Blame Culture

*potential trigger warning for sexual assault survivors

Jordan Davis was murdered for playing loud music.

A recent piece in The Root breaks from traditional black convention on “preparing young black men for the world”. In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, the Rules of blackness are a much talked about rite of passage for black children with special emphasis for young black men:

•  When pulled over by the police, keep both hands on the steering wheel until asked for ID, then move slowly and narrate your actions
•   Pull your pants up and take off your hoodie
•  “Yes sir” and “no sir”, politeness to the extreme is essential not a nicety.

This list is not exhaustive but you get the gist. The piece inspects these “protective rules” and finds them lacking. At the heart of these rules, she maintains, is teaching young blacks to submit. 

Submission is a heavy word. Submit to some unspoken but innately understood idea of what a threat is and contort yourself in an attempt to avoid being that. 

If only he’d taken off his hoodie, hadn’t had tattoos, hadn’t been playing loud music…then he’d be safe and alive and wouldn’t have looked suspicious, would have celebrated his birthday last week, wouldn’t have been murdered in a parking lot. 

Seldom do we question the faulty premise. Florida’s flawed “Stand Your Ground” law and repugnant acquittal by a jury didn’t push the issue. Didn’t stop blaming the victim long enough to prosecute his murderer. 

My sister was conflicted by the Root’s article. I think the troubling part was theory vs. practice. A black man should be able to don a hoodie and go for a run. He should. But who volunteers to test that theory? Do you want your loved one to push that issue?

Surviving a racist society as a black person is parallel to surviving rape culture as a woman. They aren’t the same but they have common threads. 

“Why was she there?” I, and the rest of my classmates, asked. 

The Sociology of Deviant Behavior class was discussing a hypothetical rape at a fraternity party. “Where were her friends?” “She had to know being there wasn’t safe.” Our minds churned out questions thinly veiling blame…of the victim.

I cringe to think of it now. I am horrified to remember how entirely and obliviously I was entrenched in the assumptions of rape culture, in the blame of rape survivors (mostly women, although not entirely) for the abuses heaped upon them. In that moment I didn’t see anything wrong with our line of questioning or the way we were considering the situation. Our discussion mirrored every discussion I’d ever heard on the subject, directly or indirectly, on television, informally in high school and now my early years in college.

And then Prof. Hunt asked, “Why are you focused on the perceived faults of the victim? If I told you she was robbed would you ask the same questions?”

I wracked my brain, turning over what he’d asked and trying to find absolution for my views. But I couldn’t. I was a part of the problem. In that moment my freshman year in college, I began to reorient my thinking. No more double standards for victims or thresholds of blame. A rapist was a criminal, not the raped. 

That conversation spurred me to be vocal, to question the narratives surrounding rape and behavior. I remember a close friend of mine comfortably assured that victims of rape were responsible for what happens to them.

“What if it were your sister?” I asked.

“I don’t have a sister?”

“What about your favorite cousin?”

“She wouldn’t be stupid enough to be in that situation.”

He was adamant in his understanding of rape and I was just as adamant in trying to dismantle it. Adamant in trying to bring about that moment of clarity I’d had in Prof. Hunt’s class years earlier. I’m not sure I was successful but I’ve never stopped having that conversation. Never stopped asking how a victim is somehow to blame for her/his attacker. 

If we hold to that logic of victim blame then robbery victims are to blame for having stuff worthy of stealing and murder victims for having a life to take in the first place. It becomes a theater of the absurd.

I still didn’t go to frat parties alone. I am still mindful of where I walk (my sophomore year I didn’t argue with my boyfriend when he’d send a cab for me instead of walking the short distance home from campus when I worked late at the paper). I do not see culpability in someone who doesn’t take those precautions but I haven’t removed them from my arsenal. 

Ultimately, the rules we put into place are a mental protection. We blame the victims because it gives us a sense of control where, in fact, we have very little. If she was raped because “she looked slutty” and he was shot because “he looked like a thug” then if I dress a certain way, if my children are dressed a certain way, we are protected. The reality that some people walking around are rapists and gun-toting racists is too scary and dis-empowering to contemplate.

If I had children, no doubt, I would share the Living While Black rules with them as well as all the rules I navigate my world with as a woman, because who wants their child to face danger because in theory they should be safe. 

But you can’t change an inherently racist and sexist system by altering one person's behavior. Altering individual behavior is a survival mechanism for the moment- for the individual. To change a culture of sexual and racial oppression we have to have conversations that extend beyond rules and incorporate race and gender and privilege and entitlement as well. We have to be bold and confront fallacies of blame passed off as truth so that discussions of murder place blame on those doing harm and we can stop pretending that rules stops bullets.

Vegetarian Bully

“They are raising him to be a tyrant!” my voice was raised and I stood up and paced a little. Ron giggled over the phone, amused at how agitated I was over a short piece on This American Life. The prologue told the story of a family with two young children, the 7-year-old a vegetarian and the 5-year-old very much not. 

It was billed as a kind of cute story i think. A little quirky. Not too serious. 

Only I took it…I take it…very seriously. 

It isn’t the vegetarian piece. As much as i embrace an omnivore’s lifestyle I embrace an ideology of “you like I love it” (as long as I’m not cooking!). i live in the bay, home of specialized dietary restrictions. More than your pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan, we add gluten free, organic only, paleo, freegan, and the “ans” continue. Eat or don’t eat.

No, my issue isn’t that a child has become passionate about being a vegetarian. My issue is that he is intent on making everyone around him vegetarian. 

Rather than take his passion for his choice as an opportunity to discuss other people’s (namely, his little brother’s) choices, the parents instead urge and cajole the youngest child to acquiesce. And when that proves difficult, they simply lie. 

All of a sudden his desire to be a vegetarian has morphed into making the entire family vegetarian. Suddenly, his way of looking at the world becomes the way of looking at the world. Other opinions and ideas be damned. 

And it could all be harmless. Maybe a phase this 7-year-old is in and by the time he is 9 or 13, he’ll no longer care what other people sate themselves with – or at least no longer try to control them.

But therein lies the rub. The lesson he is learning is that he should get to control other people’s actions; that he can. 

My sister often says, referencing children’s behavior, “If it isn’t cute at 22 it isn’t cute at 2.” Listening to this child haggle with his little brother over the length and payment for a temporary bout of vegetarianism may seem harmless enough, might even border on cute. But at 22 that same behavior is just bullying and no one likes a bully, vegetarian or otherwise.

Hypocritical Thirst

Hypocrisy is a fierce and greedy beast.

When I lived in rural South Africa I seethed with an intense disgust every time I went to Pretoria and passed the various consulate and international houses that lined some of the streets. They were magnificent houses – I assume. It was hard to tell much from the stone walls latticed with ivy purposefully woven along the front surface. Without fail there would be a small sprinkler system aimed at the roots of that ivy spraying incessantly. The water, having already saturated the roots, continued to trickle, leaving a dark patch of mud meandering into the street. Water puddled. No one seemed to notice.

 But I noticed.

Stepping past puddles of water I would rant to whoever was nearby to hear or simply in my own head, “How dare they water a stone wall? How dare they waste something the women in my village walk for hours to reach?”

But that was Pretoria and I lived in Makushoaneng, only a few hours – if worlds – away. In Makushoaneng it was normal to see women walk beyond the perimeter of the village with jerricans or buckets. Hours later they would return with receptacles sloshing lightly on their head, balanced neatly on the checha (folded cloth that keeps the bucket in place). Potable or contaminated, the state of the water depended on how far they were willing to walk. An open source nearby or further still. The pump at the center of town had been broken since before I arrived. We’d had meetings about fixing it, but when I left, two years later, the pump was still broken. 

I was obsessed with water back then. Obsessed with potable water despite the bore hole I had in my yard. Even when I returned to the land of flushing toilets and long hot showers, I found myself preoccupied with how much I used. How often I turned it on. How other people consumed it. I constantly reminded myself of the women walking for miles in search of that most basic thing…water.

And now I find myself in California. We are in the midst of the longest drought in decades (some say back to 1850). For the most part I am a bay area stereotype (sans the restricted diet), I recycle and buy local as much as possible. When I buy organic it is usually with the farm workers in mind more than myself, and my eggs are cage and hormone free, a mutually beneficial arrangement. 

And I’m an “if its yellow let it mellow” kind of woman. Once again, TMI (too much info) I know. But old American toilets use an insane amount of water and I live alone and so I don’t see a need in sending gallons to the sewer simply because I am well hydrated. 

I’m thinking about mother earth generally. I’m thinking about California specifically.

Only I don’t…think about mother earth that is. Not always. Not when it could really count. 

Last weekend I treated myself to a fancy spa day. I craved the serene space and humid air. I wanted the warm water and time with friends. Harmless enough…

Except the sheer volume of water I used boggles my mind. As soon as I walked in I was assaulted by my own shortsightedness…my own hypocrisy of lifestyle. 

I showered to get into the bath. I lounged in the bath. I walked past the wet sauna, the air so heavy inside that it looked like a cloud outside an airplane window. 

Water water everywhere. 

Outside a much needed rain fell softly on the streets of san Francisco. I emerged from the moist comfort of my spa treatment only mildly sheepish. In my head I’m fast-forwarding my thinking to March when I can return to my favorite local spa, only marginally (if at all) less water-logged.

I haven’t reconciled my hypocrisy yet. I’m sure, given a few quiet moments I can work up a reasonable explanation for my behavior and possibly some convoluted justification for it. But really, the answer is that, as with so many other hypocrisies, I took a time out. A time out from thinking and acting in the way that I swear I believe. 

Hypocrite is a heavy moniker to wear; I hope I put it down soon.