I know what I titled the post, but I’m going to do a little bait and switch with this post. I’m going to touch a bit on the protests, but the post is going to be more free-form, stream-of-consciousness about what is on my mind during these times. So, apologies ahead of time when I jump all over the place.
We need to start with Amy Cooper. She’s pretty infamous by now, but I’ll summarize. She was walking her dog off-leash in Central Park when Christian Cooper (no relation), a black man who was birding, asked her to put her dog on a leash. She refused, and he started recording. She told him to stop recording or she’d call the police. He invited her to call the police, which she did. She then told the police that there was an African-American man threatening her, and she begged them to come protect her.
There has been plenty of ink spilled about her and why her actions were so profoundly disturbing–and, yes, racist. Both Aya Gruber and Aymann Ismail from Slate wrote about it from different perspectives, and I would recommend both reads highly. The thing that stood out is that afterwards, she both ‘apologized’ and claimed she wasn’t a racist. She also said she didn’t intend to harm Christian Cooper. I call bullshit on all of that. Or rather, I’ll say that it doesn’t matter if she’s a racist in her heart or not. I don’t give a shit if she has a million black friends and listens to rap in her spare time.
I don’t care who she is–I care about what she did and to a greater extent, how what she did affected someone else. Also, I care about the broader context in which she made the decision to call the cops and knowingly use ‘African American man’ as the whip to goad the cops to racing to her protection. There’s a whole history of white woman fragility and black man scariness that Gruber touches on in the post above, so I won’t belabor the point. I just want to say that it beggars belief that Amy Cooper meant no harm. I mean, come on! If you watch the video, she was the aggressor the whole time. He remained where he was, and his voice is calm and polite. She’s the one who goes towards him and points angrily at him.
I will say one thing–people have discounted her claims that she felt afraid. They say she was angry, but why can’t it be both? I think she was afraid, but it’s because of the endemic and enduring racism that is interwoven in every fabric of our society–black men are dangerous, especially to white women, not because Christian Cooper was threatening her in any way. This is something I don’t want lost in this incident–she’s not the problem in and of itself–the systemic racism that allows her to be this way is. She was obviously also angry at being called out by a black man as well.
White women need to do better. This is not new. I mean, white men need to do better, too, but I expect less from them (sadly). White women, on the other hand, especially those who proclaim to be feminists, need to do much, much better. There is a weird tension between gender and race because while white women do suffer from sexism, they also benefit from white supremacy. More than benefit, they actively participate in it. They have since the country was birthed. Here is a post by Shannon Keating from Buzzfeed News writing about this concept.
In the end, though, I don’t want the rage over Amy Cooper to stop with her. She is a symbol of the sickness, not the root cause.
George Floyd. I can’t even type his name without feeling some sort of way about it. All the rage, sorrow, sadness, anxiety, and other unnamed emotions come to the surface. Then, I immediately push them back down until all I feel is (un)comfortably numb. My parents called last night to talk about it, and my mom noted that she was relieved I sounded so calm because I was ‘so sensitive’ to….and her voice trailed off. I knew what she meant, but there were a few reasons for that. One, I’m still dealing with some sinus issues that have really fucked with my sleep so I was exhausted, even though it was only midnight. It wasn’t even yet quite midnight because I had to give my mother a hard time limit as to when she could call me (midnight was the limit), but I was so fucking tired.
More to the point, I get really quiet/calm/focused when it’s a true crisis. I’ve written about this before, but part of my PTSD is that I’m actually better when the worst possible scenario occurs because I’ve been preparing for it all my life. But my heart is heavy with grief, and I think part of my exhaustion is because of what is happening around me. I’m not in the direct line of fire (no pun intended), but some of the unrest has happened close by. And, selfishly, it’s making delivery of food much harder as my last order got canceled and the current one may or may not depending on the situation. I haven’t been to a grocery store in months, and the thought of going in makes me very anxious.
The debate around what is the appropriate way to protest is pissing me off, by the way. Or rather, frustrating the hell out of me. I’m not going to talk about the looting and the fires because I don’t want to, and there has been plenty written about that from people with much more experience and knowledge than I. I just want to point out that the people saying they disapprove or then entirely discount the protests because of it are full of shit. It’s a way to shift the focus, and it’s a way to avoid the actual issue at hand. I say this because I’ve seen the same reaction to other forms of protest with the same disclaimer. Locally, there was attempts to shut down major freeways a few years ago when Philando Castile was also killed by the police. People were indignant about that as well, and the Republicans tried to pass a bill to make it a gross misdemeanor. This was just not to be done! And, I read on some local forums that people were mad about it because they had to get their shopping down, damn it (the Megamall was another place that was supposed to be shut down).
Then, of course, let’s look at the case of Colin Kaepernick. He took a knee during the national anthem of a football game to protest police brutality. White fans were appalled because why bring politics into sports???? That’s not the place for it! Kaepernick was crucified for it, and he was considered toxic after that. Here is a post by Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post as to why his knee was important and how the NFL chose the wrong knee (on George Floyd’s neck) to defend. He was shunned from football and endured online abuse because he made a simple statement about the state of our society and highlighted the sickness that is racism which has a chokehold on our society.
My takeaway is that protesting is acceptable only if it causes no discomfort to the white person. Which, you know, defeats the purpose of the protests in the first place. I remember when the debate about marriage equality raged on. There were so many people on the anti side who talked about the tone of the debate and how those on the pro side would do so much better if they were civil about it. Same with gender issues, by the way. It’s the tool of the oppressor to be able to set the boundaries of the debate in a way that favors them. Again, it takes the focus off the issue itself and while quietly moving the goal posts.
Drawing back to the marriage equality debates, I maintained that I didn’t have to be civil when my humanity was being called into question. I also posited that the very act of denying me my humanity was civil, even if it was wrapped up in flowery language. “Don’t fuck with me, you goddamn homophobe” is no less uncivil than, “I don’t hate the sinner, but I do hate the sin” especially when the latter comes with the added bonus of legal inequality.
It’s the same now. Black people have to live their lives wondering if today is the day they’re going to be killed for existing. Their humanity is called into question in thousands of ways, including the rather obvious example of Amy Cooper above. Demanding that they be ‘civil’ while not holding others to the same rules (and, in fact, aiding and abetting incivility against them) is yet another way to try to establish dominance over a lesser (in their eyes) being.
I have much more to say, but I am tired and grieving, so I’ll stop here. My last plea is to see the pain behind the rage and realize that a dream constantly deferred may sometimes explode.