Angry Black Lady

I am very tired right now. I’m fine. I appreciate all the supportive messages I’ve been getting, deeply. But I am tired. 

I’m tired of explaining the central thesis of my argument, which is that Bruenig is a ringleader for harassment. I get it: The idea that someone could get fired for insensitive or flippant things they say on Twitter is concerning. It concerns me – I post rude things all the time. But the question I’m most often being asked, or the point I’m being made to prove, is that Bruenig “bears responsibility for his followers.” 

Breunig says mean things to and about people, he casts people as morally bankrupt and “enemies,” but that’s not real “harassment” – and any “real harassment” that follows isn’t his responsibility. That is the line I’m hearing. That is the line Bruenig’s friends are currently publishing to excuse his actions. 

It does have some bearing in truth. I can tell really aggressive people in my feed to calm it down, and I can publicly request that no-one use me as a pretext to commit harassment, and I have, but some of them will persist in being aggressive with people, or trying to use me as a way to start Twitter fights. I tend to just block those people, so that they can’t have the illusion of my approval any more. I can take reasonable steps, but can’t control their actions. 

The problem with Bruenig, however, is not “failing to control people’s actions,” or even a failure to take reasonable steps. It’s a specific pattern of directing, legitimizing, and even incentivizing dangerous harassment. This is the part people keep saying they don’t understand or believe – and not all of them are saying it in bad faith. So this is what I’m going to try to lay out here. 

Trust me; I would not be contacting people, publicly casting this person as dangerous, connecting them to acts of sexual, gendered or racial aggression, endangering my career, or endangering my safety, if I were not very, very convinced, after extensive research, that it were true. 

I don’t give a lot of content warnings, but some of what I’m about to quote is violent, or sexually aggressive, in ways I’ve had trouble un-hearing. So if you have trouble with that, feel free not to read. 

Dear White Racial ‘Progressive’

It’s past time you and I had a chat about some things. There’s a lot of taking for granted that seems to go on between us and it needs to be addressed. The past few years have been a real test for us. Well, in many ways, all of American history has. But my own experience with you has been under deepest scrutiny as I’ve watched what feels an endless stream of news stories of black lives not mattering to the American public or its institutions. What I have to say does not apply to every white progressive in America. Some folks really do get it. Some get it with little effort, their capacity for sympathy being finely tuned in rare fashion. Others get it with more effort but not for the sake of scoring the achievement of ‘getting it’ but for the sake of doing the tough work morality demands. Then there are the rest, which I fear very likely comprise a significant portion of white liberals, possibly the majority. A lot is at stake these days and I find my own ability to modulate my own feelings about what goes on in America under an unreasonable strain that seems unfair for me to bear alone. So I will say what I have to say and you will judge for yourself if I am really speaking to you. And if I am, and you feel under the strain of shame then we will then be doing the tough work of ethical living together.

Truth be told, I often wonder about you. I grew up thinking, well, actually, taught to believe, that in all the world, the White Racial Progressive was the best friend a guy (or gal) colored like me could have. Many white folks are able to get by most of their lives without ever really having to deal with black people. Us on the other hand? Not possible – especially if we want things like jobs, a bank account, green lettuce, or a nice car to drive. So, things being what they are, there seemed to be two options available to me: the outright racists – the Bull Connors, David Dukes, the plain vanilla white supremacists – or you. It always seemed wise, again, so I was taught, to embrace you. Clearly, I had to choose so between you and the outright racist, and you were the better choice because you tolerated me. But funny word that. Tolerate: allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of something (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference. Hmph. I wonder, my ‘friend’ if you’ve ever been tolerated. I think not. Only one of us really has the power to ‘allow’ the other to exist.

Now, I can see you frowning and tense and I hear you saying: but I’m one of the good ones, the real deal – I really do like black people! My words feel to you a barb, maybe a betrayal given your good intentions. Fine. Then answer the following: why don’t you send your kids to the public schools while insisting to the city that the school experience must be fair and just for everyone? Why don’t you live across the street from us leveling all our property values making all our economic opportunities filled with genuine potential? Why are you happy to trot out the fine goods from the local boutique gourmet deli for you friends but hesitate in patronizing local black businesses to cater your party? Why is it that every time I mention diversity, a dozen other identity groups that have never had it as hard as blacks suddenly seem to have complaints as urgent as ours? Why is it that the freedom to protect oneself is a live debate for you but an open and shut case for me, a matter of public safety the minute blacks arm themselves? Isn’t the constitution supposed to recognize equal rights? Why is it you are so eager to don a button of sympathy and solidarity and support when foreign whites are murdered by zealots yet our own homegrown zealot, Dylan Roof, killed those nine similarly innocent black churchgoers and your wardrobe that week expressed all the sympathy of a cold stone? Where’s your “Je suis Freddy Gray” social media profile image? Right.

So, you can see why you get the side-eye from me. Your words point in one direction, but your actions often go in another. This is why the outright racist, evil as she or he can be, is also a source of comfort. There is no confusion about where I stand in relation to the racist. We can try to talk out our differences but if at the end of the day the racist insists on hating me then the solution is clear, we must go our separate way and accept being enemies. You, on the other hand, are a source of confusion and anxiety. You never cease in reassuring me that you’ve got my back, but that I need to be patient. Institutions don’t easily change; people don’t always see things like you do; these things take time. Patience: an ability or willingness to suppress restlessness or annoyance when confronted with delay. Do you see what’s happening here? I am meant to suppress my anger as you allow me to exist, as I wait for what is rightfully mine: human recognition under conditions of basic decency and the full force of my rights as supposedly secured by the law. I remain waiting but I’m done being patient and I’m done with your toleration. We are at a crossroads and you’d like to know just what I want from you.

Here it is – your realization that calling yourself a progressive or a liberal is not the same thing as being decent. Rather it is a label, a garment easily draped over oneself and shown to the world to indicate your style.

Actually, there are variations on the style, “progressive.” Of my least favorites is the Totally Down white American. When you meet me you sometimes want to show me and tell me all the things that make you “down”. One time you were busted for smoking weed in public and spent a night in jail; you have memorized most of Tupac’s raps; you once went to Brooklyn and simply adored ‘the culture’; your momma and poppa once marched in a march having to do with something blacks were marching for; you want to have me over for dinner. And there will be other cool people there! And I show up and all your cool friends are white. But I thought you really liked black people…

But Totally Down is not the only flavor self-proclaimed white progressives come in. Another least favorite comes in Such A Shame. This person has lived most of his or her life having had nothing to do with black folks. Often, this person has lived a quite privileged and charmed life. Mommy and daddy held jobs in good ‘liberal’ professions like the academy or maybe journalism with a little bit of the medical field in there somewhere to help pay the bills. They taught you to care for your fellow humans as brothers and sisters as they packed your bags for Exeter. Maybe you did go to a state college, but you know, a good one like University of Virginia or Berkeley, and there you thought about the unfortunate after you pledged your frat or sorority. You spent a summer teaching in the “inner city” and writing a paper on it for your favorite sosh prof. Then you graduated, married and had a child and, wonder of wonders, live in a segregated suburb where now neither you nor your child have black friends (except for me, that is). And as you tsk tsk about the news stories of black child citizens murdered by the police, your middle class parenting leads you to constantly indicate to your child just how special s/he is and you begin to make preparations for your child to start competing in the race for the very tip of the top they already occupy so you send them to more segregated activities completely oblivious to the fact that more likely than not you are effectively raising and training my son’s future enemy, that you are raising a person who will grow up thinking that his or her own destiny is important enough to climb ladders even if they mistake a neck for a rung.

Notice, whether you are a Totally Down or Such A Shame white American I don’t want you to do anything for me. Really, most of the time the best thing you can do for me is to not try to do anything for me. I’m good, thanks. Rather, I want you to do something for yourself. I am asking you to stop worrying about how you look and start worrying about who you are. I need reliable people around me, those for whom the role of decency is a not part to be played but a life lived according to the tenets of sympathy and care. That kind of person neither tries to signal their supposedly progressive pedigree nor mistakes easy condolences for moral aptitude. Rather, that person embraces the toughness of moral demandingness, realizes the radical awkwardness that can ensue when a wrong judgment is made, and possesses the courage to face it without the facile aid of good intentions, which are necessarily future oriented and open-ended, but rather with actions born of ethical commitment. Such a person realizes that America’s history threatens to doom us all: me for being brown, thus often endangered or at risk; you for being white and making you too easily complicit in the destruction of brown life chances and sometimes of life itself. I can’t quite say that you are one of the downtrodden; your privileged lot in life is certainly unfortunate in certain morally relevant ways but certainly no misfortune – you can turn yourself around much more easily than I can overcome the obstacle that is white passivity and complicity.

Though overcoming that obstacle is what me and many other brown folks do. Maybe that is the thing I resent (though maybe not the most). I resent that I must work around, through, and over, while you merely work and sometimes not even that – your ‘progressivism’ is rarely a disincentive to benefit from the goods your skin tone helps secure. For example, take the public good of trust. See me? I walk into a store and it’s on everyone’s faces: is he really here to buy? Can he afford this stuff? I walk into an academic conference: is he a serious thinker or does he ‘just’ write about race. I play my music loud out of my car: how does he afford to have a car like that? Maybe it’s drug money. I walk into a Starbucks: the young white guy taking my order still calls me ‘man’ or ‘bro’ despite the fact the suit I am wearing cost more than two weeks of his salary and that he called the white guy in front of me in sweats and a t-shirt ‘sir’. Yes, this is all about trust. Whether the people that engage, avoid, confront, shirk away from, enjoy, loath me in these situations really trust that I am in fact, just like them – a person who may or may not be in the mood to buy an overpriced scarf; a scholar who thinks the world of ideas extends beyond dead white men, or living ones, for that matter; a music lover who indulges the privilege of a nice car; a gentleman and not a ‘bro’ that enjoys a pumpkin spice latte like the last ‘sir’.  And that is really only one of the many, many public goods I must struggle to secure while you simply choose whether or not to recognize that it has always been profitably within your grasp.

Last year (actually, the last 400 hundred) was not an especially good year for black folks. You and I were both reminded how disposable black lives can be. In at least one case, racism was the straw that literally broke a back. This is a new year. I have nothing against those who make resolutions but that is not really my goal here. Why? Well, nothing about me will change so much as continue to entrench itself within me: the will to live a good life. I don’t want you to make a resolution either. The things the moral life require of us are not year-long projects to be assessed under the influence of a half-drunken reverie around our friends’ coffee table at the end of twelve months. But I do want your resolve, the resolve to face yourself, to look inward rather than perform outwardly. Make no mistake about it. My will to live the good life can take many forms. It can be defined by the soft compassion of brother- and sister-hood or it can be shifted by the hardness of resentment and regret. Ultimately there is only so much I can do to bring you closer to me. Indeed, there is only so much I should do – there are other worthwhile things in the world I intend on enjoying; your reticence, insecurity, and weakness is not among them. If it is ultimately your position that being closer to me is uninteresting to you then I can happily accept that. If you stand far from me then I really know where you stand and, like I said, that is much more comforting to me. Otherwise, leave your Tupac verses and Teach For America stories behind and talk to me as friends do, bearing the risks and rewards of mutual trust and sympathy. If you are one of the white folks to whom none of this applies, do not be cross with me, for you are not the ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ person that is my target here. Rather, you are something more enduring – a person for whom racial decency matters for its own sake.

With attentiveness and hope Chris Lebron From New Haven, Ct January 3, 2016

So many of my notifications on all forms of social media this morning are talking about this woman:

Rachel Dolezal, head of an NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, has been posing as a Black woman for years and her whitewhitewhite parents put her on Front Street yesterday.  

The first thing I did when I saw the notifications was open up some links to read about what happened and on every single article, this showed up:

Over and over and over again

Those comments are from Buzzfeed, but they’re everywhere, and largely being made by cisgender white people.  The opinion I really want is from a Black trans person, not Becky from North Platte, Nebraska who has no frame of reference for either of those groups.

Until Janet Mock or Laverne Cox gives me something to work with, I want to attempt to explain that while race and gender are both social constructs, they don’t occupy the same space with regard to perception or flexibility.

The Nebraska legislature is preparing for a vote that could override Republican Gov. Pete Rickett’s veto of a bill to repeal the death penalty. The measure, which passed earlier this month with a bipartisan and veto-proof majority, would also mark the first time in more than 40 years that a deep red state has opted out of capital punishment.

I just want to talk about female directors as well: Gina Prince-Bythewood, Amma Asante — we have to celebrate these women. [Selma] is about embracing the vote, utilizing the vote. Support these women, vote for them at the box office

David Oyelowo accepting the NAACP IMAGE Award for Best Actor for Selma

David Oyelowo directed by women filmography

Purvi Patel is the first woman to be sentenced in the US under a feticide law. When pregnancy outcomes are criminalized, women are the first to be punished.