Nia Wilson & Mollie Tibbitts. This is really. . .uncomfortable.

This post is truly uncomfortable. I’ve been reluctant to even post it, considering the unresolved nature of both these cases, the raw emotions involved, and the pain of the families. I can’t imagine the agony the families of Nia Wilson and Mollie Tibbetts are experiencing. My heart goes out to all those affected. It is gut wrenching to imagine how it must feel to lose a young woman like Nia to such senseless violence or to have someone like Mollie simply “disappear” while jogging the same familiar route each day.

This is not a post comparing/contrasting the worth of either of these young women. They both seem so full of life and potential. Rather, this post is a reflection on how these cases are portrayed in the media and how those portrayals reflect and reinforce our own implicit biases. As for these young women, my heart breaks. For the families I wish resolution and healing. I am holding out hope Mollie Tibbetts is returned safe and sound to her family soon. No one should ever have to endure what her or Nia’s family has gone through.

Like I said, this is a post on media coverage. My thought are as follows:

A veteran journalist once said to me that in terms of which stories get coverage in the US market, the following formula holds true: 1 American life = 5 Europeans = 10 Israelis = 20 Palestinians = 50 Asians = 200 Africans.

Cynical? Yes. But when we consider which tragedies get air time, column inches, and tweets, it’s hard to ignore the truth of the statement. Case in point, my Kenyan friends asked—rightly so—why there was not the same outpouring of international mourning after the terrorist attacks in the Westgate Mall in 2013 or Garissa in 2015 (where 67 and 152 people were killed respectively) as there was in 2016 when 137 and 32 people were killed by terrorists in Paris and Belgium. In 2016 thousands of us modified our profile pictures with the French and Belgium flags. In 2013 and 2015, I don’t remember seeing a single Kenyan flag superimposed on a profile picture.

The notion of bias in media is nothing new. But how this bias reflects racism. . . we have a harder time admitting.

That brings me to these two cases of Mollie and Nia. The disappearance of Mollie Tibbetts is deeply disturbing and tragic. As I write this, she is still missing. I know everyday she is not found is torture for her friends and family. I am praying she is found safe and sound. I don’t wish this ordeal on anyone. I do wish for her to be returned safely to her loved ones.

What is noteworthy is the coverage. Of course, Mollie is still missing, so the urgency of finding her is great. In that sense, the saturation of coverage and stridency is completely called for.  I don’t question that for a moment.

It’s just, we don’t always do it for everyone. And that’s the deeply uncomfortable bit.

If you are white and don’t understand why your black friends or neighbors might not see the latest coverage of a missing white girl the same way you do, read this article:

https://mic.com/articles/93780/64-000-missing-women-in-america-all-have-one-important-thing-in-common#.ubFEq3Seu

As the article points out, the bottom line is that even though African Americans represent only about 12 percent of the US population, they account for 34 percent of all missing person cases. They are OVER represented in missing persons cases, just as they are over represented in incarceration figures. To quote the article: "If you Google 'Natalee Holloway,' how many impressions would you get?" Black and Missing cofounder Natalie Wilson told ABC News last year. "If you Google 'Unique Harris,' who's missing from D.C., the story is not the same."

Where do these missing women of color go? Many are fleeing domestic violence. Women of color experience domestic violence at rates 35 percent higher than white counterparts.[1] Many end up as unsolved murder cases. Many are trafficked into sex work. In my own home county, King County which encompasses Seattle, 84 percent of child trafficking victims (18 and younger) were female, and 52 percent of them were African American. The general population of King County is just 7 percent African American.[2]

Those statistics are not making headlines. That leads to a long-standing complaint from people of color about what grabs media attention (and thus ours). A young missing white woman in Iowa garners national headlines and primetime coverage. Hundreds of missing black women in US cities doesn’t.

We can’t say the media is solely to blame here, because the media is made up of people just like you and me. The media is us. We are also its consumers. And we’re biased. We’re racist. Even if we don’t mean to be biased, we are biased. Even if we don’t mean to do racist things, we still do racist things. Often without even knowing.

Stories of missing white women or white women who have been victims of violence are packaged for our consumption with a familiar outline that harkens back to the damsel-in-distress trope. For women of color, the same treatment is not merited. That brings us to Nia Wilson.

As many might know, Nia Wilson (21) was stabbed to death on a BART platform in an unprovoked attack July 28th of this year. The man who murdered her and stabbed her friend was apprehended. He is white. Nia was black. Some are alleging this was a hate crime. In my own Google search for Nia’s image, I found at least half a dozen pictures of her. She was a photogenic woman. She wanted to be a paramedic and liked the idea of helping others. She appeared happy and approachable in her photos. There were half a dozen flattering photos that came up in my cursory search, much like the ones I used above. But when the local Oakland television station KTVU, ran the story, the picture they chose, from Nia’s Facebook profile, was one of her holding a toy gun.

Nia, who had been brutally murdered, for some reason, did not merit the “damsel in distress” treatment. Instead she was portrayed holding a weapon, confirming the implicit associations, on the part of whites, that black people are dangerous, criminal, and violent.

We’ve progressed enough as a society that plenty of people cried foul. Dahleen Glanton in the Chicago Tribune credits Anne Hathaway as one sympathetic and influential voice that brought attention to Nia’s story and the outrageous, biased, and racist way she was portrayed through the choice of this picture http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/glanton/ct-met-dahleen-glanton-anne-hathaway-white-privilege-20180730-story.html

The headline of Ms. Glanton’s article is another hard truth: Nothing is more powerful than privileged white people talking about white privilege.

What’s striking to me is the privilege so many of us white people (youth AND adults) have to dress up as Storm Troopers, Gangsters, Bounty Hunters, (complete with imitation guns) but we’re not DEFINED by it, nor are we imperiled by it. We can gather at various CON, events, e.g. Dragoncon, Comicon, Emerald City Con, and no one calls the police on us. If we’re murdered, the picture put on the evening news is likely not of us posing in Han Solo cosplay with a replica ray-gun.

Meanwhile, my friends, parents of black children, can’t even let their kids play with water guns, for fear they might be shot by police.

Nia Wilson dressing up as a 1920s gangster and holding a toy gun doesn’t scare me. You know what does scare me? These white men with real guns.

Those pictures were from the Oath Keeper’s armed protests last month outside member of Congress, Maxine Waters’ office in Washington DC and from Ferguson Missouri. I am not advocating violence, no matter how problematic I find the politics of groups like the Oath Keepers. But consider this: an extraterrestrial visitor lands on your street tomorrow morning. He’s been watching CNN. He asks you why there have not been “misunderstandings” that lead to police shooting dead these white men carrying real firearms and threatening people, when black children are shot dead for carrying toy guns. Can you explain this to him without implicating racism?

Oh yeah, and speaking of white guys with guns, someone keeps shooting the sign commemorating the murder of Emmett Till. It’s been shot, dragged, and thrown in the river, like his body was, numerous times. Each time it is replaced, someone shoots it up. https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/06/us/emmett-till-sign-vandalized-trnd/index.html

It’s 2018, right? Just checking.

Back to Nia. The damsel-in-distress narrative vs. the dangerous-black-person-with-a-gun feeds into the toxic (if implicit) bias that “well that black person probably did something to provoke/deserve it that treatment.” I’m afraid we white people feed ourselves this line when we encounter these stories and then move on under the illusion that all OK with the world. Our police are virtuous. Our society is post racial. These fallacies allows us to suppress our own cognitive dissonance. They let us ignore how we might be reaping benefits of a horribly prejudiced system.

All is definitely NOT right with the world. Actually, things are pretty damn wrong. To paraphrase Ving Rhames as Marcellus Wallace: “Things are pretty f***ing far from OK.”

And things are far from OK when it comes to how we track these things. In researching for this post, I looked up government statistics on missing persons. It’s heartening to see that at least some agencies are tracking these cases. But (again) attention is not applied in equal measure. When I tried to find data on missing Native American women, I found out that the US government does not even track reported disappearances for this group. It was a sobering reminder that we don’t act as if ALL lives actually matter in this country.

To that end, ALL lives will NEVER matter, until we act as if women’s lives matter, black lives matter, and native lives matter. Mollie Tibbitt’s life matters. So does Nia Wilson’s.

No more or less so than one another. No more or less so than anyone else’s.

Hopefully, in a not too distant future, the data we collect, the media representation—our representations—of these women and women like them, will reflect that.

[1] https://www.doj.state.or.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/women_of_color_network_facts_domestic_violence_2006.pdf

[2]  https://iwantrest.com/blog/systemic-oppression-inequity-and-sex-trafficking/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March

Out of Many, One. Identity Politics, Loneliness, and Falling (Back) in Love with America

While reflecting on the place our country finds itself in right now I’ve come across two great articles that have gotten my mental gears turning and given me insight, even some optimism.

The first is In extremis by Nabeelah Jaffer published on the website Aeon this week.

https://aeon.co/essays/loneliness-is-the-common-ground-of-terror-and-extremism

Jaffer, a PhD student at the University of Oxford challenges our widely held belief that religious extremism, fanaticism, and violence are phenomena born out of foreign lands, foreign cultures, and foreign faiths. Instead she highlights that the root of these social ills lies in the universal experience of loneliness.

As George Orwell said, sometimes it takes all our effort just to see what is right in front of our faces.

Jaffer’s observations already fit with the clichés we hear uttered about nearly every mass shooter, domestic terrorist, or serial killer: they are loners. . .alienated, isolated (and almost always male—that is a whole other blog post). But Jaffer pushes her readers to see the foreign terrorist, the domestic mass shooter, and the violent white supremacist as one in the same. We should. The distinction between domestic and foreign criminals who perpetrate this type of extremist violence is facile at best. It relies on an “othering” of people from different nationalities and backgrounds that has no real basis in fact. No matter who we are, where we are from, our hearts break for the same reasons.

What Jaffer’s article opens up is a line of inquiry to examine the alienation and isolation that is behind violence in the Middle East, violent Alt-Right extremism here in the states, and even nativist White Supremacist hate groups in Europe. These are manifestations of the same maladies and might even have similar solutions. (Spoiler alert, those solutions are love and inclusion—don’t act surprised, the name of the blog is BELONG after all).

The second article is the special report in the July 14-20th edition of The Economist (full disclosure, I am an unapologetic fanboy of The Economist). This special report on America’s Democrats, taken with the same issue’s cover story on the inherent bias built into the electoral college and its “odious” (The Economist’s word not mine) roots in slavery make the edition a MUST read.

I’m sympathetic to the spirit of what is often derided as “identity politics.” I think it is crucial we recognize that people from different backgrounds—ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, faith, etc . . . have different experiences of the world. This is a non-negotiable if we are to move forward as a country and try to evolve away from out normalization and centering of “whiteness” and “maleness.” I like how the report, in the balanced-yet-witty fashion of the Economist, says the following:

“Candidates who are not in power must be able to persuade people that they share their worries, are on their side and, at some level, are like them. Voting is partly an exercise in narcissism. People want to be able to look at a candidate and see something of themselves. When your party does this, it is called empathy. When the other side tries, it is called identity politics.”

I admit, identity politics frequently leaves me with a sense of unease. For taken too far, I see its potential to set us apart from one another to further divide us. A balance needs to be struck, but what that balance is exactly, has eluded me up to this point. How do we do so without glossing over people’s legitimate experiences, their unique identities, the value of different voices?

The Economist article goes on to posit a way forward. It closes with an interview with Governor Jerry Brown of California—a leader who has remained relevant in an increasingly diverse electorate by consistently being on the cutting edge of progressive politics, and one might say, the right side of history. (The guy has been succeeding in California politics longer than I’ve been alive, serving as Governor in the seventies and today—well played Mr. Brown, well played).

Brown argues that we need to steer clear of the roll call of identities taking over the introduction of speeches by democratic candidates. While we certainly need to de-center white-masculinity, this does not mean we value some voices over others. We white men definitely need to do more listening and less talking these days. There needs to be a shift in how much time folks get to hold the microphone. But telling white men to simply “shut up” because they are not valued and people of color are, is just the mirror opposite of the white supremacy we are trying to combat today. James Baldwin said as much years ago when he criticized the Nation of Islam of exhibiting the very same racism as the whites they were calling devils.

I say that knowing I’ve have, figuratively, told white men to shut up at times. (Sometimes they deserved the rebuke—looking at you Matt Damon). Those of us on the progressive side of things are all likely guilty of some version of this I fear. It takes several forms. It even can show up when we tokenize the stories and voices of people of color, LGBTQ, (at the risk of appropriating them), simply moving down that “check list of oppressed identities” without reflecting on the individual persons telling their story. We don’t pay attention to the person as much as the label and the perfunctory task of getting some “melanin behind the microphone” for optics rather than true recognition.

It’s a tricky balance to strike I admit, but we need to constantly check ourselves, our motives, and how we present ourselves and ask others to tell their stories (and others not to). When we appear to completely devalue some points of view because they are too “privileged,” when we are blind to their pain or treat them as inauthentic, we get into dangerous waters. It can lead us into, what some observers have deemed, the “misery Olympics.” It even contributes to the (mistaken) impression among some whites that they are being persecuted.

Let me be the first to say they aren’t. But we can over steer in our efforts to self-correct and end up doubling down on differences, which can further alienate us from each other. This can make some people, who operate on a scarcity model, feel that in the recognition of historically marginalized voices means their own will be lost.

It won’t be. We’re all made better by inclusion of many voices. I’m convinced of it, but it requires a shift from a zero-sum to win-win mindset. One of generosity. That is NOT the worldview promoted by our current administration. If anything, the current administration has succeeded by doing the opposite, convincing people that if others are “winning” they must be losing. . .and on the verge of social extinction, which some (idiots) interpret as genocide.

                <Eye Roll>

                I can’t even . . .

As we correct historical imbalances in representation, however, it can be an exceedingly tough balancing act and sometimes feels like a real catch-22. But Governor Brown presents a refreshing antidote, urging us to focus on an articulation of the American identity that is, at its core, inclusive.

That has always been the ideal of America from the beginning, but not the practice. (This is captured powerfully in the recent excavation of the burial site of George Yeardley, the first governor of Jamestown settlement in the colony of Virginia. Yeardley was the first leader of a representative assembly in North America, as well as its first slave holder. He is the inescapable epitome the contradictory themes of our country, right there, in front of our faces from its very beginning: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/archaeologists-have-found-the-remains-of-one-of-jamestowns-early-settlers-now-they-have-to-prove-he-is-who-they-think-he-is/2018/07/23/81c71708-8901-11e8-85ae-511bc1146b0b_story.html?utm_term=.1d61235c0c43 ).

But enough about the governor of Jamestown. Back to the governor of California, Jerry Brown. Here I see that, again, we can evoke George Orwell: the solution was staring us in the face the whole time. In Brown’s words, progressive leaders need to “wrap themselves in the flag and become grounded in this ‘Americana business.’” By Americana business, Brown does not mean whiteness, border walls, guns, or Christianity. He means embracing and fighting for an American identity that emphasizes the things about America that leads so many to fall in love with her in the first place: freedom of speech, of the press, of faith, equal access to opportunity and protections of the law. As The Economist report concludes, we “must relearn the language of American civil religion: self-evident truths; a shining city upon a hill; life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And above all, e pluribus unum: out of many, one.”

(An aside: I wonder if “out of many one,” has been floated with focus groups as a slogan for the next democratic presidential campaign slogan).

This vision not only helps us to strive towards the best ideals of the United States of America, but it presents us with a big-bucket identity that is at once inclusive and also embracing of our differences. It might also be a healthy counter to the hyper-categorization and segregation of the electorate we see taking place by political operatives who place emphasis on long-tailed labels. Some labels have value. They help us to be SEEN. But they can also lead to the isolation and alienation Nabeela Jaffer warns against in the first article mentioned above. This is the very isolation that leads to political extremism and violence, especially if it contributes to the “othering” of our brothers and sisters.

I see Jerry Brown’s approach as a shift from a deficit minded lens to a strengths-based one. I guess my hope is that the socially conservative, church-going white-dude in Alabama (Joe six pack) can stand alongside green tea sipping LGBTQ allied, agnostic, AfroLatina in San Francisco (Ayesha Yoga mat) and they can realize there are American ideals that unite us, not just labels that divide us.

Out of Many, One.

White Awake by Daniel Hill - A Must Read!

I frequently encourage the white participants in my Reconciliation and Justice book groups to read more authors of color. I provide my students with recommendations ranging from Brenda Salter McNeil, to James Baldwin, bell hooks, Michael Harriot, and Michelle Alexander.

However, there are times I think the best person to reach people (especially white folks early in their journey to deeper understanding) is actually a white male—a white male who has grown up in privilege, made all the beginner mistakes when trying to be an ally, fallen down, gotten up, brushed himself off, and tried again.

That is where Daniel Hill comes in.

I recently was able to participate in a meeting with some of the leaders at my church and Daniel Hill. Daniel Hill is a pastor at River City Community Church, a multiethnic church in the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago. He is also an author. I was first directed to Daniel’s book, White Awake, by Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil, a reconciliation leader and church pastor here in Seattle. Here are some links to cut and paste to Daniel’s website and his book on Amazon. I’ll just say now that any white person in this country interested in working towards eradicating racism and building reconciliation should read White Awake.

https://pastordanielhill.com/

https://www.amazon.com/White-Awake-Honest-Look-Means/dp/0830843930

Amid so many gems, one of the most fundamental lessons of Daniel’s book has to be how he breaks down the two tracks we must use when discussing anti-racism and reconciliation work. These two tracks are interdependent and inseparable.

The first track is to consider Ethnicity and Diversity. Daniel, being a pastor, would be the first to call ethnicity, “God given and God created.” His point is that our different cultural backgrounds are valuable and worth acknowledging without self-consciousness. This is in direct response to people (often white) who are uncomfortable even talking about race. They will insist they are “colorblind,” which is of course a huge mistake. Striving to be “colorblind” only leads to the dead end of ignoring the undeniable fact that people of different ethnicities and skin colors experience the world in different ways. As a white male, when I see a police officer, I generally feel safe. But for my friends of color, they have a fundamentally different experience.

The second track is that of Race, Racism, and Discrimination. Daniel makes the critical and valuable point that THERE IS NOTHING REDEEMABLE ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF RACE. It is evil. I agree. Hear me (and us) out. Race, is a construct that is human-made, not only that, but it was created and propagated by European colonial powers as a justification for colonialization, slavery, exploitation, oppression, and genocide. This aligns with Brian Stevenson’s (author of Just Mercy) concept of the false Narrative of Racial Difference. This is the notion that points to ethnic differences, which are fine unto themselves, but then assigns different values to those ethnic differences. This is the essence of racism and I think Daniel is right to call it out as evil and unredeemable.

Daniel goes on to point out that to discuss just the first of these tracks without the second, is often what we get in the corporate sector when we attend mandatory gender, equity, and diversity trainings. Those can be useful, but without acknowledging the second track in these discussions, we’re not getting to the root of the problems that require us to have gender, equity, and diversity trainings in the first place.

As Daniel is a pastor, his core arguments against racism rest on scripture and tenets of faith. I know this might pose a challenge for those of us progressives who sometimes seek resources and justifications for anti-racism and equity work that are not associated with the faith community. This is understandable (which might be surprising to hear from a deacon). The church has so many times been on the wrong side of these discussions and so many people from marginalized communities have been church-hurt by bigoted religious folks, that association with the faith community can taint some equity and justice resources. It’s sad but true! See: Westboro Baptist Church (ugh gross, I don’t even like typing their name!). As a result, I know there are times equity leaders are required to step away from religious affiliations and references which can be divisive or triggering to some.

But Daniel’s work can be translated to the secular sphere seamlessly, as he does for his trainings and consultancies with government agencies. A middle way might be to borrow from the recovery community and 12 Step programs. As equity leaders and change agents we can recognize that racism, like addiction, is a social malaise and even a disease at the level of the individual. But these afflictions can be overcome through building community, honest self-examination, and spiritual (but not necessarily religious) growth.

So, my heart is full of thanks for Daniel Hill, an influential thinker/activist, a powerful speaker, and gifted writer. His book is a must read!

Michelle Alexander, Author of The New Jim Crow, Columnist for New York Times, & SHERO for Our Times

Shout out today to Michelle Alexander who will now be the only woman of color Op-Ed writer. Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow is a MUST READ for anyone who cares about recognizing, fighting racism. . .or just anyone who cares about the mistreatment of our fellow human beings (that should include all of us).

Alexander brings formidable scholarship and excellent writing to point out how slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through convict leasing, voting disenfranchisement, lynchings, Jim Crow, and most recently through the mass incarceration of people of color. Below are links you can cut and paste to learn more about her and to buy her book—which you absolutely should do.

http://newjimcrow.com/about-the-author

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

 In recognition of her work, I am including some striking statistics which alone should wake us up to the injustices taking place in the US under the guise of “The War on Drugs” and how the prison industrial complex and the emerging detention industrial complex benefit from it—the financial gains accruing to white own corporations and providing jobs in rural towns that are predominantly white.

It’s also worth pointing out how in black/urban communities the drug problem has been historically viewed as a “criminal” problem while in white/rural communities is has been mainly identified as a public health issue. To this point, I also want to recognize the recent work my own home city and county, the City of Seattle and King county for taking a more enlightened approach and viewing juvenile justice issues through a lens of public health, connecting at risk and incarcerated youth with mental health, recovery, and job training services. Well Done.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/bold-step-king-county-to-look-at-youth-crime-as-public-health-risk/

This is not the case in most of the country. So here are the sad statistics—retrieved from https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2015/05/28/113436/8-facts-you-should-know-about-the-criminal-justice-system-and-people-of-color/

• People of color are significantly overrepresented in the U.S. prison population, making up more than 60 percent of the people behind bars. Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32 percent of the US population, they comprised 56 percent of all incarcerated people in 2015.
• 1 in 3 black men will go to prison at some point during their lifetimes; 1 in 6 Latino males will have the same fate. Only 1 out 17 white males are expected to go to prison.
• 1 in 111 white women, 1 in 18 black women, and 1 in 45 Latina women will go to prison at some point.
• If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites, prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40 percent.
• African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be arrested than whites and incarcerated at 5 times the rates of whites.
• The so-called War on Drugs has disproportionately affected people of color. Despite using and selling drugs at rates similar to those of their white counterparts, African Americans and Latinos comprise 62 percent of those in state prisons for drug offenses and 72 percent of those sentenced for federal drug trafficking offenses, which generally carry extreme mandatory minimum sentences.
•  Voting restrictions on the formerly incarcerated have disenfranchised millions of voters, particularly African Americans. Today, approximately 5.9 million people are not able to vote due to felony convictions. While laws vary from state to state—with some allowing for restoration of voting rights—1 in 13 blacks nationwide are disenfranchised due to felony convictions. In Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, more than one in five black adults are denied the right to vote.

Insert-Daily-Mundane-Activity-Here-White-People-of-Privilege-Utterly-Take-for-Granted. . .WHILE BLACK

During this week of the Fourth of July, when we celebrate “Freedom,” a recent glance at headlines reveals to me how lacking freedom is in this country if you are a person of color. File this under the tragic, reoccurring category of “[Insert-Daily-Mundane-Activity-Here-White-People-of-Privilege-Utterly-Take-for-Granted] While Black.” If you are not familiar with it already, this is an exercise wherein we add the tagline “while black” to simple activities white people rarely are harassed, attacked, or imprisoned for. But if you are black, it’s a completely different story.

It is worth noting that the president responded with a thinly veiled threat of violence to the Congresswoman Maxine Waters. I don't know what the legal repercussions are against making threats of violence against members of congress are and if they are as serious as making public threats of violence against POTUS. These days, it's anyone's guess. But I commend Congresswoman Waters for her courage.

Speaking-as-Member-of-Congress while black: https://www.theroot.com/unbossed-and-unbowed-maxine-waters-tells-maga-harasser-1827268127

Walking-Down-the-Road while black: 21-year-old black woman called N*****, run over by truck and dragged by white man in Virginia. https://www.theroot.com/virginia-family-calls-for-hate-crime-investigation-afte-1826980108

Running-a-Business while black: https://www.theroot.com/black-owned-indiana-gaming-lounge-targeted-with-hate-no-1827258195

Going-to-School-and-even-being-valedictorian while Black: https://www.theroot.com/toronto-principal-transferred-after-being-accused-of-ra-1827258632

Owning-a-Car while black: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/police-attacked-me-for-stealing-a-car-it-was-my-own/2018/06/29/86829292-7658-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html?utm_term=.1b07c474f3ad

Mowing-Lawns-as-a-Twelve-Year-Old while black: https://www.theroot.com/some-miserable-troll-called-the-cops-on-a-12-year-old-e-1827244768

Selling-Bottles-of-Water-as-an-eight-year-old while black: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/letterstoeditor/article/Editorial-Permit-Patty-is-the-latest-in-an-13038622.php

Swimming-in-hotel-pool while black: https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/watch-white-man-tells-black-family-shower-entering-hotel-pool-hell-drain-afterwards/

Using-AirBnB while black: https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/10/us/airbnb-black-rialto-california-trnd/index.html

Come on white people. Do better. Be better.

Selene San Felice: F*** your Prayers

I was truly heartened to see this statement from Sojourners Magazine circulating among my social media feeds this weekend and how frequently it is being endorsed and shared among people of faith and people who want to call out people of faith on their silence and/or complicity on some of the injustices being carried out in our country right now.

https://sojo.net/media/reclaiming-jesus-time-crisis

I commend this statement. I agree with it. Silence is not spiritual. Silence equals consent in cases of injustice. As a writer, I recognize the importance of words, free speech, and speaking out. . .speaking TRUTH to power.

But I also see this statement as only a starting point. I'd urge churches to go further than mere words. I hope church leaders who have been on the “sidelines” up to this point are as haunted and challenged by the words of Selene San Felice, one of the survivors of the attack on journalists at the Capital Gazette this week. Ms. Felice said to Anderson Cooper on CNN: "Thanks for your prayers, but I couldn’t give a fuck about them if there’s nothing else.”

https://splinternews.com/capital-gazette-reporter-on-thoughts-and-prayers-i-cou-1827225278

I guess we all will wait and see what sort of act of compassion, reform, and resistance "thoughts, prayers, and reclaiming words," transform into.

Immigrants' Creed - Counterpoint for "Christians" who want to lock people of color up in cages

Came across this from one of the pastors at my church. She thought it was another meaningful counterpoint for people who call themselves Christians who are clamoring for the US to lock immigrants and migrants seeking asylum up in cages. As with all my posts on spirituality and faith, take whatever works for you and feel free to leave the rest.

The Immigrants' Creed
by José Luis Casal  
 
I believe in Almighty God,
who guided the people in exile and in exodus,
the God of Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon,
the God of foreigners and immigrants.

I believe in Jesus Christ,
a displaced Galilean,
who was born away from his people and his home,
who fled his country with his parents when his life was in danger,
and returning to his own country suffered the oppression
of the tyrant Pontius Pilate, the servant of a foreign power,
who then was persecuted, beaten, and finally tortured,
accused and condemned to death unjustly.
But on the third day, this scorned Jesus rose from the dead,
not as a foreigner but to offer us citizenship in heaven.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the eternal immigrant from God’s kingdom among us,
who speaks all languages, lives in all countries,
and reunites all races.

I believe that the church is the secure home
for the foreigner and for all believers who constitute it,
who speak the same language and have the same purpose.

I believe that the communion of the saints begins
when we accept the diversity of the saints.

I believe in the forgiveness of sin, which makes us all equal,
and in reconciliation, which identifies us more
than does race, language, or nationality.

I believe that in the resurrection
God will unite us as one people
in which all are distinct
and all are alike at the same time.

Beyond this world, I believe in life eternal
in which no one will be an immigrant
but all will be citizens of God’s kingdom,
which will never end. Amen.

Casa Padre and the American History of Concentration Camps

It is important to examine a facility like Casa Padre in the context of the US history of creating prisons and internment camps for people of color. Whether it has been in the form of convict leasing, Native American reservations, camps for Japanese Americans during WWII, or the prison industrial complex today, this manifestation of migrant detention—of children and their families—is a reoccurring violation of human rights and dignity that sadly has consistently targeted people of color and reinforced white supremacy throughout US history. These most recent incidents of state sponsored human rights violations are shocking, tragic, and outrageous, but not new. It makes last week's visual alignment with the despotic leaders of North Korea that much more disturbing.

Its terrifying to reflect ten percent of children in US juvenile detention facilities report sexual assault while incarcerated.[1] And also that the US ran Abu Ghraib prison less than 4 months before abuse and torture of inmates began.[2] Not surprising we are already seeing reports of abuse at detention facilities for immigrant youths and children in the us.[3]

[1] https://www.alternet.org/education/why-are-rates-sexual-abuse-juvenile-detention-facilities-rise

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

[3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/immigrant-children-allege-abuse-at-virginia-detention-center https://www.thenation.com/article/just-hateful-abuse-immigrants-face-detention-centers/ https://theintercept.com/2018/06/26/immigration-detention-center-abuse-ice/

Sorry "Christians," the Bible DOES say to Break the G**D**** Law

For those of you who know me, you might know I’m a deacon at my church in Seattle. It’s a non-denominational Christian church and my role is really to minister to the material, social-emotional, and practical matters of church members who might be in a season of need. I don’t preach or teach. I basically run errands and coordinate volunteers so that the pastors can do that. 

I as raised in the Catholic Church and while I appreciate their teachings on social justice, I couldn’t remain a practicing member considering their handling of the child sexual abuse scandals, their positions on homosexuality, female ordination, conception, and abortion. 

Anyone who has read my memoir, Two Years of Wonder, will also know I attend multiple meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous each week. I attend AA as a “friend of AA,” someone who has never struggled with addiction, but practices the 12 Steps as a spiritual practice. I find the tenants of AA have helped me profoundly with my depression and anxiety. I also have found a deep connection with the recovery community. It’s in the rooms of AA with recovering addicts, drunks, sex workers, that I have met some of the “best” Christians in my life—although I know they would eschew any such label themselves, since so many folks I meet in the recovery community are also “church hurt” and are understandably skeptical of institutional religion (something I took on in my first novel City on a Hill as well as my short story collection Bunny Man’s Bridge).

So my approach to religion is more informed by AA’s approach to spirituality than anything else. In that I mainly, “take what works, and leave the rest.” This would earn me the label “Cafeteria Catholic,” back in Catholic circles. If I were still Catholic, I might care.

That said, it’s been saddening, yet not shocking, in recent weeks to hear so many folks who call themselves Christians using justification from the Bible to rip migrant children, seeking asylum, away from their parents to be placed in modern day concentration camps. Now, you can consider me a post-modernist skeptic of the Bible. I look on it as a historical document, written by MEN with all the biases and cultural blind spots that come with that. Although I recognize there are some profoundly progressive notions in the Bible on a number of issues, including gender, these have historically been glossed over by scholarly analyses, until recently done by men (that is the subject for another blog post).

But for those who still refer to the Bible as their go to, citing it, erroneously, as stating that we have a moral obligation to follow laws (as some politicians have recently, cherry picking a line from Romans 12) I decided to include the following counterpoints—from the Bible—highlighted recently by Pastor Tara Beth Leach. I think its also interesting to point out that the author of Romans, Paul, wrote many of his most famous epistles from jail, as he was constantly, willingly, purposefully, breaking the law—and was ultimately executed for it. Strange that this is the writer conservative Christians turn to in order to justify their own legalistic position to throw people of color in jail.

·      In Exodus we see the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, deliberately refused to enforce the law of the land. Pharaoh had explicitly commanded them to kill all male Hebrews. Recognizing this command as outrageously morally perverse, they courageously refused to do it (Exodus 1:15-17). 

·      Moses’s mother, Jochabed, illegally hid her son for three months instead of drowning him in the Nile as Pharaoh had ordered (Exodus 1:22-2:2). 

·      The wise men disobeyed Herod’s order to tell him where Jesus was; they broke the law and returned to their own country (Matthew 2:7-12). 

·      Mary, mother of Jesus, and Joseph, did not give their child up to Herod but fled as refugees to Egypt (Matthew 2:13-15).

Let’s face it. Very righteous people in the Bible broke the law, often in order to protect children and families. Think on that.

Writing Characters of Color when you are a Cis-Gender, White, Heterosexual Male

With the release of my latest young adult novel, Jamhuri, Njambi, & Fighting Zombies (the second novel I've written from the point of view of protagonists of color) I wanted to share here the Author's Note I've opened JN&FZ with which I wrote as an attempt to enter into dialogue with some of these challenging and complex issues. I definitely would never suggest I have all the answers on this, but I think the best we can do is to keep a dialogue going on it. Scroll down past the cover for the full essay.

A Note on Cultural (Mis)appropriation

            I have not stayed in my lane, and my sense of social justice—not to mention my friends who identify as people of color—have called me out for it. Rightly so.

            At first glance, most readers might not see the trouble with a cisgender, heterosexual, white writer using imagery from African culture in a work of fiction. It’s a “celebration of African traditions ignored by sci-fi and fantasy writers for far too long,” or it’s “an overdue acknowledgement of rich African contributions to art and literature.” Maybe it’s even “a healthy, contemporary reaction to the overemphasis of white characters in sci-fi and fantasy.”

            It is, I hope, but it’s other things too—things that must be viewed in the context of colonialism and the social, political, economic, and military oppression of people of color.

First of all, I’m no trailblazer. Other writers, such as Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin, have been producing works that fuse sci-fi and fantasy with African themes for some time. Before them, Octavia Butler was doing the same. Acknowledging, celebrating, and profiting from a white male’s derivations from the art and images of people of color over those artists of color who have a more personal, historical claim is nothing new. It’s a long tradition, characterizing the careers of artists as diverse as Al Jolson, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, Robin Thicke, Justin Timberlake, and so many others.[1]

            So, depending on the interpretation, Jamhuri, Njambi & Fighting Zombies is a celebration, an acknowledgement, or it’s just another form of exploitation and cultural (mis)appropriation.

            Truth is, it’s all these things.

            To simply see this work as a welcome and timely celebration, a “generous inclusion,” would be to patronize these traditions and ignore great artists of color. It also ignores the historical power imbalances that have benefited Western, white writers over communities of color, whether in Africa or in its diaspora, for hundreds of years. This has been due to quirks of geography, disease, and more insidious institutions and practices such as colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery (to name just a few). Blood, treasure, images, and ideas have been extracted from these communities for centuries, the benefits accruing to whites and the cost borne by people of color. It is a repeating pattern, called out with smoldering eloquence by Jesse Williams in his acceptance speech for the 2016 Black Entertainment Television Humanitarian Award:

This invention called whiteness uses and abuses us . . . extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil—black gold—ghettoizing and demeaning our creations and stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.

            There is nothing to add to Mr. William’s words. They are complete, powerful, and persuasive on their own.

There is a counter argument. It goes something like this: that the cross-fertilization of cultures has always taken place and led to benefits in a variety of disciplines. The very characters these words are written with are “Roman,” influenced by Greek and Phoenician alphabets; the numbers in this text are “Arabic,” although really first codified by a Persian scholar (Muhammad al-Khwarizmi) who modeled them after a number system used by Hindu mathematicians.

Cross-fertilization indeed.

            The precedents for cultural exchange in fantasy literature are many fold. Take J.R.R. Tolkien, who borrowed heavily from Norse, Finnish, Germanic, as well as his own Anglo-Saxon traditions. Such fusions can create works of profound beauty and stand testament to the value of cultural diffusion. And it is often artists who are pioneers in reaching across cultural and social barriers, drawn by the universal experience of art and the appreciation of beauty. In the process we may blend influences, foster collaboration, and forge lifelong friendships despite ethnic, racial, or other social barriers. Sometimes amazing art is produced too.

But it is equally important to point out that Tolkien’s ancestors did not systematically oppress these other groups. Furthermore, Tolkien, in his own time, did not benefit disproportionately from historic or current oppression of Scandinavians or Germanic people in a way that denied these groups equal opportunity to flourish. The exchange of trade, ideas, and even violence among these peoples took place (more or less) among groups with equivalent levels of power—on an even playing field, if you will. The costs and benefits were equally shared.

No such moral or ethical neutrality can be ascribed to the exploitation of people of color by Europeans or their white descendants. White privilege is real. It has benefited me and still benefits me as a white man, a white writer, in the United States.

            There is no getting around this. But just because something looks like an unethical pattern in the past, does not mean it is the exact same thing today. In my heart of hearts, I would hope that Jamhuri, Njambi & Fighting Zombies is not exploitive. But intentions do not exculpate the artist. The art and work will stand for themselves and will rise or fall on the interpretation, opinions, the praise or condemnation, of others. I expect both and I have no answer other than my work.

            So why write Jamhuri, Njambi & Fighting Zombies? Can we escape these patterns of oppression, exploitation, and historical amnesia?

I hope so.

            Those who are not seized by the urge to create, to channel some idea from the world of the imagined to the real, might not understand the fierce insistence of an idea, a plot, or characters and their stories knocking around in an author’s head. Like the Greek muses, these imagined personalities and events seem to exist outside us, using the artist as a mere channel. Michelangelo described it best when he said the figures he sculpted had always already existed, trapped inside their blocks of marble. It was simply his role to chip away the excess to reveal them.

It is the same with the characters and stories that reside in a writer’s head. They feel, to us, as if they already do and have always existed—a bit like a law in physics, a pattern in number theory, or an undiscovered prime. We as artists reveal; we create, because we can’t not. These characters, Jamhuri, Njambi, Latia, Anastasia, Esmeralda, and their stories, although not completely aligned with my own background, wanted to be out in the world. They wouldn’t leave me alone until they were.

            The second reason was a personal promise. These stories were conceived in the early 2000s when I was living and working at an orphanage for HIV+ children in Nairobi, Kenya. At the time our resources for books were limited. Although we benefited from donations, the books I read to the kids had few characters that looked like them. As much as they enjoyed Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants (which did include a main character of color), they clamored for more characters that looked like them, characters from backgrounds and contexts they could relate to. As children who had been abandoned, abused, stigmatized, and generally not “seen” as individuals outside of their HIV status, this broke my heart.

At the time, writers such as Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin were not on my own radar. So I set out to write a few stories of my own.

As a result, Jamhuri, Njambi & Fighting Zombies is laden with that personal history and meaning for me. If these stories never find an audience beyond the children I wrote them for, then I am at peace with that. The audience and stories deserve at least that much, if nothing else.

            But this all begs the question of whether a privileged, white, male writer can or even should write from the point of view of characters of color. The answer leads me to my third and final reason for writing and publishing these stories.

            “Can a privileged, white, male writer write from the point of view of characters of color?” I will leave that for the readers to determine. I’d like to think these characters are authentic and well developed, but sales, comment sections, and reviews will bear that out as true or not.

            The question of should I have even tried to write in the point of view of these characters also looms large for me. I, for one, believe that art can transcend race (in some ways). As mentioned above, the common ground, the shared experience of being an artist, has united people from various backgrounds for the entire story of humankind. Moving from literature to music, I landed on the career and life of Benny Goodman as an example. Contemporary critics may be split over the legacy of figures such as Goodman, whose classical background and European ancestry “legitimized” jazz for white listeners, making jazz “safe” to bring into venues such as Carnegie Hall. His integration and promotion of this African American art form in his own performances undeniably contributed to his own stardom and the success of his career at a time when black musicians couldn’t drink from the same water fountains, much less perform in the same concert halls as he. So in that sense, perhaps Goodman’s choices were exploitive. But Goodman also launched the careers of many African American jazz artists and, during a time of racial segregation, defiantly toured the US in an integrated jazz band.

            So, as they say on Facebook, the relationship status here is “complicated.”

And that still does not answer the question of whether a white person can even write believable black characters?

It is not as straight forward as I once thought. For instance, my friends—writers of color in literature, television, and film—have had to write white characters throughout the course of their careers. It’s the reality of whiteness being associated with the mainstream, with “normality.” This is a consequence of our ridiculous default culture of white-centeredness and the unfortunate reality of the marketplace. The question of whether or not my friends of color “can” write white characters rarely comes up for them. After all, as people of color in the United States, they are bombarded with images of whiteness. They are forced (sadly) to move in a sea of pallor that is, arbitrarily, considered “the norm.” As people of color in a predominantly white society, they have to understand white culture—even better than we might understand ourselves (as James Baldwin once pointed out).

            Whites do not have the same need. As Jesse Williams reminds us, white society might extract black culture, treating it as a costume to put on, or a thing to demean, to make the “other.” But we have the choice. If we whites wanted, we could likely pass the day without encountering a person of color IRL (in real life). With effort, (and sometimes without) we can whitewash our social experiences and our media consumption, eliminating diverse images and voices and validating only our own. Living a life in an echo chamber like this, as so many white Americans do, eliminates the need to appreciate the perspective or point of view of someone different. It is a great loss, but it happens. I know this from teaching classes on race and reconciliation to white participants. One woman in her fifties in one of my classes recently had the epiphany that, “I worked as a trauma nurse in for thirty-two years and it’s dawning on me that I never worked with a black nurse. It didn’t even occur to me that that was even remarkable until 2017.”

            Baldwin has written that people of color are forced to “get” us whites, to understand us. Sometimes reading white people, living in a state of double consciousness (knowing yourself but also imagining how others misperceive your identity), is a matter of life or death. The tragic deaths of Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Charleena Lyles, and the murder of so many other black citizens by police can attest to this.

But to say that whites cannot do the same, that a white writer cannot and should not write from the point of view of black characters (as I have been told) is a conclusion I am unwilling to accept. Such a conclusion is flawed; it posits that we whites can never understand, much less endorse, the perspective of anyone but ourselves, even with effort, intentionality, and exposure. If this were true, it leaves me without hope. If understanding could only go in one direction: people of color learning to interpret and live with white people who are unable to do the same, progress would be impossible.

I don’t want to live in that world.

            It may take intentionality and no small amount of effort, humility, and discomfort, but I want—I need—to believe that members of a group of people who have been oppressors and a (rapidly diminishing) majority can come to understand and endorse, to love and accept the perspective of an oppressed minority. Perhaps it is the part of writers and artists, who try to see out of the eyes of others, to play a constructive role here. Again, to say otherwise—that artists, or even people in general, cannot do so—would be to suggest that people of color alone have this ability and whites do not. This seems like an overgeneralization, a dangerous assumption—in short, pure fallacy.

So yes, I believe that a white, privileged writer can and even should try to write from the perspective of others—with care, humility, and historical sensitivity. Must we be aware of harmful cultural legacies? Absolutely. We should also take care to consider whether or not our voices are taking up space that could be granted to writers of color who have not had the same opportunities to speak or to publish. The realities of the marketplace and the attention span of the modern human dictate that this is a genuine possibility. But to stop short of trying because of these risks handicaps us all.

The default flow of information, attention, experiences, and imagery might be in the direction of white people like myself—we the loud, obnoxious, blundering, self-absorbed, self-centered sibling of the US family, we who have historically been the referent. Thanks to demographics, this will not always be the case. But in the meantime, with intentionality, I believe this myopic vision amongst wypipo can be remedied. It takes exposure, dialogue, travel, reading, watching, and most of all, shutting up and listening.

            In that spirit, I think that is enough from me. People who look like me have had the spotlight on them and the microphone clutched in their hands a long time. Acknowledging that requires me to step aside, to let the characters take the stage—in this case Jamhuri, Latia, Njambi, Anastasia, and Esmeralda, who all have their own real-life counterparts—so they might tell their stories. I’ll be off to the side, sitting down and shutting up.

            Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoy. If you don’t, well, I’ll try to do better next time.

—Ted Neill, Seattle, 2018

[1] This even happens in social activism. One need look no further than the initial confusion about the origin of the “MeToo” campaign. Many Twitter followers attributed it to Alyssa Milano, when it was actually a campaign started in 2007 by Tarana Burke, a Harlem activist, as a way to support women and girls and women of color who had been victims of sexual abuse.