Painful Art

Sitting in the theatre, lights shining on the stage stretched out in rectangle between two sets of spectator seating, the stage not elevated, us – the audience – elevated instead. And in a sea of whiteness, almost exclusive whiteness, my feelings were a mix between rage and confusion. 

Last night, We are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrkia, Between the Years 1884 - 1915 , a play, disoriented me, bouncing between silly laughter and the slaughter of thousands in a lattice of humor and disgust not easily reconciled. It was more than the crafting of a complex story; I applaud a complicated journey that does not cater to neat packaging of extremes. But I’d entered the play with thoughts of a genocide- assumptions that no one could talk about a genocide with anything other than gravity. 

The first few minutes were wrought with humor- laughter emerging unexpectedly from myself and the people seated around me. I got comfortable. A purposeful positioning by the director I’m sure. I was lulled. Lulled myself into thinking there could be humor in the decimation of the Herero people of Namibia. 

My fault. 

I wasn’t diligent enough. I didn’t hold onto the horror of it long enough. My brain didn’t ache from the strain of carrying the Herero atrocity at the forefront of my mind.

The play went on, veering into stories of German-ness – whiteness. Soldiers writing home too their loved ones. As if this story of the Herero should be told – could be told- through the love letters of the soldiers that slaughtered them. 

The anger welled like bile in my throat. I clutched my fists and looked around – surreptitious glances at the audience. The people laughing at all the “right” places. The people properly quiet and chaste when the script called for that too. 

There erupted some fiercer emotion for me. Overly sensitive to the depiction of Africa and its many varied inhabitants, I tried to weigh my internal reflex reactions against the possible satire or deeper meaning I might be missing. I struggled to ignore the subtlety (or maybe not so subtle) typing of an angry black man, neurotic white woman.

In fairness – the play finessed the white-lens default on genocide…the idea that every genocide was in some way related to the holocaust. The assumption that anything before the holocaust was simply a rehearsal, anything after, a gross mimicry. As if human suffering is a competition. As if only the “winner” matters.

The thing is, we never got to the Herero. Prominent in the name of the play, they are all but absent from it. Their story is the hook it all hangs on and yet they are only the background – talked about but never talking. Even the conversation about their voicelessness only amplifies their silence. With a little space to sort through my feelings from last night I can consider that maybe that was the point. At least one of the points of the play. Either way, what do I do with that?

The part of the play that resonated with me – whether by my own fabrication or possibly purposeful intent – is the idea that no one can be/can see themselves on the wrong side of history. We don’t want to admit we could be – could have been. No one wants to be a slave owner, a genocidal solider. No one wants to see that kind of darkness and recognize it as their own reflection. And yet we are apt to thrust ourselves into the victim role- the survivor. See our horrors buoyed on the horrors of another.

The idea of who we are and who we could be is brought up again and again and again. Black isn’t the same as African. White doesn’t translate into a German soldier. Pennsylvanian coal miner stories are not universal stories…except when they are. The truth is that we are all pieces of the same story, capable of the same atrocities, of suffering the same cruelties. Maybe not the literal all…not every single person…but enough of us. Enough of us in the world so that we continue to recreate our most brutal histories. Creating genocides even as we argue that we could never do that…I could never do that.

The final blow of We are Here to Present… had me seething with rage that it had gone there. That, without warning or clearly defined trail, the story shifted and transported us to American soil. All of a sudden the Herero man became an American one. The soldiers became police- German law became Jim Crow (and its ancestor laws we have left nameless but enact brutality on present-day brown bodies just the same). All of a sudden the fear wasn’t the Namibian dessert, instead it was the noose.

The scene was frenzied. A terrified black man bound and bullied from all sides, “n!&&er” floating from white lips on deep voices. Feet pounding a rhythm like a hammering heartbeat. This man’s terror both visceral and visible – on display for us to marvel at his inability to escape the mob. Feet pounding, bodies constricting his movement. Feet pounding directing him toward scaffolding and a familiar end. Feet pounding and the noose around his neck.

A noose around his neck.

I wasn’t ready for the noose around his neck. Wasn’t ready for a grown man bent and crying. Wasn’t ready for the veneer of civil discourse ripped so brutally apart.

He yanked off the noose and ran screaming and crying from the stage. The black woman followed.

Silence.

Four people remained on stage. The white actors chuckling in a nervous fashion. Deeply uncomfortable. Laughter born of fear or shame. The lone black man bent to pick up scraps of paper that had fallen and been dropped throughout the play. Single minded of purpose, he didn’t speak, didn’t make eye contact, looked only at each scrap of paper, tidying the space around him with a fierceness that was palpable. 

Picking up pieces…picking up the pieces of a failed attempt to tell a story of an atrocity elsewhere when we are unable to tell the stories of our own atrocities.

The stage emptied one person at a time and we were left with silence. A few moments passed and the applause began. People standing, an offering of their appreciation.

But I didn’t stand. I couldn't clap. 

For me this was not a therapeutic flogging of the horrors done so many in 1915. This was a vivid visceral painful reminder of what horrors are done every day. This was not Namibia this was Sanford, and Oakland, and Cleveland. This was not history this was my today…and I don’t know how to applaud that.

Fear Swings Both Ways

Fear is visceral. 

We respond to fear. We have to. It may be freezing in place, or fleeing without thought, or fighting for what we hold dear. 

Fear doesn’t promote clear rational thinking. The part of the brain activated when we are face-deep in fear is the primal part of who we are, the part that dates back to living in caves and fighting off wild animals. Us before fire. 

Fear has led us to arming ourselves with ever more lethal weapons…mace, knives, and guns. Fear inspired us to teach our children about “stranger danger” (despite the reality that most children are abducted by people they know). And Homeland Security was built on fear. 

Post 911, the vision of smoke and falling buildings still fresh in the collective American mind, and our government told us that we needed to be protected. Danger wasn't past tense it was ever present. And so we lamented  our withering freedoms but took solace in the safety that its withering would provide. This isn't new; this reality has had many a birthday. But it is relevant now as the FBIis denouncing the new encryption capabilities that both Google and Apple have placed on their phones. The changes they have made make it difficult for law enforcement to gain access to materials even if they have a valid warrant. 

When I read about this, the phrase, “even if they have a valid warrant” stood out to me. Screamed at me. Blinked in neon colors. It is that line that clarifies everything. That line explains how acutely we respond to fear.  That line reveals the expectation that law enforcement might be accessing our information without a valid warrant. The subtle implication nestled in the FBI’s whine is essentially, “even if we follow the rules we still might not get to play.” And for the moment the response is, “no, you cannot play.”

To me, the most obvious reason that Google and Apple have scrambled to get encryption in the first place is the recent bullying from NSA and the like.* Forced to offer up client information even after fighting the demand in court; outrage followed when we, the public, found out how much of our information was being demanded.

And so we fell down a hole our own fear made. And this encrypted reaction is the ladder we’re making to escape. A ladder of fear – only this time a different kind.

Unchecked power is a frightening and insatiable beast.  Feed it a few rights, access to some things, and soon it will devour everything – offered or not. And so more than a decade after 911…post NSA snooping phone calls…post skimming our emails for whatever phrase proves our guilt...we see a backlash. Emails sealed, phones held tight, secrets locked away.

I delight in this fear. Delight in the audacity of the FBI to be indignant about their own cavalier behavior towards rules and limitations, even when it is those very things that have brought us here.

And here is not the best place. 

Here is where child pornographers might be able to breathe a little easier because their emails are a little more secure. Here is where actual terrorists may have an extra moment, drug dealers may have hiding places that remain hidden. 

But here is where fear put us. First the fear of everything without. Fear of all the things that go bang in the daylight and leave us bewildered at the destruction. And now fear of the people that swore to protect us and abused that trust, relished in our fear that gave them latitude to ignore rules that were created to keep us all safe to begin with.

Fear is visceral. Fear spreads. We respond to fear, just not always in predictable ways.  

*I’m sure there are other reasons that have nothing to do with this but the rush…the rush I maintain is linked at least in part to law enforcement’s intrusion.

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.