I'm home from a holiday visit with family members who were gathered in Philly, where I shared the joy my cousins have found. They have adopted a young boy out of foster care. He is three, going on four. He is black. He will now have two well-educated middle class parents to raise him. He will live in a "safe" community with them in a mid-west college town environment. But now that I am home again, I am gripped by melancholy. I cannot avoid my musings'ones that I did not want to share with these two new parents, though I am sure they are just as aware as I am. They are both sociologists and quite familiar with the political and social implications of blackness, or brownness and maleness in our world. They want the best for him, as parents are wont to do. Far easier to smile, hug and imagine a bright future for him.
Three distinct yet entwined themes are twisted in my thoughts this morning. The first thread is Newtown and the immense sadness and outpouring of grief for those lost in our latest national tragedy and shame. The second is the stark reality that every day some young black or brown child will die mourned by only a few, and not as part of a national paroxysm of grief and outrage, but simply missed by family and school friends. They will be, however, equally dead. The third is about fear, and in many ways it is the thread that ties in the other two.
Even "fear" as I think about it has multiple faces. Why do I hear the drumbeat of fear every time we attempt to stir the waters of a national conversation about gun violence? Every time, I hear one more lament about "it shouldn't have happened here," or "why should innocents die in safe communities," I visualize the other side of the coin. The light and the dark, and dark is surely those unsafe mean streets of urban climes filled with crime and drugs and young black and brown men around whom no one is safe and isn't it true that they are always killing each other? They are dangerous thugs and gangsta gang members in hoodies with baggie pants and surely they must be constrained from invading the safe white spaces of America. Even black middle class parents buy that in hopes that an escape to the burbs or a gated community will somehow fade away their blackness into suburban acceptability. It didn't work for Trayvon Martin's parents.
I wonder why I am not supposed to feel automatic fear when I go to the suburban shopping mall or movie theater near me and see a young white male all dressed in black or camouflage pants? No knee-jerk reaction. No nervous shifting away of eyes and quickened step. They are not invaders. They are normal, and only when atrocity beckons are they then different'but a different singularity. They are mentally ill. They are not part of a slavering wolf pack. So there is nothing really to fear from them. It's simply your bad luck if you happen to fall victim to an anomaly. The press and social theorists from the left and right cry out, "It's the guns. It's lack of mental health services. It's the video games. We must do something! "
And so we hold a national day of mourning, flags are at half-staff and we reanimate the debate on how to preserve safety from these lone wolf aberrant young white men. The NRA has its standard response: "It isn't about the guns. Arm the teachers." The Left counters with strident cries for reform along with stricter gun laws to lock up the "criminals." Yet when were these young white men ever criminals? Surely none of them were graduates of the university of the streets or school-to-prison pipeline.
Nothing in any of this addresses the fear and who we are really trained to guard against if "they" should spill out of "their place" in South Philly, Southside Chicago, Harlem or East L.A. Tim Wise explored this in Race, Class, Violence and Denial: Mass Murder and the Pathologies of Privilege, but it got lost during the fractious debate between those on the left who believe in responsible gun ownership and those who calling yet again for reform of the Second Amendment and others who want all guns to go away.
The view from the darker side of the street, though given light this last year by the death of Trayvon Martin, has devolved into yet another debate around "Stand Your Ground" and "Castle Doctrine," veering away from the highly uncomfortable yet obvious fact that Trayvon would be alive if he wasn't one of those to be feared. His death is complicated by the unheeded cries of those mothers of the feared who have seen their children's lives extinguished by those employed to "serve and protect," not simply self-appointed vigilantes like Zimmerman. Any attempts to delineate this thread in the racial warp and weft are often derailed'which is what happened when shanikka wrote, Hey America! Can you please stop killing our (usually) innocent Black male children now?, in early December. There was a flurry of "But ... but ... but ... what about black on black crime?" which was not the focus of her piece. She tolled the bell for those young black men, and when 12 days later Adam Lanza's slaughter of lambs stopped the nation, her cry was buried under a tidal wave of righteous anti-gun outrage, which obscures the culpability of those that no one has argued should not be armed'the police.
I am a weaver, and as such should be able to follow more than one thread and see in the end product a whole cloth. Yet I am afraid that no matter which individual thread I may focus upon those who fail to pay attention to the red flag waving in front of our faces will yet again follow trail markers leading no where.
I am tangled in a quandary of variables. Constantly forced to pluck individual threads and follow them through the maze that at some point must lead to an opening which we call "change."
Race, class, privilege. Guns, violence, crime. Innocence, guilt, justice.
An impossible task to lay out or unravel on one morning's loom. There is no nice, neat finished product to present. There are no easy solutions and where each thread begins, criss-crosses or is knotted off is not always visible.
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