to be unaware of the roots of the debate about identifying as “black vs. African-American”. The distinction may seem nonsensical or petty, a pure syntactical preference rooted in self-consciousness about black identity.

However, the conversation was born out of a recognition that blackness is not a monolith. One could be black, but not African-American. African-American is a term specifically meant to refer to those born on U.S. soil to the descendants of those enslaved generations past. Our identity and culture are unique in that the era of slavery so wholly shaped who were were, and who we are today.

Another differentiation for descendants of those who were enslaved (and a particularly sobering one), is that most, if not all of us, have European ancestry. Various fantasies, arguments, and justifications exist to explain what this may have meant for our ancestors. Under the yolk of racism, however, the answer is fairly clear: our homelands were taken and despoiled, then our bodies were taken to a new land and equally despoiled.

In a way, this is where Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing begins, with Effia and Esi–two Asante women dwelling on the Gold Coast in the early 1800s. This British colony would eventually become known as Ghana.

Despised by her mother, Effia is married off to a white merchant currently residing at the Cape Coast Castle, a menacing structure that became the final portal for slaves shipping out across the Atlantic. As his common-law wife, she is treated as gently as a woman can be in a patriarchal society, and their relationship fulfills the previously-mentioned arguments set forth about interracial relationships during the age of the Slave Trade. Effia did not choose her husband James. She did not elect him out of love or desire. She was lucky enough though to have been met with a man who treated her with kindness and gentility, and given that he was legally married to a white woman in Britain, he remained committed to her as a common-law wife and cared for their son, Quey.

Esi is not so lucky and represents the majority of experiences our ancestors encountered.

Captured as a slave, Esi is taken beneath the bowels of the very Cape Coast Castle in which Effia resides on the upper floors, ignorant that below her feet pass the bodies of Asanti peoples like chattel. In the dank dark, it is there she is taken by an unknown white sailor, not by the kind tenderness shown by James, but by cruelty and callousness in a pool of human excrement. There will be no one but her to care for the child, who will be born into slavery.

Gyasi does not attempt to shy away from the fact that the Asanti people are in fact, complicit in the slave trade. Often, Conservatives attempt to argue in favor of racism by perpetuating the narrative that because West Africans took part in slavery, this serves as some sort of justification for its existence.

Often, these arguments tend to ignore the fact that the intertribal slavery present within West African cultures prior to the West African slave trade, or even that practiced by the Vikings, Romans, Egyptians, or Aztecs does not really equate to the prolific scale of that which took part during the WAST. No other slave trade resulted directly in the formation of a set of prejudices and beliefs created solely just to sustain it.

Race, as we know it, is a byproduct of this justification, defined by the National Human Genome Research Institute as:

“a social construct used to group people. Race was constructed as a hierarchal human-grouping system, generating racial classifications to identify, distinguish and marginalize some groups across nations, regions and the world. Race divides human populations into groups often based on physical appearance, social factors and cultural backgrounds.”

No other slave trade resulted in the violent erasure of cultures, the systematic destruction of belief systems, and the violent attempt to so intensely segregate populations, the reverberations of which continue to exist today in the form of police brutality, gerrymandering, and the Supreme Court’s newest measures the end Affirmative Action, effectively restricting access to black and brown individuals from now reaching the upper echelons of academia.

Poverty, drug abuse, death, hope, famine, fear, lust, love, greed, violence, disease: these are the experiences of Esi’s ancestors in America, the experiences of my ancestors, of our ancestors. Where they diverge from Effia’s, they eventually converge once more for colonialism leaves nothing untouched in its corruption. It simply transforms things differently. Where it chokes the petals of a flower in one way on one side, its strangle may look slightly different on another.

In America, we were beholden to slavery. We tilled fields, and in exchange were “gifted” Christianity as our languages and spirituality were violently beaten out of us. We were forced to conform or die, and left with just enough of our culture to influence the world around us so that our Creole flavors, soulful music, curvaceous bodies, and shrugged off and discredited ideas can flow in and out of fashion, never given full credit where it’s due.

It is our story, the story of African-Americans: those descended from slaves, and by extension, those who have immigrated here.

Black History Month celebrates the accomplishments of Black Americans, however many African-Americans remain ignorant of the long history of what has been lost to us: the culture stolen, the history hidden, the pain beneath, and the homes left behind.

You can find Homegoing at your local library, big box bookstores, local bookstores, or here via IndieBound.

Citations:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/not-all-black-people-are-african-american-what-is-the-difference/

https://www.science.org/content/article/genetic-study-reveals-surprising-ancestry-many-americans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Coast_Castle

https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/historical-foundations-race

https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Race

https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2022/01/24/the-supreme-court-gets-ready-to-end-affirmative-action/?sh=7ab8a9695e38

https://youtu.be/v9hlvEl3Gf0

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101971062?aff=penguinrandom

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/12/15/enslaved-african-smallpox-vaccine-coronavirus/

#thevisibilityarchives #tva #black history month #black history is american history #black history #books #black authors #yaa gyasi #book blog #diversity #representation #black writers #bipoc authors

0 notes

thesydneyfeminists · 6 years ago

Text

Rural Feminisms

After spending a year and a half studying in Sydney, I made a temporary move to New Zealand just last month. Since then, I’ve been living and working on a dairy farm in a rural area of the North Island, New Zealand. My time here has made me pause and rethink my past life experiences. Of the last 8 years of my life, I’ve spent more than half of them living in rural areas. At 18, I started my undergrad degree in a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, surrounded by dairy and beef farms. The town itself was prosperous, mostly due to tourism and the presence of two wealthy universities. However, the surrounding region was largely working-class and had a higher-than-average percentage of poverty. Although I spent 6 years living in Virginia, I wasn’t directly exposed to life outside my little town. Sure, I complained about the closest city being an hour away, the lack of good radio stations and no diversity of restaurants. But otherwise, I was safely enclosed in my university bubble.

Image Description: Photo of a bright green tractor harvesting wheat. The tractor is in the center of the photo. To the right of the tractor, the wheat has been cut. In front of and to the left of the tractor, the wheat is still long. The sky is bright blue with large, fluffy clouds. A line of trees runs along the horizon in the distance.

As such, I paid little heed to the “townies,” those people who lived and worked around me but might as well have been in a different world. I claimed my parent’s working-class background set me apart from my more affluent classmates. But my feminism was still centered around academia. At my university, I was lucky to have easy access to printed knowledge and heaps of kind, patient people from which to learn. But all that time I carried and, to an extent, still carry harmful, internalized classism and prejudice against people who live in rural areas. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to undermine the very real pain and suffering differently marginalized people experience in many rural parts of the world. In Virginia, I personally struggled with hiding my sexuality due to the prevalence of violent homophobia. And I witnessed the KKK’s vitriolic racism and, specifically, anti-blackness on the campus of my undergraduate university. However, classifying all people who live in rural areas as sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, etc. goes directly against the core causes of intersectional feminism.

In mainstream feminism, women and nonbinary people living in rural areas are largely forgotten or blatantly excluded. As one woman raised in rural California writes, “We’re always portrayed as being a group of exclusively white, mullet-wearing, banjo-playing, lazy, toothless, illiterate, alcoholics and addicts. Casual jokes about inbreeding, incest and bestiality are perpetually being made at our expense, and we’re often depicted as violent, hateful, and dangerous” (https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/six-things-urban-feminists-should-never-say-to-rural-people/). The truth is far more complex. And, as the above author states, such statements are inherently linked to capitalism, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. One of the most damaging falsities perpetuated by these stereotypes is only white people live in rural areas. In the States, many rural, Southern areas have high populations of black people due to the lasting impacts of slavery. In Australia, many rural areas are mainly populated by Aboriginal people. Not to mention the countless rural communities around the world in countries where white people are not the majority. Our intersectional feminisms need to more actively listen to and include women and nonbinary people living in rural areas.

Image Description: A photo of an older person of indeterminant ethnicity sitting in front of a stone wall on a set of stone steps. They are holding what appears to be a carved, wooden staff. In front of them is a white sheep with a black head and, in the background, you can see unfocused mountains. The person is wearing a blue and pink flowered, long sleeve shirt, a black dress, black, closed-toed shoes and a floppy black hat with red stripe. Their head is turned slightly to face the camera.

Historical ignorance and erasure of rural women and nonbinary people in mainstream feminism are related to yet still distinct from classism. Even the most Marxist of feminist discourse often centers the urban working-class. Of course, these people are important and should rightfully be included in our feminisms. However, as the people at Rural Feminist highlight, “Rural women face unique difficulties. Finding medical care, escaping domestic violence, and accessing community services are particularly challenging tasks in sparsely populated areas. As economic growth concentrates more and more in urban areas, manufacturing jobs move overseas or become automated, and wealth inequality grows, these problems are exacerbated” (http://ruralfeminist.com/#aboutus). As feminists, it is important to make these distinctions and incorporate the needs of rural women and nonbinary people into the movement’s short- and long-term goals. It is possible to be critical of systemic injustices and acknowledge the relationship between rural living and conservative views without ostracizing all rural women and nonbinary people. Most importantly, we must recognize and listen to rural women and nonbinary people, who have always been doing the hard work of dismantling oppression – just in ways mainstream feminism rarely appreciates.

Image Description: A photo of a pair of hands holding a pile of small purple, red, orange, green and yellow berries. The hands are quite dirty and tough, as though they have been working outside for long hours. They are holding the berries over a large, black bucket filled with the same kind of berries.

In an excellent article on Dolly Parton, Guardian contributor Sarah Smarsh writes at length about working-class feminism and, particularly, rural feminism. She discusses the class privilege inherent in many mainstream forms of activism and suggests feminism must stop privileging “intellectual knowledge” over “experiential knowing.” Smarsh reminds us, “Working-class women might not be fighting for a cause with words, time and money they don’t have, but they possess an unsurpassed wisdom about the way gender works in the world” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/25/feminism-working-class-women-gender-theory-dolly-parton). Smarsh’s point is a crucial one for anyone claiming to be a feminist. Feminism should never require an exhaustive knowledge of academic theory or extensive vocabulary. It should also not reduce women and nonbinary people to their intellectual or physical contributions to “the cause.” For some people living in rural poverty, their mere existence is a form of resistance. So, we must all engage with others whose lived experiences are different from our own to build a more inclusive and expansive community. Rural feminisms must be integral parts of all our personal feminisms if we have any hope of progressing in the fight against patriarchal society.

By: Brittany L.

Sources:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/six-things-urban-feminists-should-never-say-to-rural-people/

http://ruralfeminist.com/

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/the-particular-struggles-of-rural-women/276803/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/25/feminism-working-class-women-gender-theory-dolly-parton

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sydney Feminists. Our Blogger and Tumblr serve as platforms for a diverse array of women to put forth their ideas and explore topics. To learn more about the philosophy behind TSF’s Blogger/ Tumblr, please read our statement here: https://www.sydneyfeminists.org/a

1 note · View note

tcm · 8 years ago

Photo

Wherein EditoriaL Assistant Manager Toyiah Murry ( @thecinefiliac ) discusses the racial politics of GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (’67)

It’s hard to believe that in all my years of classic film fandom, it took me 30 years to watch Stanley Kramer’s GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (’67). Although I shocked myself at this feat, I recognize and revel in the serendipitous glory of seeing it now, exactly 50 years after its premiere. Everything about this film is near perfection: the acting (near perfection I say), Edna Taylor’s stunning wardrobe on Katharine Hepburn, the set design, the cinematography, etc. The only element that stressed me out while watching this film was the strange reality of knowing that while the times have changed, nearly every bit of conflict communicated in this film rings louder and clearer today as it did in 1967. This is a testament to screenwriter William Rose and director/producer Stanley Kramer’s incredible talent and forward-thinking decision to produce a story centered around a hot-button issue in America just ahead of the Loving vs. Virginia Supreme Court case.

Sidney Poitier portrays the handsome, educated and practically immaculate doctor John Prentice, who meets and falls in love with a very young white woman, Joanna (Joey) Drayton (Katharine Houghton), in Hawaii. The film picks up with the newly in love couple glowing with passion and on their way to Joey’s home to meet her parents before leaving for a planned wedding in Geneva, Switzerland. John isn’t a fool and is instead apprehensive of Joey’s parents’ reaction while Joey—being young, white and filled with excitement—is certain that her left leaning folks will welcome him with open arms. She is surprised when her parents, Christina (Hepburn) and Matt (Spencer Tracy), are dumbfounded by their daughter’s revelation. The family dynamic gets tested as well as their personal morals as they grapple with the announcement, one made even more difficult (and amusing) when John’s parents are unexpectedly invited to dinner to learn of this decision as well.

Although the couple face a 14 year age gap and have only known each other for 10 days, the focus of the film’s tension comes from their color difference. Kramer manages to convey a serious topic that holds a mirror up to American society and begs the most liberal of progressives to truly question their own biases and beliefs about race. Kramer masters this with purposeful intent managing to balance the film with humor and genuine laugh out loud moments.

As a director, Kramer had already proven his skill behind the camera in films like INHERIT THE WIND, JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG, and THE DEFIANT ONES, but here the fluidity of his camera movement is a testament to the American New Wave movement that was sweeping over Hollywood. Kramer allows the camera to contribute to clever sight gags by swinging back and forth and moving up and down along with its characters. But, Kramer’s skill truly shines in the performances he captures from the film’s holy trinity of actors: Hepburn, Tracy and Poitier. Delivering perhaps some of the best moments in each of their careers in GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER, each actor emotes with authenticity and finesse inciting emotion from viewers. In one pivotal scene in which John expresses frustration at his father (Roy Glenn) for the expectations he’s put on John, I literally gasped from the depths of my soul then moved closer to the screen wanting to soak in the exchange that was long overdue with my own parents.

Nevertheless, the most gut-wrenching and disappointing aspect of my experience watching GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER��was realizing just how relevant the conversations in this film remain today. While the topic of miscegenation is relegated to a smaller, more close-minded population of our society, the general discussion and thoughts on race in America are still the same. Matt must battle his own confirmation bias against his daughter marrying a Black man despite being regarded by many as one of the most progressive liberals. Joey describes her father as a lifelong liberal that has fought against prejudice. But as Matt’s friend, Monsignor Mike, reveals “I always have believed that in that fighting liberal façade there must be some sort of reactionary bigot trying to get out” a truth that many Americans had to confront after election day.

John must also deal with internalized racism from the Drayton’s maid Tillie (Isabel Sanford). John does nothing to give her a negative impression of him. He’s kind, thoughtful, educated and warm, but upon seeing him, Tillie immediately dislikes him. She even warns the family against because she simply doesn’t “care to see a member of my own race getting above himself.” This ongoing battle within communities of color is the result of colonization and white supremacist tactics that for centuries have created fighting within oppressed groups so that there is no united fight against the inherent problem of the oppressor. We see these same tactics used today against Middle Eastern and Muslim citizens. Rose’s script even manages to sow the seeds of white privilege through Joey’s wide-eyed obliviousness before the term exploded into mainstream consciousness!

Yet what GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER does so flawlessly (besides making a stunning clotheshorse of Hepburn) is beg audiences to expand their mindsets without condemning more conservatively-minded viewers. Matt isn’t necessarily wrong in the way he thinks. His feelings and fears are valid based on his life experience. It’s his irrational desire to hold on to old thoughts in an ever-changing world that gets deconstructed and prodded. In perhaps my favorite scene of the film, Matt orders ice cream based on what he thinks he has liked in the past. Upon taking the first bite, he realizes it’s not the flavor he thought and he responds angrily with disdain. But after taking another bite or two more he tells Christina, “you know, it's not bad. Not bad at all… I kinda like it.”

TCM Big Screen Classics and Fathom Events are bringing GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER back to theaters on 12/10 and 12/13 for its 50th anniversary. If you’re like me and somehow missed this film over the years, or if you just want to revisit it on the big screen, then be sure to get your tickets now: http://myt.cm/ComingToDinner

#Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner #Sidney Poitier #Katharine Hepburn #Spencer Tracy #Katharine Houghton #Stanley Kramer #TCM #Fathom Events #TCM Big Screen #Isabel Sanford

194 notes · View notes

mistermcdee-blog · 8 years ago

Text

I highly doubt DT17 is going to go into this but one of the things I sort of like to play around with in my head as a form of worldbuilding are stereotypes and racism in this world. And I sort of like thinking about the idea that stereotypes would be based on the animals of people’s character. So, for example, with my characters, the Poppeacocks. Based on the peacock bird, what sort of stereotypes might exist for these peacock characters?

The ideas I came up with are that they’re commonly considered vain, showboaters, only concerned with their appearance, drama queens (you seen actual peacocks irl? they WILL fight anything. each other. you. cars). “Every peacock wants to be a model.” It doesn’t help that one of the most famous peacocks in the world is Mr. Poppeacock. If this world is a patriarchal society on the whole, all the dude peacocks might be considered “effeminate” or “gay.” You know, “Girl, I don’t know why you’re chasing that dude, he’s a peacock.”

Rabbits are considered meek, flighty, quiet, good runners (”So how fast can you run? A five-minute or four-minute mile?” “Of course the winner was a rabbit, they win track every year.”). Swans are considered extremely aggressive, protective of their family to the point of clannishness, ludicrously strong. Chickens are considered dumb on the whole--save for people like Gyro who “did good for a chicken.” Sea birds are sailors and go into the navy, owls are smart but they’re all those weirdos who stay up and night and do weird things.

And then within those species, are there internal prejudices? Prejudices between different swans, for example: how do trumpeter swans think about mute swans, how do arctic swans think about black swans, etc., how does an emperor goose think about a red-crested goose, so on and so forth.

Again, I don’t think any of this is going to come into play whatsoever in this universe they’re building for DT17, but it’s just kind of a fun headscratcher to think about if you enjoy worldbuilding like me.

17 notes · View notes

madisonacampbell · 5 years ago

Text

Via the ACLU: The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

No one expected their words to be enlightening or their tone harmonious. Hatred rarely comes in such flavors. It spills out as an ugly, incoherent mess infused with the rotten odor of willful ignorance. And so it was with the Nazi wannabes — self-styled white supremacists determined to make their mark on the world, committed to convincing anyone who might listen that their superiority was both evident and inevitable. The setting was downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017. Their mission was unity — of like-minded hate mongers. Their leader, Jason Kessler, was a 33-year-old who lived with his parents and had once supported Barack Obama. He had learned that many demographers thought whites would eventually become a minority race in the United States. That news was so unsettling that Kessler remade himself into a white-rights activist. He styled himself as “a civil and human rights advocate, focused on the Caucasian demographic” in the mode of “Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi.” His “Unite the Right” rally, observed the Christian Science Monitor, “was supposed to be the movement’s coming out party, an emergence from the shadows of internet chat rooms into the national spotlight.” Kessler was inspired in part by fellow University of Virginia graduate and white supremacist Richard Spencer who, in May 2017, led a band of racists in Charlottesville chanting “Russia is our friend” and “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-inspired slogan. Why they were enamored of Russia is anyone’s guess; I presume it had something to do with President Trump. The reason for the Nazi chant was evident; they thought it allowed them to channel the spirit of General Robert E. Lee, who had abandoned the U.S. Army in a doomed quest to preserve race-based slavery in the South. Charlottesville’s leaders recently had voted to remove Lee’s statue from the downtown park that no longer carried his name. Spencer and his crew opposed that effort and everything they thought it implied, including hostility to the legacy of whiteness. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were similarly motivated by the perceived threat to American whiteness. Its members — 50 strong — converged on Charlottesville that July to march around and shout “white power” as hundreds of counter protesters responded with “racists go home.” How did the mad ravings of a bunch of intellectually confused, racially paranoid misfits end up spurring a national debate over the limits of free speech, the meaning of the First Amendment, and the moral obligation of the president of the United States? One reason is that — despite Kessler’s efforts to cast himself as the Martin Luther King Jr. of white rights — the rally engendered fears of made-for-TV-scale violence. As news of the event spread, and some sense of its size became clear, several local businesses announced they would temporarily close out of concern for the safety of their customers and employees. The University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville, asked students to stay away. Many rally participants showed up armed with rifles and other deadly weapons (thanks to Virginia’s open carry laws). Indeed, even before the rally’s scheduled noon start time, Kessler’s congregation had ignited so much hostility and ugliness that local authorities labeled the gathering an “illegal assembly” and ordered participants to leave. In the end, the racist, anti-Semitic hate-fest caused three deaths. Two of the dead were state troopers. Berke Bates and H. Jay Cullen, assigned to monitor the gathering from the sky, died when their helicopter crashed. The third victim was Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Adolf Hitler fanatic from Ohio, killed Heyer by intentionally plowing his car into a crowd of counter protesters — injuring some 19 people in addition to Heyer, who died from blunt-force injury to her chest. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump famously condemned the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” His words provoked a controversy that went on for months as Trump proved incapable of criticizing the racist mob without also condemning those who opposed it. Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, was so sickened by the president’s words that she refused to take his condolence call. “I’m sorry. After what he said about my child,” Bro told CNN, and added, incredulously, “I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the [counter] protesters … with the KKK and the white supremacists.” James Fields’ lawyers sought mitigation by stressing his history of mental illness. A psychologist testified that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 6 and later with schizoid personality disorder. His lawyers also delved into his childhood traumas, which included coping with the murder of his grandmother by his grandfather, who had subsequently killed himself. “James’s mental illness causes him to lose emotional and behavioral control in stressful situations,” said his attorneys, who claimed he had taken himself off his meds when he was 18, meaning he was medically untethered when he murdered Heyer. After pleading guilty, Fields received two life sentences — one in state court and the other in federal court. Even with Fields confined to prison, questions raised by Heyer’s murder — and the rally that caused it — reverberated. Trump’s troubling insistence on calling bullying bigots “very fine people” was perhaps inevitable given his need to placate a base that contains more than its share of people like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who promoted the rally as an effort to “take our country back” and who, after Heyer’s murder, thanked Trump via tweet for his “honesty & courage.” Duke also tweeted, “This is why WE LOVE TRUMP and WHY the FAKE NEWS MEDIA HATES TRUMP. He brings to light what the lying, Fake News Media Won’t. The truth is the media covers up horrific numbers of racist hate crimes against White people!” But putting the president and his behavior aside for the moment, what about the free speech community — the civil libertarians who successfully fought in court for Kessler’s right to hold his rally in downtown Charlottesville? The city had wanted to move Kessler’s parade of bigotry to another park, one farther from the heart of town that officials claimed would be easier to police. But Kessler had said no; and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a local outfit called the Rutherford Institute, had sued the city on Kessler’s behalf. Following the event, the ACLU was heavily criticized — and also lauded — for standing up for the racist rabble-rousers. Glenn Greenwald, best known for reporting on U.S. surveillance programs brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcefully defended the ACLU. Civil liberties advocates, he argued, “defend the rights of those with views we hate in order to strengthen our defense of the rights of those who are most marginalized and vulnerable in society.” Others were not so sure. The Guardian reported on an erosion in “the belief that the KKK and other white supremacist organizations are operating within the bounds of acceptable political discourse — rather than as, say, terrorist organizations — and therefore have a moral right to be heard.” Jessica Clarke, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, pointed to studies showing that bigots routinely hid behind free speech arguments as a cover for racism. Highly prejudiced people, she noted, “were less likely to voice First Amendment objections when the threatened speech was race-neutral, suggesting their free speech concerns were more about the freedom to express racist prejudice than free speech in general.” Legal scholar Laura Weinrib noted that the ACLU had never blindly supported free speech but had done so in the fight for a better society; and she wondered whether “a dogged commitment to free speech” was still the best strategy for an organization pursuing social justice: “The balances have shifted dramatically since the 1930s. In recent years, nearly half of First Amendment victories have gone to corporations and trade groups challenging government regulation. Free speech has served to secure the political influence of wealthy donors. Labor’s strength has plummeted, and the Supreme Court is poised to recognize a First Amendment right of public sector employees to refuse to contribute to union expenses. Long-settled principles of American democracy are newly vulnerable, and hate has found fertile terrain.” Even Susan Herman, president of the ACLU, questioned whether old assumptions about free speech still applied: “We need to consider whether some of our timeworn maxims — the antidote to bad speech is more speech, the marketplace of ideas will result in the best arguments winning out — still ring true in an era when white supremacists have a friend in the White House.” Leslie Mehta, the young black attorney who was legal director of the ACLU of Virginia when it took the Kessler case, seemed confident, when I interviewed her in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, that she had made the right decision. “There were certainly lots of conversations between myself and the executive director. There were a lot of revisions back and forth with briefs and having discussions about potential implications, but nobody has a crystal ball and no one [knew] exactly what [would] ultimately happen. I do think that the First Amendment has to mean something. And at the time, it was my understanding … that there was no evidence that there would be violence.” Mehta, a native of Woodland, North Carolina, is intimately familiar with the South and with the United States’ legacy of brutal racial oppression. She went to historically black Howard University School of Law because of its reputation for creating lawyers devoted to “social activism and social justice.” But she also is adamantly committed to the idea of free speech. “I think one of the reasons why free speech is so important to me is because … it exposes what you disagree with. And for me, I think it’s important to hear things like our president saying … ‘Well, there are good people on both sides.’” Mehta also thought it was important to consult with her mother and her 92-year-old grandmother as she proceeded with the Kessler case. Her grandmother, she confided, “never said that she fully agreed or disagreed [with Mehta taking the case], but she did not think that I was wrong.” As anyone trying to understand the Charlottesville fiasco quickly discovers, the issue of speech — particularly in a society polluted by racism and largely defined by economic inequality — is endlessly complex. So let me begin this journey with a brief exploration of how the U.S. came to embrace such a broad notion of free speech, and let’s look at some decisions made in its name. ••• We tend to think our current conception of free speech has been around essentially since the beginning of the republic. In truth, our firm and collective embrace of the First Amendment is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Constitution was drafted at a time when the Founders had rejected foreign tyranny. They were wary of the potential power of a centralized state. So the Bill of Rights was a balancing act, weighing not only the rights of individuals versus government in general but also the rights of states versus the federal government. Indeed, at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, the First Amendment did not apply to the states. As legal scholar David Yassky has pointed out, the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech was “quite weak — at least to contemporary eyes. A citizen in 1800 had no absolute right to free speech; if the speech-restricting law was a state law, the Constitution was silent.” Eventually that changed, and that had a lot to do with the Civil War, the end of slavery, the 14th Amendment, and assorted court decisions. But even after the Reconstruction era, free speech, as we understand it today, was nothing but an aspiration, which is one reason that Southern states could effectively outlaw agitation for abolition. Free speech is very much an invention of the 20th century. And that concept of speech is very idealistic, inextricably linked to the notion that in the competition of ideas, good ideas generally crowd out bad. That argument received its most famous articulation in a 1927 case: Whitney v. California. At its center was Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy California blueblood convicted of joining the Communist Party. She argued that her prosecution violated the Constitution. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. But even in disagreeing with her position, Louis Brandeis (joined by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.) produced a brilliant and eloquent exegesis on the potential of free speech to enact social change: “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine.” As Brandeis saw it, free speech was virtually a sacred right and an awesomely powerful force that would expose “falsehood and fallacies” and “avert … evil by the processes of education.” Hence, the remedy to bad speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” That piece of writing has been deemed one of the most important commentaries ever crafted on the First Amendment. But Brandeis assumed something that has not been borne out by facts, which is that the better argument would generally win. He also assumed that relevant people on all sides of a question were equally capable of being heard and that skeptics were interested in listening. That fallacy continues to inform the thinking of those who see speech as inherently self-correcting. Much as many of us admire Louis Brandeis’s mind and spirit, the society he envisioned has never existed. Instead, we have created a society in which lying is both endemic and purposeful. We have brought the worst values of advertising into the political sphere and wedded that to long-established tactics of political propaganda, even as our political class has learned to use social media to spread disinformation that propagates at a breathtaking rate. The very idea that political speech would expose and therefore vanquish “falsehood and fallacies” now seems incredibly naïve. Free speech always had limits. But because of our new technological reality, because of the unexpected weaponization of speech, we are having to consider those limits in a new light. We live in a world where it is far from clear that the answer to bad speech is more speech; and where a foreign power, thanks to our freedom of expression, may well be responsible for the election of a U.S. president. We live in a time when a frightened white minority within the larger white majority fights to maintain control of our country; and when large corporations and cynical functionaries — eager to exploit fear — have a bigger megaphone (including their own television news networks) than anyone speaking for the powerless and dispossessed. We live in an era when the U.S. awarded its presidency to a man who lost the election by roughly 3 million votes, and who, with the cooperation of a submissive Senate, has appointed judges determined to thwart the will of the public; has proposed policies, supported largely by lies, designed to further divide an already polarized nation; and caters to an irrational mob whose most fanatical elements want to refight the Civil War. All of this raises a host of difficult questions: If the Brandeisian view of speech is fatally flawed, what is a better, or at least a more realistic, view? Is it possible to reverse these trends that are destroying our democracy? How do we balance an array of important societal values that compete with the value of free speech? How, in short, do we enable a relatively enlightened majority to rescue our country from an embittered, backward-looking minority? And what happens to speech — which has never been totally free — in the process?

Published September 21, 2020 at 01:40PM via ACLU (https://ift.tt/3iRPsAm) via ACLU

#IFTTT #ACLU

0 notes

nancydhooper · 5 years ago

Text

The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/the-short-life-and-curious-death-of-free-speech-in-america via http://www.rssmix.com/

0 notes