Hopewell-Mann is a predominantly Latino neighborhood in the predominantly Latino city of Santa Fe. Close enough to downtown to make it a short commute, yet a world away so that tourism doesn’t quite reach it, it’s a stark reminder of some of the inequalities present in this city. While the stunning adobe architecture downtown looks like it’s been preserved in aspic, Hopewell-Mann’s main drag is lined with big-box stores, fast-food restaurants, and cheap motels offering month-to-month leases. The neighborhood attracts a mix of the transient and the locally displaced, and not surprisingly, people downtown tend to avoid it.
Dr. Martin Luther King delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington on August 28, 1963. National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia
Dr. Martin Luther King delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington on August 28, 1963. National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia
All the discussions today of how much racial progress we’ve made since Dr. Martin Luther King was alive reminded me of a disturbing point about the black−white health gap mentioned in recent research, some of which I discussed in an Atlanticessay over the weekend.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, African Americans have been catching up with whites in terms of life expectancy at birth. So things are looking up, right?
Yes, and no. To a sizeable extent, what explains the narrowing of the life-expectancy gap in the last couple decades is not just that things are better for African Americans (though they have improved), but also that things are worse for whites—working-class whites above all.
A New York Timespiece over the weekend highlighted this fact. “A once yawning gap between death rates for blacks and whites has shrunk by two-thirds”—but that’s not because both groups are doing better, according to the article. Overall mortality has declined for African Americans of all ages, but it has risen for most whites (specifically, all groups except men and women ages 54-64 and men ages 35-44).
Furthermore, younger whites (ages 25-34) have seen the largest upticks in deaths, largely because of soaring rates of drug overdoses, and those who have little education are dying at the highest rates. The mortality rate has dropped for younger African Americans, a decline apparently driven by lower rates of death from AIDS. Together these trends have cut the demographic distance between the two groups substantially.
For middle-age African Americans, the progress in improving health outcomes implied by the shrinking black−white mortality gap is also less cause for celebration than it might seem at first.
A much-discussed study last year by the economists Anne Case* and Angus Deaton found that huge spikes in deaths by suicide and drug poisonings over the last couple decades have meant that the trend of declining mortality rates we’ve seen for generations actually reversed for whites ages 45-54 between 1999 and 2013. Again, those with little education were hit the hardest.
In my Atlanticpiece, I pointed out that the growing social isolation and economic insecurity of the white working class might explain some of these trends. One of the caveats I mentioned is that death and disease rates remain much higher among African Americans and Latinos. (I should have been more precise in the article: although Latinos have higher rates of chronic liver disease, diabetes, obesity, and poorly controlled high blood pressure, they have lower rates of cancer and heart disease, and lower or at least equivalentrates of death).
But it’s not just that the black−white gap persists. Here’s an important passage from Case and Deaton’s paper:
Over the 15-[year] period, midlife all-cause mortality fell by more than 200 per 100,000 for black non-Hispanics, and by more than 60 per 100,000 for Hispanics. By contrast, white non-Hispanic mortality rose by 34 per 100,000. CDC reports have highlighted the narrowing of the black−white gap in life expectancy. However, for ages 45–54, the narrowing of the mortality rate ratio in this period [1999−2013] was largely driven by increased white mortality; if white non-Hispanic mortality had continued to decline at 1.8% per year, the ratio in 2013 would have been 1.97. The role played by changing white mortality rates in the narrowing of the black−white life expectancy gap (2003−2008) has been previously noted. It is far from clear that progress in black longevity should be benchmarked against US whites.
Let me reiterate their point: for Americans ages 45-54, the narrowing in the black−white gap in life expectancy in recent decades was “largely driven” by more deaths among whites.
It’s heartening that overall life expectancy is increasing for many Americans, including African Americans. But it’s also important to remember that, almost a half century after King’s death, people of all races continue to be left out of this country’s progress, and some—whites and nonwhites—may, in fact, be seeing an unprecedented step backward.
* I want to apologize to Dr. Anne Case for mistakenly identifying her as “Susan Case” in the original version of my article in the Atlantic. (The only reason I can think of for why I made that dumb mistake is that a friend of mine is named Susan Caisse.) This brilliant scholar has already suffered the injustice of having her study erroneously called the “Deaton and Case study” rather than the “Case and Deaton study” (for better or worse, first authorship is everything to us academics), and here I’ve added insult to indignity. My sincere apologies.
“Seasons Greetings, from Ferguson,” November 29, 2014. Mike Tigas, via Flickr
Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute says we need to remember the big picture of race relations in Baltimore:
The police behavior is something that should be remedied. It’s a terrible criminal operation on the part of the police departments. But it doesn’t start with police departments. When you have a low-income population concentrated in the area, little hope, unemployment rates in places like inner city of Baltimore … two and three times the rate for whites, well, you get behavior in those kind of communities that reinforces police hostility. It becomes a cycle of misbehavior and police aggression, and it’s attributable to the concentration of disadvantaged families in very crowded inner-city communities.
When an unarmed black man dies after a confrontation with police, there is a natural tendency to focus on racist police officers or racist police departments. We saw this after the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and we saw it, too, after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Walter Scott in North Charleston. Without a doubt, there are plenty of bigoted bad apples to be found, as seen in the shockingly racist emails unearthed in the Department of Justice investigation into Ferguson’s police department. But we also need to consider that big picture, or what sociologists call social structure: institutions like the economy and political system and the roles that people take up within them. After all, the modern-day factors pushing down poor African American communities—and pulling them into hostile encounters with police—involve more than just racial discrimination (or at least discrimination of the plain-vanilla variety).
Here is a handy chart that illustrates what I mean, using the examples of Ferguson and North Charleston—two cities with a few striking similarities.
As Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson points out, systematic racial discrimination was what originally put African Americans in their place—stuck in segregated neighborhoods and blocked from educational and job opportunities (disclosure: Wilson was my advisor in graduate school). That past has lingered on today. In the latter half of the last century, the sorts of racially motivated housing policies that Rothstein discusses worsened the plight of the people left behind in cities like Baltimore.
On the other hand, Ferguson gives us an example of policies that were not explicitly racial, but that nonetheless helped trap many African Americans in poor, crime-ridden, aggressively policed neighborhoods. Beginning in the 1950s, decisions to situate new highway extensions and other infrastructure projects within low-income neighborhoods resulted in the razing of once-vibrant communities. Again, African Americans were hit the hardest. In the St. Louis metro area, the expansion of Lambert–St. Louis International Airport in the eighties all but destroyed the black community of Kinloch, located near Ferguson. “Many of the residents displaced by this wasteful construction project,” Jeff Smith writes, “have ended up in Ferguson—specifically, in Canfield Green, the apartment complex on whose grounds Michael Brown tragically died.”
More generally, policies about where to build airports and route highways may have racial motivations behind them. (“We might ask,” Wilson writes, “whether such freeways would have also been constructed through wealthier white neighborhoods.”) But larger structural changes that have had little or nothing to do with race have also harmed African Americans disproportionately. Beginning in the eighties, cities across the country were devastated by downsizing. Corporations shipped jobs overseas in droves, and the federal government sharply cut direct aid to cities and trimmed industries that once sustained many cities—in North Charleston’s case, closing Charleston Naval Base, once the largest employer in the state. As Wilson notes, African Americans have not been the only ones affected by these seismic economic shifts. But they have been particularly vulnerable because of their low levels of skill and education relative to whites, a gap that has made it more difficult to find good jobs to replace the ones their communities lost. Few jobs and high poverty, in turn, lead to more crime, which leads to more potentially violent confrontations with police.
Beyond their need to clamp down on crime, however, the police have other, more unseemly incentives nowadays to get in the faces of the citizens they are sworn to protect. A lackluster local economy has pushed many cities to become creative about generating revenue. In Ferguson, the city’s various streams of cash have dwindled in recent years—except for fines and forfeitures. Traffic tickets and the like, it turns out, have made up for Ferguson’s budget shortfalls in recent years. As the Department of Justice report made clear, however, the push by city officials to “ramp up” ticket writing has worsened racial tensions: “Many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.”
The kinds of structural changes that have hammered cities like North Charleston and Ferguson and Baltimore—and cities across the country, for that matter—have made the situation on the streets all the more toxic and volatile. Body cameras and DOJ investigations are a good first start, but the problem, as usual, goes much deeper.
In search of Lunchables. Eddie Huang (Hudson Yang) and his mom Jessica (Constance Wu) journey to the supermarket.
“Ugh, what is that? Gross!”
About seven minutes into the pilot episode of ABC’s new comedy series Fresh Off the Boat, eleven-year-old Eddie, the new kid in school, is invited to sit at the cool kids’ table during lunchtime. He’s conscious of making friends, especially the right kind who will ease his entrance into the local social structure. But Eddie quickly blows his first impression when he pulls out a Tupperware container of homemade noodles.
“It’s Chinese food. My mom makes it,” Eddie explains.
“Get it out of here!” the table’s alpha boy yells. “Oh my god, Ying Ming is eating worms! Dude, that smells nasty!”
Fresh Off the Boat adapts the memoir of Eddie Huang, chef and owner of Baohaus, a Taiwanese restaurant in New York. Though his recollections were turned into “a cornstarch sitcom,” as Huang claims in an angry Vulture op-ed about his own show, Fresh still highlights an experience that hasn’t been visited on network television in decades: life as an Asian American. Huang spoke with comedian Margaret Cho—whose All-American Girl twenty years ago was the last sitcom to depict an Asian American family—about his doubts whether Hollywood would do justice to his story. “I believe in you,” she told him, “and to be honest, we need this.”
Indeed we do. But I hadn’t realized how much “we” needed this cathartic mainstream exposure until I started watching the show. The scene brought back surprisingly vivid memories of elementary school, its lunchroom hierarchy, and my mom’s cooking. I had accepted these memories as amusing anecdotes, dinner-party fodder. But Huang’s show elevated to comedy an important experience all-too-familiar to many Asian American (and other) kids: the search for a seat in the cafeteria.
My own search began as a fifth-grader in suburban Maryland. As in many school cafeterias, the cool kids sat together. They always seemed to bring brown paper bags with ham or turkey sandwiches on thin, crustless Wonder Bread. They drank out of juice boxes. They snacked on Doritos, Fritos, or treats like Gushers or Fruit by the Foot. The most envied kids had boxes of Lunchables and Mondos (artificially flavored drinks heavy in high-fructose corn syrup), the ultimate beverage of choice.
I found my place lower down the totem pole with a more marginalized and diverse crowd. My best friend Julia, a Jewish girl, had in her packed lunch healthy items like fruit, Yoplait yogurt, pita, hummus, and Ziploc bags of carrot or celery sticks. Rachel usually either brought a lunch in a recycled paper bag or bought from the cafeteria a tray of chocolate milk, soggy canned green beans, tater tots, and chicken nuggets. Another Jewish girl, Aviva, ate latkes and other foods unrecognizable to me. And Shobi’s mom made her incredible pocket sandwiches stuffed with a deliciously aromatic mixture of soft spiced potatoes, onions, and peas. Like a grilled cheese sandwich, these were gently fried with a nice brown crust. I would later learn they were samosas.
One day, my mom packed a doshirak (Korean for a compartmentalized lunchbox) of rice, bulgogi (marinated beef), and kimchi (spicy fermented cabbage) in an insulated cooler with a mottled neon green-and-orange pattern. The aroma of the kimchi assaulted the noses of my dining companions as soon as I unzipped my lunchbox.
“Ugh, what is that?!”
“It’s Korean food,” I said apologetically.
Mortified, I confronted my mother as soon as I arrived home after school.
“Why did you pack kimchi in my lunch, Mom?” I cried.
“Because I was out of other banchan,” she replied nonchalantly, as though the lack of other Korean side dishes served with every meal was sufficient explanation for her egregious error.
“Why can’t you pack me a normal lunch like the other kids’?”
I was angry with my mother’s lack of understanding. All I wanted was one of those brown paper bags or a box of Lunchables. Not a cooler box of pungent foreign food.
And I wanted better clothes. As in the opening scene of Fresh, my mother also rejected my sartorial choices. Her final judgment: too expensive. I went to school every day in no-brand T-shirts and ill-fitting Mom Jeans, while the most popular girls—Kristen, Ashleigh, and Julie —had closets filled with Limited Too, the preferred retailer of ten-year-old girls. What I would have given to sit with the cool kids in a new Limited Too outfit and laugh while flicking my shiny ponytail.
In retrospect, I wanted to be popular as much as I wanted to belong.
The day after his humiliation in the cafeteria, Eddie dumps his homemade lunch in the trash. When his mother finds out she is upset and baffled. “But you love my food!”
Eddie attempts to articulate the gravity of the situation in a monologue far more effective than my childhood protests. “I need white people lunch!” he tells his mom. “That gets me a seat at the table. And then, you get to change the rules. Represent. Like Nas says . . . I got big plans. First, get a seat at the table. Second, meet Shaq. Third, change the game. Possibly with the help of Shaq.”
In its inaugural episode, Fresh hit the nail on the end: Eddie does love his mother’s food. That is a part of who he is, his heritage. But he is also mindful of where he is going and who he is expected to be. Despite the difference in details, I related to Eddie’s balancing act and his constant negotiation between how much of his culture to bring to his evolving identity and how much to leave behind.
When I was ten, I didn’t realize that this experience would add to the richness of two of the many ways I identify myself—Asian and American. I didn’t think about how lucky I was to experience the cultural complexity of American society, laid out on the table every lunchtime in our virtual ethnic-food fair, where I tasted my first samosa thanks to Shobi’s mom. And I didn’t know how fortunate I was to have eaten fresh homemade meals without artificial, processed ingredients.
My mom’s love came packed every day, in a brightly colored cooler.
Sandra Hong Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.
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Each year I go through the motions of Christmas, rarely ever feeling fully present. I spend the days leading up to the holiday cooking for my family and baking for my neighbors. I send out Christmas cards. I purchase whatever gifts I can afford. I spend the nights sipping bourbon, wrapping presents, and wondering why the holiday doesn’t fill me with the kind of joy and lightheartedness we see in movies. Then the day arrives and I remember why: my family can be intolerable.
I realize you’re not supposed to say that. To be clear, I don’t mean “intolerable” in a cute, bickering, loud kind of way. I mean that since my mom died, I’m the lone woman in a family populated by troubled white and brown men—white and brown men who seem to only be capable of bonding over one thing: antiblack racism.
There are two kinds of antiblackness prevalent in my family: the openly hateful and hostile racism that is easily recognizable, and something else that is more challenging to articulate, though painfully common. I have family members who ravenously consume black culture, who worship black athletes like Kobe Bryant, who solely listen to hip hop, but who also say the n-word, who believe “thugs” like Mike Brown got what they had coming to them, and who call President Obama every name in the book, giving a ten-minute spiel about how he hates Mexicans—evidenced, apparently, by his immigration policies. “Typical,” they say. “Blacks hate Mexicans.”
Conveniently, the people in my family can see racism when they believe they are the ones experiencing prejudice. Yes, this means that white family members believe in reverse racism, and that brown family members believe that because we have a black president, antiblackness is somehow a thing of the past and black Americans now have the upper hand. They express these sentiments while throwing around the n-word and dismissing the fact black men and women are being gunned down by police officers as if it’s open season. They don’t see the irony. This level of ignorance is alarming and dangerous, and it has always been this way in my family.
When I was a little girl, my father taught me to proudly proclaim, “Soy Mexicana.” It did not matter that I was biracial, my mother blonde-haired and blue-eyed. It did not matter that I was Americanized and spoke broken Spanish and had few connections to my father’s family, the bulk of whom stayed behind in Mexico when my father made the perilous journey to the States. I was Mexicana and it was something to celebrate and embrace. It was who I was, through and through.
As a child, antiblack racism thrived on both the brown and white sides of my family, but so strong was it on my father’s side that I began to think that hating black people was a prerequisite for being Mexican. I was led to believe that part of being brown was being antiblack.
For whatever reason—and I attribute it to nothing more than semi-decent critical thinking skills and luck (because hatred is very effectively taught)—I didn’t buy into this messaging the way other family members did. Not only did I know it was ridiculous to hate an entire group of people based on the color of their skin, but it didn’t make any sense to me. It seemed that the brown men in my family shared many similarities with the black men they hated and almost always failed to understand that black people were a part of our community, both literally in terms of location and figuratively in the form of Afro Latinos.
In the predominantly Latino city of Los Angeles where I was born and raised, Latino men are gunned down by police officers alongside black men in astonishing numbers. Latinos are also funneled into prisons and sentenced harshly for minor offenses. Low-income Latinos and black Angelenos are primarily impacted by gentrification, making affordable housing for their families and adequate schooling for their children a near pipe dream. My father and my brothers have all been pulled over by cops who had their guns drawn, guilty of nothing but driving while brown. Any sudden movement and there would have been the very real possibility that we’d be spending Christmas with an empty seat at the table and a hole in our hearts.
Still, I can’t convince my family that they should care about black lives. Writers like Aura Bogado have delved into how antiblackness is deeply instilled in Latino families. Black and brown solidarity is often discussed in progressive and radical circles, but personally, I’ve never seen it.
To be clear: this isn’t about the experiences of Latinos. This isn’t an “all lives matter” conversation. It is not my goal to decenter black people. I’ve simply felt the most reasonable approach to getting through to the brown men in my family is to make them understand how closely their struggles are tied to the struggles of the black community. I try, and I fail.
This isn’t specific to my family. Earlier this year, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 18 percent of Latinos surveyed were following the case of Mike Brown. Few Latinos seem to be following the aftermath. The movement born in Ferguson has been so powerful that it has spiraled out into cities across the country, where marches, protests, and die-ins demand that we remember the names of black men and children recently murdered by police, including Eric Garner and, more recently, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. As I write this, details are emerging about the December 23 murder of eighteen-year-old Antonio Martin, shot and killed by a Berkeley, Missouri, police officer just a few miles outside of Ferguson.
Needless to say, the murders of black cisgender and transgender women rarely get any attention. Black women have been leading the charge in these marches. It has also been black women who have kept the names of murdered black women alive.
The broader message behind this growing movement is that black lives matter. The message is deceptively simple, but for us white and nonblack people of color, asserting that black lives matter comes with the requirement that we continuously center black people. A working knowledge of white supremacy and how it benefits us—and why it must be dismantled—doesn’t hurt either.
It is a tall task that won’t be achieved overnight, but there are small, impactful ways you can push back against antiblack racism every day. Today, on Christmas, I am thinking of the families of recently slain black men and women, those who are facing that empty chair at the table and that hole in their heart. I can think of nothing more disrespectful than allowing the people at my dinner table to speak poorly of those who have lost their lives as a direct result of white supremacy and police brutality—and I won’t allow it.
When I was younger, standing up against antiblack racism in my family was read as being mouthy and disrespectful, resulting in punishment. I am older now and it is easier and safer for me to push back, so I will. In many of our families, every day is filled with antiblack racism, but it seems the holidays amplify it, whether because of alcohol or the “safe” setting family gatherings enable, allowing many to feel free to share the racist commentary they usually keep to themselves.
If you are a white or nonblack person of color who believes that black lives matter, you must behave as if they do when there are no black people present. It is harder than sending out a series of tweets or writing an article the bulk of your family won’t read. (I speak from personal experience.) Pushing back against your family’s antiblack racism is uncomfortable. Pushing back can be contentious. Pushing back can sometimes feel useless, but it is necessary.
I was once told by an artist I interviewed that the most important and transformative work we do is in our own family. I am committed to doing that work. Today, as many of us spend time with our families, I hope we can show up for black people. When our fathers or our mothers or our cousins or siblings assert that Mike Brown was a “thug” or that “police are just doing their job,” I hope we tell them black lives matter, and that they always have, and always will.
Since I was a child, I knew I was going to be a writer. Early on, though, I was ruined by the romanticism surrounding the craft. I’d read too much Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, and Charles Bukowski. I did drugs. I drank. I wandered. At first it may have been to emulate my idols, but eventually it became about survival: running fast and hard from the horrors of an abusive home.
I don’t recall ever making the connection that all of my literary heroes were straight white men, but in the back of my head I knew that so much of how the world opened up for them would never be in the cards for me. But I kept writing, filling up composition books, not thinking about getting published so much as trying, word by word, to patch up my life.
In high school, several teachers took an interest in me, despite the fact I was a miserable fuckup who barely showed up to class. I read all of the writers they believed a girl like me should read. The men gave me Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus. The women gave me Kate Chopin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. Not once did any teacher ever hand me a book by a writer of color.
I now understand this experience is hardly unique to me. If it weren’t for one of my oldest friends, Jessica Rodriguez, loaning me Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros in high school, I would have never known a Latina could be a writer. I mean, I knew Latina writers existed—they were my friends, fellow notebook scribblers—but I don’t think it ever occurred to us that one day we could hold each other’s books in our hands.
Diversity in literature is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. Last month I attended a workshop run by the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA), which sponsors programs for writers of color working in a variety of genres. I sat at the orientation looking around in disbelief at more than 150 writers crammed into a room at UC Berkeley, thinking, “Holy fuck, I had no idea there were so many of us.”
I was there because of the weekly comic strip I write with my best friend Julio Salgado. Liberty For All is his baby. In its early days, the queer, undocumented artist drew and wrote it himself and posted it on his Facebook page. When the comic was picked up by CultureStrike, I was brought on as the writer, giving the two of us the opportunity to work on our first project together after nearly ten years of friendship.
Liberty, the strip’s main character, is a writer without much of a filter. She is sometimes Salgado. Sometimes me. Sometimes our friends, lovers, or family members. She is never a stranger to us. By featuring her story, week after week, we hope she is seen as the quirky, complicated, sometimes problematic character we know her to be, rather than a laundry list of oppressions. But because of those less-than-conventional details of who she is—chubby, brown, undocumented, queer, feminist—I worry that mainstream audiences aren’t capable of recognizing her humanity.
Junot Díaz, the celebrated Dominican American author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and one of VONA’s founders, has spoken out about the tough environment writers of color face. In a recent New Yorker piece—an excerpt from an anthology of writing from VONA attendees and instructors—Díaz describes his particularly miserable experience studying in an MFA program: “That shit was too white.” It’s the “standard problem” of MFA programs everywhere, he adds. Díaz brings up the story of Athena, a Caribbean American woman he praises as a “truly gifted writer.” She dropped out of his program because it was simply too challenging to be a woman of color in that space. Over the years, he looked for Athena’s work, but it appeared that she had chosen not to pursue writing. Díaz seems to recognize the tragedy of this, if only in the distant way a man who “made it” can.
How much better are things today? The women’s literary group VIDA does a yearly tally of the number of women writers in various mainstream literary publications, from the Atlantic to the New Republic—both of whose bylines were more than two-thirds male in 2013. Inspired by this hard-numbers approach, Roxane Gay set out to find out where things stood for writers of color. She found that nearly 90 percent of the books reviewed by the New York Times in 2011 were written by white writers. (Today, few writers of color can be found even in the pages of liberal magazines, which may laud diversity in theory, but do not actually practice it.)
Gay also pointed out another issue: the identity hierarchy. “Race often gets lost in the gender conversation as if it’s an issue we’ll get to later,” she wrote. Yes, progress is slow, but it’s always the most needed voices that are forced to wait. And as we push for a racial mix that better represents the world we live in, does that mean we’ll also need to “get to” queer and transgender writers later?
At least people today are more willing to speak out about these issues—on social media, in particular. In May, the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag went viral after it was announced only white writers would be featured at BookCon, a new reader-focused book festival held in conjunction with the annual trade show BookExpo America. It wasn’t the first time BookCon organizers had come under fire. A month earlier, they had put together a panel on young-adult literature composed solely of white men.
Another diversity-related dustup blew up on Twitter in Maywhen writer Daniel José Older reacted to criticism of a story in Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, an anthology he co-edited. A review chided one of the anthology’s writers, Troy L. Wiggins, for relying too heavily on “phonetic dialect,” calling it a “literary trick” that rarely works. Older tweeted that the reviewer was unfairly coming at a black writer for using AAVE (African American Vernacular English), even though critics have long called white writers—from Joyce to Shakespeare—“brilliant” for using vernacular in their prose. He and Wiggins, Older wrote, are “trying to stay true to our voices in a white ass world.”
In the comic strip Julio and I work on, many of the characters are queer, undocumented, body positive, sex positive, transgender, and people of color. They suffer from mental health issues. They live below the poverty line. They do bad things. In other words, they are messy and beautiful, just like our real-life communities.
Julio and I never had a conversation about being all-inclusive, but sometimes we get commended for our “diverse” comic. No doubt the nine other people in my graphic novel writing workshop—eight of whom were women—encounter the same weird praise. And that’s just it, really. When you give people at the margins the opportunity and platform to tell their own stories, what is reflected will look like intentional pushback against mainstream narratives. Our stories only seem revolutionary because they so often go untold.
At VONA, our instructor Mat Johnson told us we can’t hide behind our oppressions. We have to be good writers. Our only hope of getting mainstream readers to take interest in stories featuring people of color is by tapping into the human condition, those seemingly mundane and yet monumentally important life events that connect us all—and that magically render gender, race, culture, and class unimportant.
The Heart of Everything That Is tells the little-known story of Red Cloud, a ruthless Lakota chief who brought together the warring tribes of the Great Plains to fight the US government and halt its relentless westward expansion.
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend By Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
Simon & Schuster. 432 pages.
For nearly three hundred years, white settlers and American Indians engaged in mutually destructive warfare. The bloodshed followed the path of white Western migration—from the first English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, where colonists coming ashore in 1607 were met with a volley of the Powhatan’s arrows, to far Western lands like the Montana territory, where General Custer and his soldiers made their last stand in 1876, overrun by Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors on the banks of the Little Bighorn River.
Their stunning victory in the Battle of the Little Bighorn immortalized the names of great Indian chiefs like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. But in The Heart of Everything That Is, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin make the case that a relatively obscure Oglala Lakota chief called Red Cloud was actually the era’s most fearsome and effective Indian leader, a brilliant tactician of guerrilla warfare who a decade before Little Bighorn had beaten the US Army in a bloody conflict known as “Red Cloud’s War.”
Best of In The Fray 2014. A novelist, poet, and peerless observer of American Indian life, Sherman Alexie has produced an acclaimed body of work that deals with the estrangement, poverty, and tragedy of life on the reservation. Two decades into his career, what really makes him happy, he says, is the way that a new generation of kids are picking up his books for their first real taste of literature.
When his first book, The Business of Fancydancing, came out two decades ago, the New York Times Book Reviewhailed Sherman Alexie as “one of the major lyric voices of our time.” Since his debut, the American Indian novelist, poet, and filmmaker has written two dozen books and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State — an experience that became the basis of his semi-autobiographical novel for young adults, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Alexie has also delved into film, writing the critically praised screenplay for Smoke Signals. His latest work is What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned, a collection of poems and short prose published last November by Hanging Loose Press.
Sherman Alexie spoke to In The Fray about what it’s like being an “ambiguously ethnic person,” how the first immigrant he met inspired him, and why writing groups make him flinch.
You’re often asked about growing up on a reservation. I recall reading your short story, “Indian Education,” for the first time and being blown away by it. How did your experiences growing up shape what you write about?
Oh, that early stuff is barely fiction. Yeah, “Indian Education” … I called it fiction to give myself those moments where I could actually tell a more interesting version of what happened. I mean, there’s no doubt. I remember reading my first book after many years and laughing because I could have easily called it autobiography. So certainly early on, that’s what I was doing, as many young writers do.
One of the things I’ve been realizing lately — and having the words for it, I guess — is that I generally write about unhappiness and poverty and oppression, and all that difficult stuff, growing up on the res. But what I’ve realized is that a lot of my unhappiness has to do with the fact that I was a natural liberal. And an Indian reservation is an essentially conservative place. So, yeah, I was really fleeing conservatism of the Indian variety.
I can kind of relate to that. I come from a Korean American background, which can be conservative in many ways.
It’s fascinating because — I don’t know about your family — but because Democrats are usually the ones who are more pro-Indian, the worldview of Indians tends to be more Democratic. But at the same time, their tribalism is incredibly right-wing. The religious stuff is incredibly right-wing.
What did you surround yourself with, then, when you were on the reservation?
Books, books, books, books. And what I didn’t know then, and I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary or experience to know, is that I was really reading the work of about a dozen generations of white American liberals.
What were you reading?
Jane Austen, who is not actually American. [laughs] You know, The Great Gatsby. I should say, not white American liberals. White liberals. Shakespeare, Dickens, Whitman. Stephen King. Even travel books, encyclopedias.
Do you visit the reservation often?
Not since my dad died. He died ten years ago, and I have a hard time being home. I mean, my mom and my siblings still live there, but I meet them in Spokane. I have a lot of pain associated with the reservation. I am completely public and out about the fact that Indians should be fleeing reservations. We’ve completely forgotten that reservations were created by the United States government as an act of war. I think they still serve that purpose. It’s Stockholm syndrome.
You have said that leaving the reservation was a pivotal moment in your life. In an interview with Bill Moyers you said that you felt like an “indigenous immigrant” and a “spy in the house of ethnicity.” I love that. Can you tell me what you mean by that?
Everybody thinks I’m half of what they are. I get treated in every way imaginable, from positive to negative. People will say things to me and react to me in every way possible.
Like the question of “What are you?”
What are you? Where do you come from originally? [laughs]
What do people think you are?
Asian, Central American, South American, Puerto Rican, Italian, Cuban, Middle Eastern, Pakistani, Siberian, Russian, Slavic. It used to really bug me. It used to really anger me to not be seen as Indian. I realized that came out of this sort of insecurity — my identity was so based on immediately being perceived as being Indian. But the thing is, in order to immediately be perceived as Indian, you have to talk, act [“Indian”]. You have to wear all these cloaks. You have to conduct yourself on such a surface “Indianness” level that you become a cartoon character.
Did you feel that way when you first went off to college and left the reservation?
I felt like a minority. I mean in eastern Washington, I am completely identifiable as Indian. I guess the question as an ambiguously ethnic person is, how to protect yourself. You know, you’re driving into a region and you think, “Okay, how likely am I to be confused for a member of the race that’s most hated in this region?” I think it’s the shit that white people don’t even consider. Often they don’t even think that it’s real. And it’s often the thing that makes brown people so enraged and irrational, too. So it has this double effect, you know — white people deny it, and brown people base their entire lives on it. It’s so damaging in all sorts of ways …
Also, there’s a certain kind of magic in [race]. It’s often about people trying to connect. It’s like that brown-people head nod in the airport — when you see somebody, you make eye contact with somebody who is something, and you’re something, and you may be the same something, so you do that little head nod at each other. Like, “Yeah, I acknowledge the fact that we may be of the same brown-skinned race, or maybe not, but I’m gonna nod my head just in case.”
A lot of your work is about despair, but I feel you never get a sense that your writing is didactic. You talk about these subject matters but kind of interspersed with moments of real comedy and hilarity. What is that like for you as you’re writing?
I don’t worry about it. I don’t preplan or preconsider whether something is going to feel didactic or not. And I think I have been didactic, and I’m perfectly fine with that. I have a specifically political and social ambition in my work. I’m happy when anybody reads my book, but I especially love that my career has become multigenerational, and really happy that all sorts of brown boys are into my books now. I get “This is the first book I finished” or “This is the first book I ever loved.” I hope I am the gateway book.
I don’t think there’s a typical writing process for you, is there?
Oh God, no.
Do you have any rituals or habits?
Nothing. I think ritual prevents you from writing. If you don’t have everything in place, I think that ends up being an excuse. The more complicated your writing ritual the more likely you are not to write. So no, I am promiscuous.
How about deciding between poetry and prose? Do you ever start out with a poem and later decide that it would be much better as a short story — or the other way around?
It used to be more clear-cut that way. It really came down to the mechanics of the thing I used [to write]. I started out writing on a typewriter. If the poem went past one page, it turned into a story. When I pulled that sheet out of the typewriter, it really made the distinction between poetry and prose clear to me. But now that you don’t do that, you keep writing. I think it’s far more blurred and unpredictable.
Do you read your work aloud?
Oh, constantly. All the time. I am not a formalist, a typical formalist, but I use a lot of rhyme — all of traditional forms — and repetition. So certainly the music of it is something I am very interested in.
Do you have readers or friends you show your work to?
Most of my work, I don’t. I have a few friends that see my early stuff, but by in large, no. I am pretty isolated that way. I don’t hang around, you know, a writing group. That makes me flinch. Or hanging around writers talking about writing. That makes me flinch. If I were a plumber, I wouldn’t want to be talking about plumbing all night. My friendships revolve around my other interests.
This is a broad question, but who would you say has been a big influence on your life and work?
Always teachers. And not even necessarily English or writing teachers. One of the reasons why I’m good at public speaking is my experience with the Future Farmers of America in high school. I did debate. I did parliamentary-procedure contests and debate within Future Farmers of America. It was performance. You would get a randomly chosen topic and a specific set of motions that you had to display. It was sort of theater, in a way. And you would be debating and discussing these issues as well at a mock meeting — bureaucratic theater, essentially. I’ve always been in the school plays, too. On the res, I was always the narrator and the lead role.
When you went to college that’s when you got into poetry. And you credit one of your professors at Washington State University.
Yeah, Alex Kuo. He’s a poet. He’s incredibly brilliant and extremely liberal and politically minded. He was born in China and grew up in the US, in Boston. It was my first experience — I haven’t ever put it this way before — it was my first experience with an immigrant. I’m just realizing that.
What was that like?
Well, he was the first Chinese person I knew. The first Chinese American I knew, the first poet I knew. He was this perfect combination of all those liberal things I was reading about on the res, in the form of a second-generation Chinese American.
The first class [of Kuo’s course] he assigned the work, and a week later we met. Before the second class he read five pages of my poems, and they were the first five poems I had ever wrote. He came in and he took me in the hallway. He asked me what I was doing with the rest of my life, and I said, I don’t know. And he goes, “Well, you should be a writer.”
Are there any topics or themes that you don’t want to face, or stay away from?
I stay away from specific tribal and religious ceremonies. I have characters who participate in that stuff, but I never go inside the sweat lodge, so to speak. I think it would be playing a character. And number two, Native religion is so economically exploited that I have no interest in being a part of that, either. And it’s a cliché by now, Native spirituality. It’s all that. And it’s just bad writing.
When did you start Tweeting?
Maybe it’s been a year and a half. It’s entertaining. It’s a monologue. It’s so funny. Some people get so mad that I don’t have conversations with them. They get all Twitter fundamentalist: “There are these rules!” It’s another forum for me to put ideas that people can agree with or not, but I have no illusions about whether I am going to change anybody’s mind about anything.
I support all the people who fight these bans, but on the individual level, all they do is benefit me. It’s a lot of free publicity. The philosophy, you know, is dangerous. The people who try to ban one book, they’re not trying to ban a book. They’re trying to ban imagination.
When do you know that you’re absolutely done with pieces of your work?
When my publisher tells me that they have to have to be turned in. It’s really deadlines. I abandon things. I turn them in because I have to.
Is there anything else that you want to accomplish still as a writer?
Hopefully to get better. I want to write a book that surprises me. And in doing so, surprises everybody else. Something I never thought I was going to write about, or was capable of doing. I don’t even know what that is. Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Susan M. Lee Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.
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I recently read Lindsey Woo’s contribution to a series of writings about feminism and race on NPR’s CodeSwitch blog. In her piece, Woo discusses the frequent exclusion of Asian American women from conversations concerning race in the context of feminism and poses an important question, one I ask myself often: who is considered a woman of color?
I talk about race — a lot. I constantly initiate discussions with friends and colleagues, and find that even in our supposedly postracial world many still deem race to be an uncomfortable subject. Although I believe attempts to have a dialogue about race are important, another part of me does it for purely selfish reasons. These conversations help me to figure out my own relationship with race. They validate and invalidate my opinions, and give me a better understanding of where I fit as a light-skinned Latina.
My mother’s family is self-proclaimed “white trash” with roots in Tennessee. My father’s family is from the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán. In the 1960s, my dad crossed the border into the United States, where he lived for twenty years as an undocumented immigrant before obtaining citizenship around the time I was born.
The legacies of two vastly different cultures live inside of me. One side of my family has former Ku Klux Klan members. The other has undocumented immigrants. Holidays meant a feast of fried ham, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese that was served alongside mole, tamales, and flan. Backyard barbecues featured Johnny Cash and Vicente Fernandez, Patsy Cline and Ritchie Valens. The blending of cultures is a beautiful thing, but it can also be confusing.
Being biracial means growing up with a keen understanding that your identity is not yours alone. It is something others feel entitled to foist upon you, including your friends and family. You carry the weight of racial tensions that not only exist in society at large, but also among those you love.
My mother’s family stopped talking to her because she had married a “wetback.” I didn’t know my maternal grandfather for the first eight years of my life because he refused to see me. According to my mom, when I was born he took to referring to me as a “mutt,” so she shielded me from his racist epithets and maintained a safe distance.
After members of my father’s family settled in the Los Angeles area from Mexico, they made many jokes at my expense. They told me I could never be a “real” Mexican because my mom was a gringa, but my dad insisted I proudly tell the world, “Soy Mexicana.” He now teaches the same to my biracial nieces.
It’s hard when neither side of your family embraces your blended ethnicity, and it set the stage for the identity crisis I’ve been having for twenty-eight years. As a Latina whose pallor matches my blonde-haired, blue-eyed mother, I don’t feel comfortable with the label “woman of color,” although it is often ascribed to me in the context of my work. In some ways my reticence is the product of not having the emotional bandwidth to defend my right to use the term when I come up against backlash, particularly from people of color.
I understand the discomfort some darker-skinned women feel when a light-skinned Latina identifies as a woman of color. After all, we are often the recipients of racial privilege that comes when we are (mis)perceived as being white. At the same time, my dark hair, ethnic features, and clearly Latina last name all place me squarely in the category of being raced. I try very hard to understand my place on the racial continuum, but knowing which side I’m supposed to be on isn’t always clear. And it is always shifting.
My identity has been shaped by my experiences as a Latina feminist. I resisted my father and brothers’ violent machismo, and also make sacrifices for my family that most white feminists don’t understand. Yet, fellow Latinas tend to have a deep appreciation for my family’s complicated love. Despite my skin color, identifying as a white woman was never an option for me.
A recent Census Bureau report shows that children in America are more racially diverse than they’ve ever been, and the fastest rate of growth is among children who are multiracial. Mixed-race people are rapidly becoming the new norm, but we still live in a world where we’re expected to choose and neatly conform to just one thing.
I often wonder if Chicana writer and feminist Cherríe Moraga, who was born just ten miles away from my hometown, underwent an exploration of her own identities that’s similar to the one I’m engaged in now. A woman of Mexican and Anglo ethnicity, Moraga is one of the foremost authorities on race and feminism in America. Her story gives me hope that I will one day reach the place where I no longer allow others to question my identity, the place where I determine for myself who I am and who I will be.
Fifty years after the March on Washington, we are well versed in the visual cues of the civil rights era: grainy black-and-white photos and footage of peaceful protesters being accosted by angry mobs, beset by dogs and water cannons, and enveloped in plumes of tear gas. John Lewis, one of the giants of the civil rights movement, not only lived those scenes of protest and violence — a beating by Alabama state troopers fractured his skull — but he worked to make sure the struggle led to real political and cultural change by the era’s end.
Now Lewis and his collaborators offer a new visual take on the protests and the people behind them, in the graphic novel March, an illustrated (and unconventional) autobiography of the civil rights leader and longtime member of Congress. In a way, the book brings Lewis full circle: Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a comic book published in 1956, helped inspire him to take up the nonviolent cause as a teenager.
There’s a long tradition of autobiographical comics, from Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor to Jonathan Ames’s The Alcoholic to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (the basis of an Academy Award-nominated animated film). But Lewis is not just any other thoughtful voice of retrospection. One of the original Freedom Riders, he was a founding member and then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was instrumental in organizing some of the era’s most important sit-ins and other nonviolent protests against segregation — including the March on Washington. (The youngest speaker that day was Lewis, then twenty-three years old.) He also played a prominent role in another of the era’s iconic demonstrations, the Selma to Montgomery march, the source of the scars he still bears on his head. Lewis went on to a career in politics, representing Georgia’s fifth congressional district since the late eighties and now serving in the House Democratic leadership.
Lewis, we learn in March, was an unusual child. His parents were sharecroppers, and Lewis grew up on a farm in Alabama. As a boy, he raised chickens, not only giving them names but even devising a makeshift incubator because his family couldn’t afford the one in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. His youth in the forties and fifties is captured in a series of panels: Lewis as a boy honing his sermonizing skills before a congregation of chickens (his first ambition was to become a preacher). Lewis as a young man first hearing King on the radio and becoming inspired to embrace nonviolence. As the narrative of Lewis’s life advances, March reminds us of the events transpiring in the background — from Rosa Parks’s civil disobedience to the killing of Emmett Till to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down school segregation — all of which shaped Lewis’s worldview and led him and others down the path to protest.
The best dramatizations carry a sense of dread, or anticipation, even when you know the outcome. Like a train slowing a moment on the tracks and, by degrees, gaining momentum, March crackles with a sort of inevitability. We watch as Lewis and other young protestors in the Nashville Student Movement, a nonviolent direct-action group fighting against segregation, subject themselves – and each other – to a series of humiliating tests, preparing them for not only the harsh words, but also the physical retaliation they were likely to encounter. As Lewis points out, “For some, it was too much.” The hardest part to learn, he adds, was “how to find love for your attacker.”
Once the book settles into the sit-ins by Lewis and his fellow activists in downtown Nashville, you’re firmly locked in — you’re enlisted. And, here, really, is where Nate Powell’s art takes off.
When the sit-ins begin, the artwork becomes darker, the pages soaked with dark ink, the lines sketchier, shadowy, conveying the pain and fears of the nonviolent protestors. Powell’s style is somewhere in between the worlds of photorealism and animation, the images at times seeming to move on the page. It’s detailed enough that each face is distinctive from the other, with exquisitely rendered backgrounds undoubtedly reflecting Powell’s research on the downtown buildings of that era. His use of black and white is not just an artistic choice; it intensifies the action by making the reader slow down to see the details.
Part of a planned trilogy, March ends right after Nashville Mayor Ben West announces to the press and a group of protesters at city hall that he will support the desegregation of lunch counters. On May 10, 1960, six downtown stores, the book tells us, “served food to black customers for the first time in the city’s history.” We’re left with scenes of black Americans sitting at a lunch counter some three years before the historic March on Washington.
In August, Lewis spoke at the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, sharing the podium with former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama. The last surviving speaker of the original march, Lewis noted that the country still has “a great distance to go before we fulfill the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.” And yet, he said, change had come — as March itself suggests, in its introductory depiction of the inauguration of the country’s first black president. “Fifty years later we can ride anywhere we want to ride, we can stay where we want to stay,” Lewis said. “Those signs that said ‘white’ and ‘colored’ are gone. And you won’t see them anymore except in a museum, in a book, on a video.”
Sometimes I hear people saying nothing has changed, but for someone to grow up the way I grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama to now be serving in the United States Congress makes me want to tell them come and walk in my shoes. Come walk in the shoes of those who were attacked by police dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks, arrested and taken to jail.
March invites the reader to walk in the shoes of Lewis and the many other men and women who sat down, picketed, and marched for justice, without violence and with a great love for their attackers — and for their country.
Cornelius Fortune is a journalist whose work has appeared in theAdvocate,Citizen Brooklyn, theChicago Defender,Yahoo News, and other publications.
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“Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter.”
Thus began Sojourner Truth’s famous 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Or, at least, this is what we’ve been led to believe by suffragette and abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage. It’s her version of Truth’s extemporaneous oration that became popularized in American history.
According to one of Gage’s accounts of what happened at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, she granted Truth the opportunity to speak at the podium, in spite of protests from white suffragettes. They feared the emancipated slave would detract from their cause by bringing up the issue of slavery. Instead, in Gage’s telling, Truth acknowledged “negro’s rights” only in passing and focused on the rights of women.
To some, this account may come across as a heartwarming moment of white feminist solidarity in the face of race-based tensions. To others, like me, the story serves the suffragists’ agenda too neatly. A white woman gave a black woman a platform to speak, and she used that platform to support the cause of women who had just moments before called for her silence?
Historians have poked many holes in the accuracy of Gage’s retellings. In fact, much of what we’ve come to know about Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech may have been fabricated by Gage.
When #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen tweets began flooding my Twitter feed on Monday, I thought about the historical revisionism of Truth’s speech. Although a part of me wishes I still believed the rousing and monumentalized story, knowing the dubious purpose it served makes the words feel hollow. My enthusiasm for feminism long since waned in the wake of critiques from people who have been marginalized in the movement.
More than a 150 years after the delivery of Truth’s speech, many white feminists have yet to internalize the seminal theories contained in works like The Combahee River Collective Statement,This Bridge Called My Back, and the INCITE! anthologies. Our refusal to accept the perspectives of women of color regarding our shared history means white women continue to resist, dismiss, and ignore the same critiques when they are made today.
I was humbled by the magnitude of feminist history that was contained in Mikki Kendall’s spontaneous #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen tweet — its force enough to ascend the hashtag to trending in a matter of hours. But my delight quickly turned to dismay when the responses sought to divorce the hashtag from its historical context. So, I paused to remind myself that we all have different points of entry into conversations about race and feminism. After all, my own public introduction was something of a mess.
I stumbled into web-based debates about race and feminism in 2007 by writing a shamefully indelicate review of Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism. My utter lack of humility was justly greeted with a rather harsh smack down from a number of influential feminist bloggers, including Valenti. With arrogant amusement, I fired back and people came to my defense.
Except, the exchange that occurred wasn’t happening because anyone wanted to defend me. It was happening because I’d unknowingly expressed similar critiques to ones that had been lodged long before my review. Because I’m a white girl it didn’t have to occur to me that there might be discord between white feminist and women of color bloggers. And once I did see it, I thought all anyone needed from me was a declaration of solidarity.
The thing is, my actions weren’t really about being in solidarity with anybody. They were about doing what I needed to feel good about myself, to be seen as a white girl who “gets it” when it comes to race. I thought differentiation and distancing from the “bad” white feminists would show that I understood what people of color have been saying for all these years. That was a selfish mistake. I should have realized that the work to end racism isn’t going to be comfortable — for me or anyone else.
Many of the responses I’ve seen to #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen criticize the hashtag for its supposed alienation of white allies, angry tone, and defensive divisiveness. But those allegations overlook the context from which the hashtag emerged. Hugo Schwyzer debacle aside, Mikki Kendall is not the first woman of color to point out that some white feminists claim to speak for all women while excluding the concerns of a great number of them. So long as white women dictate a revisionist feminist history, just like Frances Dana Barker Gage did with Sojourner Truth, the conversation about race and feminism will continue its circular path.
#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen wasn’t meant to be an invitation for white feminists to participate in a discussion about white women’s privilege — again. It was intended to be an outlet for a woman of color’s frustrations. It turned into a clever litany of injuries women of color have endured (and do endure) due to the actions (and inactions) of white women whose solidarity has been illusive. The anger some women of color have expressed through #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen is justifiable in the face of white women’s consistent and systematic exclusion of what they say is critical for their survival.
Sometimes I think I’ve got this social justice thing on lock, but in truth, none of us do. We’re all fumbling through it and doing the best we can, hoping it’s better than those who came before us. In some ways, it is. That doesn’t mean we can allow ourselves to be seduced into complacency in order to meet our own needs and desires. It means that, although we are learning, we have the responsibility to be vigilant about how far we have left to go — and move things forward.
Whether we own them or don’t own them, our respective privileges are still there. We may not be able to eliminate their power, but we can mitigate their capacity for damage by making different choices. Sometimes those choices will be uncomfortable, but the discomfort is an indication that we are living into change. The discomfort is an opportunity to do something better that we have done it in the past. The discomfort is necessary for growth.
We all have the need to feel we are being heard, but it’s not enough for white folks to simply stop speaking and listen. We also have to learn to see and empathize with other people’s points of entry. We have to be honest about our own motivations when doing antiracist work, especially when we muck it up. We have to lift while we climb, but resolve to do this outside of our own cliques and communities. We have to stop denying that putting our own self-interest first is hindering collective progress.
In the process of learning to live with and learn from our discomfort, we may just find the means for healing.
I was never confident that a jury comprised almost exclusively of white women would convict George Zimmerman of second-degree murder, but last night’s not guilty verdict still left me breathless. I had wanted to believe that my worst fears weren’t true, that I am not living in a country where a man can get away with killing a seventeen-year-old child because that child is black. But the verdict sent a clear message: black people’s lives are not valued in America.
This case has been rife with racial tension from the beginning. It took Florida police six weeks to arrest George Zimmerman after he shot and killed Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. Their inaction brought to mind similar examples of legal injustice in US history, and many began to draw parallels between Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till.
During the summer of 1955, two white men brutally tortured and shot fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi because he whistled at a white woman while buying bubble gum at the local grocery. The white woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, enlisted the help of his half-brother, J.W. Milam, and the two men kidnapped and murdered the black child before dumping his body into a river. In a gross miscarriage of justice, which many credit as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, both men were acquitted by an all-white jury.
When I learned the story of Emmett Till’s lynching, I didn’t understand how it was possible for these two men to get away with murder. After all, America’s foundational philosophy is “liberty and justice for all.” But when a victim is black, and the accused and their jurors are white, accountability can be elusive. We learned that lesson fifty-seven years ago, and we are still learning it today.
The morning before the Zimmerman verdict was reached, journalist Aura Bogado appeared on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry show and pointed out that, although the Zimmerman trial is not about gender, the all-female jury is getting a lot of attention in the media. “It’s actually five white people and one person of color,” Bogado said. “They’re seen as women; their whiteness is not seen.”
This sentiment was echoed by Maya Wiley, president of the Center for Social Inclusion and another commentator on that episode of the show. Wiley pointed out that Zimmerman’s lawyers played to the racial fears they believed the white women jurors would possess by calling Olivia Bertalan as a witness for Zimmerman. Bertalan, a white woman, conveyed her appreciation of Zimmerman’s efforts to help her feel safe — including giving her a dog — after two black teenagers broke into her home.
“They called a white woman to talk about the two black men who terrorized her in her home,” commented Wiley. “That was to reinforce to white women on that jury that [they] need to be afraid [of black men].”
Mamie Till, Emmett Till’s mother, understood the climate of race-based fear in a time of Jim Crow laws and legal segregation. To help white people understand the brutality that had been inflicted upon her son, she insisted on having an open casket at the funeral. Mamie Till is reported to have said, “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.”
The world did see what was done to Emmett Till. Photographs of his bloated body and severely mangled face were featured in newspapers internationally.
Unlike Mamie Till, Trayvon Martin’s mother wasn’t given the courtesy of choosing whether her son’s dead body would be displayed publicly. Instead, MSNBC and Gawker made the choice for her. (Warning: This link contains graphic violence.) As a result, millions of people have seen Trayvon Martin’s lifeless body. Like the photographs of Emmett Till, the image haunts me.
After the verdict was announced, many Americans took to Facebook and Twitter to express their devastation, outrage, horror, and shame. Some pointed out the hypocrisy of Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict in comparison with last year’s verdict in the Marissa Alexander case. A 31-year-old, black mother of three, Alexander was found guilty of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for firing a warning shot to scare off her abusive husband as he threatened her. No one was harmed, except Alexander and her children; she received a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty years in prison.
Amid talk of possible rioting after the verdict was reached, blogger Jay Smooth made this comment on Twitter: “The fundamental danger of an acquittal is not more riots, it is more George Zimmermans.” His comment made me wonder whether they were saying the same thing nearly six decades ago when Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam got away with murder in Mississippi.
No parent wants their son to be the next Emmett Till. Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin now share Mamie Till’s pain of losing a beloved child in a national tragedy. After the verdict was announced, Tracy Martin tweeted this emotional response: “Even in his death, I know my baby is proud of the fight we, along with all of you, put up for him.… Even though I am brokenhearted, my faith is unshattered.”
For me, I will continue fighting until it is no longer the case that a man can walk free after killing a black child in America. Hoodies up!
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, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin make the case that a relatively obscure Oglala Lakota chief called Red Cloud was actually the era’s most fearsome and effective Indian leader, a brilliant tactician of guerrilla warfare who a decade before Little Bighorn had beaten the US Army in a bloody conflict known as “Red Cloud’s War.”
, came out two decades ago, the 
, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Alexie has also delved into film, writing the critically praised screenplay for 
. His latest work is 
, a collection of poems and short prose published last November by Hanging Loose Press.
