First Human: An Intersectional Human Rights Blog

He was brash. Reckless. Audacious. Walking right in front of police officers like he had nothing to fear. It was lunacy. His chest out, invincible. It was a defiance of the highest order. Utterly insane. How could he have cared about his own life, his own future, doing such things?

It is impossible for me to see the murder of Laquan McDonald through anything other than my Palestinian eyes. It is impossible for me to see that cop shoot him, an unthreatening young man, sixteen times, mostly while he lay still on the ground, without thinking of the countless Palestinian boys similarly gunned down by Israeli police and civilians alike. It is impossible for me not to feel the same simultaneous feelings of sadness, anger, disenfranchisement, and a glaring absence of shock.

Of course, some in my Palestinian community (especially here in America) will refuse to see the connection. They will say we are nothing like them. They are wrong. But what is more concerning than their disagreement with me is their animation in doing so. Why do some Palestinian/Arab/Muslim Americans protest so loudly when the Palestinian struggle is lined up next to that of black America? What underlies that fervor? The possible answers to those questions scare me deeply.

OPINION 

By Zemdena Abebe

I was in the midst of a lovely concert at the Stade Mamadou Konate organized and sponsored by Orange (a French telecom provider) here in one of France's former colonies, Mali, when the news of the Paris attacks surfaced. I was trying to share a video from the concert on my social media page and asking for translations, when the singer on stage sang "Franci...."( a Bambara word for France) going on to say something else I couldn't decipher.

I asked my Malian friend what was being said, wondering, is the singer hailing and praising the former colonial master? Is she singing, "I want to go to France"? What could she be saying? Is she saying all of these things because the event was organized by a French company and she felt pressured? After all, whoever feeds you controls you, right?

These were random thoughts going through my head when I stumbled upon the news on my timeline about the horrendous act that took place in Paris. At first, I read 30 deaths, the numbers escalated as time went by and so did the plethora of information and condolences coming from all over the world. It seemed like the world was at a standstill. It felt almost like when the 9/11 attacks occurred, a similar eerie feeling.

Like something evil to the whole of humanity had happened, almost like an alien attack from Mars or something. To my mind that had been fixated on chilling on a Friday night, it did not make sense; it did not add up, it had not sunk in yet. I was still confused as to what exactly happened. Thus I was really in a hurry to go home and see what made the Paris attacks so unique, so horrific, so disturbing, so shocking, so relevant, so painful, so unimaginable, so pathetic, so ruthless, so VISIBLE.

On my way home I decided to stop at a local bar for food (maybe it's the shock that made me very hungry. Had dooms day arrived?) I was astonished to see a room full of handsome men, a few women, mostly drinking and chatting, some smoking and some old school hip-hop playing in the background. I was digging the vibes despite being a bit uneasy at the lusty yet smile-coated gazes that were undressing my womanhood.

It was in an effort to avoid the male gaze that I looked up, and that was when when my eyes landed on the flat screen TV. It was showing live coverage of the Paris attacks! That astonishing rare circumstance caught my eyes! It was bewildering. I have noticed that clubs and bars usually play a backdrop of music videos on their plasma screens but never in my nightlife experience have I seen the news at night being shown in a bar/restaurant.

After all, aren't those places where one tries to escape the gruesome realties of life, particularly the news and the pain of this world and find solace in music and heal oneself in the complete sense of temporary freedom? At any rate, all I wanted to do was to go home as soon as possible, charge my phone and dig deeper, unravel the truth of the matter at hand and deconstruct the doom that had occurred against humanity.

What on earth had happened in Paris? What was the most defining factor? What made it capture this amount of attention? Why was it any different? What had happened that seemed to unify the world in mourning? Was my suspicion true: was humanity under threat? Why did the aliens choose the 'romantic' city of Paris, of all places in the whole wide world?

I don't expect much from Facebook and Western media. After all, they are there to promote their agenda, interest and cause. Western media (new media, social media included) is a tool for Western imperialism. I cannot support these imperial power structures that loot my continent, I am not attracted to its power when the rape, devastation, agony, blood and tears of my people make up its power.

There must be a clear distinction between forces of the state apparatus and the people. The same power created by the control, dehumanization and oppression of the African and our resources. The white world lives off Africa, profits from our deaths so our lives mean very little to them. But have we forgotten our own lives? Does our death mean nothing to our own selves? In fact, we are conditioned to believe that our lives mean very little; so do our deaths.

All of this goes back to the mentality of the slave. We see ourselves as less than human. The years and years of dehumanization by slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, western education, western media, western production of knowledge and worldviews and the African's own sense of not staying alert have made us devalue our bodies both alive and dead. The forces of transnational white supremacist capitalist patriarchy exploit, dehumanize and erase a people but so does our ignorance.

White lives matter more than our own. I am not here for selective empathy! Looking at my timeline on all of my social media pages it becomes apparent that a lot of us still don't get it and that makes me very sad. How can we exclude ourselves from the compassion we seem to show?

The scenes happen almost daily: Stabbing, shooting, sometimes a lynching. (There is already a learned public debate in Israel: Lynching, for or against?) After that the body lies on the road, sometimes covered and sometimes not, the curious and the security forces looking at it as someone looks at a hunting trophy, a few of them taking selfies as a memento.

In one of the most shocking pictures spread on the social media in the past few days, we see an armed settler in Hebron, wearing a kippa of course, standing smiling and amused in front of the body of a Palestinian whose blood is flowing from his head. The blood is spreading on the road and the happy settler is taking pictures with his cell phone, to show the kids at home.

The expectation that one of the curious passersby looking at the bodies will also think about what he sees there, and in particular about who he sees, is not realistic. These are moments of anger and lust for revenge, and these are days of incitement, in Israel too, and the bleeding body on the street is not the body of a person; it is, in the eyes of many, a carcass.

Do black people really make everything about race?

I work at a child therapy center where there are very few black patients. This could be due to income or lack of knowledge of services, but I suspect the main reason is the stigma and general unwillingness to address mental health issues in the black community. But I digress, that is a discussion for another time.

There is a 14 year old black kid in one of the units. If you spend just 15 minutes with him, you will most likely hear a reference to the color if his skin at least half a dozen times (but probably more). It's not like the political brother who is always addressing the issues of his people. It's like "I need to be obnoxiously funny and constantly point out the color of my skin in order to get a laugh and make myself feel less insecure". He is always pointing out things that are, in reality, completely unrelated to his blackness.

Now, I am (or try to be) the last person to silence someone of color when speaking of their color. But I can honestly say this kid is the first to truly bring the "black people make everything about race" line into my head. And it makes me think what a fine line it is between educating children of color on past and present issues of race, and reducing a child to a color. It is possible to dehumanize someone to that point: Am I a person, or a color? Because if you simply see a color when you look in the mirror, you've done half of the bigots' job for them.

BY SHANNON  NOV 02, 2015.

Hi everyone! My name is Shannon and I am currently working with the Metropolitan Community Church to get out the vote on Proposition 1.

Opponents of the proposition are focusing on its protection of trans individual’s access to bathroom facilities as a way to sway voters which is very unfortunate because 1) Every person protected under Proposition 1 is worthy of protection under the law and 2) Proposition 1 protects a wide range of Houstonians regardless of race, age, sexual attraction, gender identity, national origin, family status, or military status.

Prior to taking a Texas government class,  I had no idea that people in the military were not welcome to some jobs in Houston or that single parents were discriminated against in the Houston housing markets. These are just few groups of people who are being protected under Proposition 1.