Infinite Clef to Insanity

In Alice Walker’s short story “The Flowers,” a little girl happens upon the decomposing body of a lynching victim while she is out picking flowers.  Walker contrasts the light tranquility of the girl’s walk with the savagery of her discovery; suggesting that to be a black child is to never be shielded from the “adult” horrors of racist dehumanization. As the girl lays down her wreath of flowers Walker’s narrator declares that “the summer was over.”   Summer’s metaphoric end signifies the brutality of a segregated nation in which black children are already othered, racialized, and criminalized in the pools, parks and recreational spaces that define white childhood innocence.

The videotaped assault and sexual harassment of 14 year-old Dajerria Becton by a rampaging white police officer after a pool party in McKinney, Texas makes it clear that it continues to be open season on black women and girls.  In the video officer Eric Casebolt grabs, straddles and violently restrains Becton while she is lying face down on the ground in a bikini.  Ignoring her cries of pain and anxiety, he sadistically sits on her back while handcuffing her.  Casebolt then pulls a gun on a few young people who attempt to intervene.  Some of the good white citizens of McKinney have reportedly praised Casebolt’s thuggery.

The assault of Becton is an enraging reminder of the particular brand of sexual terrorism black women routinely experienced in the Jim Crow South at the hands of white law enforcement and ordinary white citizens.  In her important book, At the Dark End of the Street, Danielle McGuire chronicles how institutionalized sexual violence informed black women’s civil and human rights resistance.  Even as they were eclipsed in the mainstream civil rights movement by charismatic black male leaders, black women activists like Ida B. Wells, Recy Taylor, Claudette Colvin and Endesha Mae Holland drew on their experiences with sexual terrorism to galvanize black women organizers around the nexus of gender, race and class apartheid.

The McKinney incident underscores how even within the context of “recreation,” “normative” gender boundaries that automatically “feminize” young white women do not exist for young black women.  Little black girls can never occupy the space of carefree, feminine innocence that little white girls expect as their birthright.  They can never rely on the damsel in distress image to “rescue” them from American-as-apple pie state violence.  According to the African American Policy Forum, black girls are suspended six times more than white girls and routinely vilified as aggressive menaces in school classrooms. It goes without saying that a black male police officer captured on video brutalizing and sitting on a bikini-clad teenage white girl would have been lynched before he returned to his precinct. It is tacitly understood that the scantily clad bodies of teenage white girls are sacrosanct cultural commodities; publicly off limits to law enforcement, privately available for the consumption of white heterosexist patriarchy.  Within the public domain these are the bodies that must be protected at all costs—from potential violation by predator white men and from the imagined, ever present “threat” of violent encroachment by men of color.

Socialized to see black women as chattel, thuggish police officers play on misogynist white supremacist stereotypes to justify their criminality under the color of law.  After months of community agitation, last summer’s heinous videotaped beating of Marlene Pinnock, a middle age African American homeless woman, by a white California Highway Patrol officer led to his firing.  Nonetheless L.A.’s black female district attorney has not seen fit to file criminal charges against him.  And the recent conviction of white female LAPD officer Mary O’Callaghan for assault—rather than involuntary manslaughter—in the death of 35 year-old Alesia Thomas is an anemic substitute for justice.

Joker - DC Comics

Warm-Blooded Fish: The ‘Opah’ Is First One Ever Discoverd

Fish are known for being seemingly cold-hearted creatures, swimming the cool depths of our vast oceans. But now scientists have discovered the first fully warm-blooded fish, and it’s making them question how much we really know about marine life.

A team from the NOAA Fisheries describes in the journal Science the opah, or moonfish, which circulates heated blood throughout its body much like mammals and birds, giving it a competitive advantage in the cold ocean depths.

Afro-Juba: Osborne Macharia On His Kenyan Schoolyard Game-Inspired Photo Series

UNARMED BLACK MAN FATALLY SHOT BY VOLUNTEER COP

Eric Harris, who was unarmed, died an hour later after what Tulsa, Oklahoma police officials called a “mistake.” According to several news sources, On April 2nd, the victim had reportedly tried to sell a gun to undercover cops and fled on foot as they attempted to arrest him. A video camera captured him, wearing dark shorts and a t-shirt, running up a sidewalk. Harris was quickly caught and subdued. That’s when a 73-year-old volunteer patrolman, Robert Bates, “allegedly” reached for his Taser, but grabbed “accidentally” grabbed his gun instead. According to Tulsa World, Bates, who has donated thousands of dollars worth of items to the Sheriff’s Office since becoming a reserve deputy in 2008, is a Tulsa insurance company executive. He was working undercover as a member of the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office Violent Crimes Task Force. The World reported that “Bates is classified as an ‘advanced reserve,’ which means he ‘can do anything a full-time deputy can do.’” 

Rather than immediately render aid, the officers held Harris down by his neck as a deputy screamed, “Fuck You! You shouldn’t have f*cking ran!”

As Eric Harris lay mortally wounded, face down on the pavement, he begged for his life. “He shot me!” Harris shouted. “He shot me, man. Oh, my god. I’m losing my breath.” 

“F*ck your breath!” the officer yelled.

Capt. Billy McKelvey said the officers were not aware the suspect had been shot, despite the unmistakable sound of the gunshot noise. Bates “made an inadvertent mistake,” he said.

The New York Daily News reported that no further investigation is planned, unless requested by the sheriff’s office.

Source/ Source / Video

Nine small original paintings are available for a special price of US$60 in my Etsy shop!