In the universe there is a substance that has long eluded direct detection by astrophysicists and astronomers, but which has a profound effect upon the universe: Dark Matter:
Dark matter is non-luminous matter that cannot be directly detected by observing any form of electromagnetic radiation (light), but whose existence is suggested because of the effects of its gravity …
Yet, dark matter is not completely unobservable. We just have to look for its effects on visible matter. We have to make the effort to see what has previously been unseen.
Understanding these invisible particles is now considered a priority among cosmologists and other scientists who study the universe. There is another form of dark matter, however, that much of white America does not wish to look at or understand, the dark matter of the existence of African American lives and the manner in which they have suffered, and continue to suffer death, imprisonment, discrimination, poverty and indifference to their plight at the hands of their governments, local and federal, and their fellow citizens. As Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, arguably the greatest American Novel of the last century, has his fictional narrator state at the beginning of the novel:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
In the hagiographic history of America, a pastiche of iconic images and legendary tales that fill the pages of our history books, books predominately written by white men, black lives have often been omitted except in those rare instances where their existence is necessary to highlight the exceptional qualities of our nation, or to be more precise, the exceptional qualities of white America. So, African American slavery is acknowledged in order to elevate our civil war to a moral crusade to end it. Lincoln, with his genius for speechifying, became an American immortal. The (mostly white) abolitionist movement and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and an abolitionist ‘champion’ are granted heroic status.
Meanwhile, Frederick Douglas, the escaped slave, self-educated man, tireless advocate for black America and one of the prime movers for ending the institution of slavery, is shoved into a shadowy corner, along with the the sacrifices made by black Union soldiers who literally fought and died for their freedom, though they’re efforts were little regarded at the time and even less rewarded.
Martin Luther King Jr. is (now) viewed as a saintly figure. As the best known leader of the Civil Rights Movement, the words from his greatest speeches are frequently quoted today, even by conservatives who would undo his legacy. MLK is viewed as both a symbol of racial progress and the catalyst for the enactment of the civil rights laws of the 1960s. Those laws that supposedly enshrined the principles of justice and equality in our justice system, and (according to many Americans) embedded them into the fabric of our society.
Glossed over and elided are the many, many violent murders of black men, women, children and civil rights workers, the bombings of black churches and the brutal treatment of African American teenagers peacefully protesting their subjugation by the laws of Alabama by racist police forces. Not to mention our prior history of Jim Crow, lynchings (both judicial and non-judicial), domestic terrorism by white supremacists and the massacres by whites of African American communities in Tulsa and Detroit, among others.
Why has so much of this, our history, been ignored, or worse never taught to the children of America in their still segregated schools? Why do so many white Americans act surprised at the recent rash of murders of African American men, women and yes, children by the very police that are supposed to insure their safety. Why do so many whites contest the notion that the mass incarceration of blacks is a de facto violation of their equal rights under the law?
None of those white people are among the people here, you might respond. They are Republicans and racists and conservative whites. We, on the other hand, are the good ones. We rally around our black community members in times of need. Heck, the Orange Satan went out and signed up Shaun King, a black activist, specifically to highlight these continuing injustices, these symptoms of a society beset by individual and institutional racism.
Fair enough. So, to you, the good guys, let me pose some different questions. Why did so many of us celebrate the removal of the confederate flag from the grounds of South Carolina’s Capitol, figuratively high-fiving ourselves and lauding, in part, our efforts, when the impetus for that action was the slaughter of nine innocent black people in a church at the hands of a young white man who hoped to incite a race war? Why has there been such an uproar here on this blog over the actions of Black Lives Matter to vocally and visibly challenge the Democratic candidates for president who appeared at Netroots Nation 2015 on this last Saturday?
All right, I can hear some of you saying, that’s enough. You, Steven D, are simply trying to stir up more trouble. Bernie Sanders has a great record on supporting the black community and human rights for all people. The Black Lives Matter activists hijacked the event at which he and Governor O’Malley spoke. Their tactics were uncalled for and disrespectful and did a disservice to their cause. They acted as if we, their allies, were their enemies. They had no fucking right to do that!
Here’s my response. I waited a few days to post anything about this matter because I wanted to think about what occurred carefully, and not just react reflexively. Because, to be honest, my initial response was one of defensiveness. I support African Americans. I’ve written diaries about the unjustified and frankly criminal shooting and other killings of black men and women at the hands of police forces across the country. I support Bernie Sanders. I’m one of the good guys, dammit! How dare you attack my motives and good faith.
But that was wrong of me. In the words of the another fictional character, Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird (one whose reputation some feel was unjustifiably sullied by the posthumous release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman):
“First of all […] if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
And that is the trick, isn’t it. In fact, I believe it’s a trick that cannot be pulled off without a great deal of time and effort, more effort frankly than most people want to make. And even then, the skin you end up walking around in is, at best, only a simulacrum of that person’s life experiences. It’s an approximation, and far from a complete appreciation of what they feel and why they feel what they do.
Let me give you an example of what I mean.
My wife was a rising mid-level executive in a major (at the time) Fortune 500 corporation when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June, 2006. Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers which can afflict someone. She was fortunate. They caught it early. Her cancer had not metastasized, and her tumor was confined to her pancreas. She had the surgery to remove her pancreas and spleen, followed by joint chemo and radiation treatments, and then a second course of chemo. She’s been cancer free these last nine years, and that is a blessing. However, she didn’t escape unscathed. The first chemotherapy drug stripped the myelin sheaths from her neurons (think of myelin as similar to insulation around electrical wiring), effectively short circuiting many of the connections between the various regions of her brain.
The effects came on gradually, but were continuous and the damage was cumulative. A woman with a brilliant mind suddenly couldn’t find the car keys she was holding in her own hand. She kept forgetting appointments, missing deadlines, and thus, she took early retirement and disability. She lost the ability to concentrate and focus on mundane tasks. Even reading became a chore because it took so long. She couldn’t remember what was told to her verbally because her short term memory stopped making – well, memories.
And god forbid she found herself in what we now call a “stimuli rich” environment. Her mind could no longer filter out extraneous information to focus on what was essential. Any place a crowd gathered became a living hell for her. Add to that peripheral neuropathy, which includes severe pain and muscle cramps, crashes when her blood sugar dropped too low (she often forgot to give herself insulin shots), nausea and other symptoms of Type 1 diabetes (they took out her pancreas, remember).
You can imagine the frustration and the fear and panic and sheer overwhelming sadness she felt at these losses, yes? No, no you can’t. I know you can’t because I still can’t, and I’ve been working on it for nine years. I thought I understood her based on my own health issues. I knew about sadness. I knew about chronic conditions that force you to retire early. I knew about constant pain, nausea, anger and frustration, but in truth I had no clue how she felt, what she endured. It’s taken a long time for me to begin to reach some comprehension of what she goes through on a daily basis, and that only happened after I stopped assuming that I understood, when I stopped trying to be helpful and after I started listening more to what she was telling me.
I had to learn to hear her, really hear her, because sometimes she said things I didn’t like. Sometimes her anger and anxiety boiled over and she lashed out at me. No one likes to be the focus of another person’s anger, but she was justified. I wasn’t listening to her as well as I should. I was always looking for a “fix” to her predicament instead of just letting her vent. I kept repeating the same mistakes in interacting with her that she told me were unhelpful.
I’ll be honest. There was an element of arrogance in my reaction to her. And arrogance can be a big problem. Only after I had been humbled was I able to begin to listen, listen and learn. And when I did I learned a lot.
I discovered that for month after month, year after year she constantly feared she would die at any time. I discovered she feared losing her mind, of being institutionalized for the rest of her life. I learned her anger and shouting at me was often a defensive response, an attempt to stop me from overloading her with too much information, too fast, information she could no longer process like she once could. I had to discover her all over again, and find the woman I loved underneath all the trauma she suffered and still suffers.
I cannot pretend I really know what her days are like. I can feel a slippery, illusive empathy for her struggles, but that my friends is not the same thing as understanding. At it’s best, it allows me to focus on her needs and not my own. And that is the key, isn’t it?
My wife is also Japanese American. I have some slight knowledge of racial prejudice from my experiences with her and my children over the years, but nothing as damaging or traumatic as any black person I’ve ever met. Police do not stop my kids for driving while Asian. I don’t have to warn them how to act around white people or white police officers, because – hey – with their Northern European/Japanese genes they aren’t seen as dangerous. They aren’t targeted as a threat. Neither is my wife. Rarely does anyone use racial slurs to their faces. Yes, they are stereotyped by many white people (they even joke about it), but its not the same stereotypes with which black people are burdened.
I do not live in a community with many African Americans. Police cars do not troll the streets of my neighborhood looking for excuses to arrest my children or me. The lawns were I live are green and lush, not dead, brown and full of broken glass like the Cincinnati projects I visited in 2004 when I canvassed for John Kerry. The people here have jobs and enough food for their kids. They don’t have that million mile stare, that utter look of something beyond hopelessness that I saw in the eyes of the people whose doors we knocked upon, people who sat and politely listened to the silly white people telling them how important it was to get out to vote when all the voting in the world had done next to nothing to improve their lives.
So, I’m not going to pretend I understand the anger and frustration and fear and emotional trauma that being black in America evokes. I don’t. But I do know that reacting defensively to that anger is not useful. The folks of Black Lives Matter are attempting to stop an assault on not only their liberty, not only their freedom, but their very lives. An assault enabled by both the entertainment and news media. An assault carried out by government bodies local, state and yes, even federal.
For years black people have suffered out of the sight of white people’s eyes. Whether that was done intentionally, out of malice or indifference, or whether it was done out of ignorance makes little difference. All these years while so many whites have been telling themselves the race problem was fixed because of what happened fifty years ago, these same daily atrocities have been ongoing. It is only now that we have the means to record them, and spread the news of them through other avenues than the narrow choke point of traditional media, that we have suddenly seen the people we made invisible, through our own neglect, our own ignorance, our own lack of understanding. And by we, I mean whites of every political and religious conviction.
The easy path is to reject the display of justifiable anger we witnessed on Saturday, to dismiss it, to refuse to listen to the message the voices of Black Lives Matters are trying to have heard. To feel disrespected. To get defensive. To whitesplain to them how wonderful we are, we few we happy few good, liberal, progressive white people.
But that would be a mistake. The same mistake I made with my wife.
Look, I appreciate that there will be those who feel offended by what I’ve written, or that I’m re-hashing matters that are better left alone. But BLM is not going away. African Americans will still be here, whether we choose to engage with them on their terms or not. We, the white community can remain in the dark and reject them, or we can come out into the light and listen, really listen to their grievances, their experiences, their feelings, their stories.
For my money, I think it’s the better way to go. Condemning them gets us nowhere. Not listening to them, thinking we know what their problems are or that we have the solutions for them hasn’t worked out very well for any of us, black or white. For the dark matter of America’s racism and racial conflict that I speak of here affects all of us, and though we may refuse to look at it, it will still pull us down, individually and collectively. That’s how gravity works.
Hey if you look at this and go TL;DR I’ll understand.
But read it anyway. 🙂
So. They are the masters and no one can talk about anything unless they OK it? No. No. No.
They need to APOLOGIZE for their rude behavior. They have done a grave disservice to their cause. Was it really about their cause? Or was it about power?
Are they still the black KKK today?
No, Sanders needs to call Elon James White and Goldie Taylor and apologize to THEM for not showing up and being a big baby by cancelling. EJW and GT had nothing to do with the BLM protesters in and of themselves, or their movement. Sanders scheduled with EJW and GT, he cancelled. Sanders needs their vote; this is how he does outreach?
No, Sanders needs to call Elon James White and Goldie Taylor and apologize to THEM for not showing up and being a big baby by cancelling. EJW and GT had nothing to do with the BLM protesters in and of themselves, or their movement. Sanders scheduled with EJW and GT, he cancelled. Sanders needs their vote; this is how he does outreach?
Did Sanders know EJW had nothing to do with the BLM protestors that interrupted the NN15 event? Because there is still some crossing of wires going on. Who exactly had meetings set up with Sanders that were supposed to take place after the NN15 event? EJW and GT? The BLM folks? All of them together at one big meeting? Because, as I’ve said before, no politician would put up with what went on Saturday, especially if there was supposed to have been a meeting afterwards. No one likes to get shown up. I bet you certainly don’t. Also, the BLM folks just painted a big target on their back. How and why? Obviously Clinton found out about it. Do you think any event of hers is going to get interrupted in such a manor? Of course not. And that’s not even getting to in the manor of the security she’ll have at any event. Also, while I don’t agree with everything in it, I’ll just leave this here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/20/1403663/-What-BlackLivesMatter-Can-Learn-From-Immigration-A
ctivists
Excellent points made in that diary. (skipped the comments because I’m bored with and tired of hearing all the white apologists for the BLM action at NN) But why use the immigration rights movement for example of effective actions? (diarist did properly note that the locus of the power to change what exists and requires change differs from that of BLM)
My question to the BLM activists that were at NN would be, “Why are you emulating teabaggers and not being guided by the masters at organizing protests? Do you have any clue why we know and speak the name of Rosa Parks? Why MLK chose one woman, Parks, and not the large list of woman that we ordered to give up their seats on buses in the two years before Parks was so ordered?
I saw K-Drum over at MoJo posted a list of what their demands are. Some of those demands are only things the various states can do, not something done at the state level. So Governors and state legislatures also need to be focused on.
It’s not either/or. Federal laws and funding of federal and local LE are integral to the state/local laws and enforcement.
Protest actions are fine and should be a mix of local, state, and national actions. However, if that’s all they’ve got, they won’t get very far and any progress will be slow to materialize.
A smart diary. I would just add, on the economic front, a link that was posted to the Washington Monthly blog. I recommend it.
http://loicwacquant.net/assets/Papers/CLASSRACEHYPERINCARCERATION-pub.pdf
It hits all the points.
Thank you. It’s chock full of important and solid facts and presents the full picture. Not just the selected bits and pieces offered up to the public and that likely has contributed to the creation of this monster. An industry that ranks third in national employment.
Just saw a recent paper confirming the fact that prisoners were the poorest in their environment BEFORE they went to jail, regardless of race, sex, and level of education.)
Shouldn’t we also note: What’s Wrong with this Picture?
Has it been supply or demand driven?
Pretty scary.
I see it as a clear affirmation of racial equality: Assholes come in ALL colors. And it’s nothing but stereotyping if anybody thinks that “all”, or even most, black people agree with what they did.
It was a symbolic action. The symbolism of that action was valid, yes. That’s what Steven is saying. However, it was totally the wrong time and place for it. And a cheap shot to boot, because that was the easiest possible venue for something like that.
Best I’ve read on the subject so far, by a wide margin. Bravo Steven.
KDrum took a look at their website to see what they actually wanted and posted the bullet points. Then he sensibly asks what gets demanded of progressives all the time, what specific legislation are you going for here? What will be done by executive order?
Absolutely your best so far.
But one nit. Can we make the effort to write #blacklivesmatter . I keep reading BLM as Bureau of Land Management.
will read this, but it is no less coherent than the rest of the crap people are writing about this, so here are three past events/movements:
Al Sharpton/Tawana Brawley
I was a New York resident at the time. The “movement” in support of Tawama did things like shut the subway down. It featured some liberals writing things almost identical to this piece. See also the line from Annie Hall about Woody Allen’s father saying it was OK that his maid was stealing from him, because she was black and had enough trouble.
It was, of course, all bullshit. All made up. That Sharpton remains a credible figure is kind of amazing.
It’s primary accomplishment was making people mad, and making the self described civil rights leaders look terrible. And making certain ‘progressive whites’ look like they had no spine.
They didn’t – that was one of the lessons – and it led straight to Bill Clinton and Sister Soujah(sp).
Act Up
This movement really pissed me off. Again, I was a New York Resident. They did outrageous things. They were disrespectful.
How many lives, exactly, did Act Up save? 100,000? 200,000? Does anybody really think SSM would have came as far as it did as fast as it did without them.
But you can go back and read liberals talking about how their tactics did nothing but alienate potential supporters.
So what is the difference between the two? Larry Kramer and crew would have blown that meeting up if they thought they weren’t being supported. Hell, Kramer was so much trouble he got thrown out of his own organization.
Act UP knew who to piss off. They didn’t tolerate fake supporters and meaningless political rhetoric. They wanted action, and they could in very precise words describe what that meant.
BUT I DON”T EVER remember them disrupting ally’s events. To be sure they were damn loud if you were their enemy, but the knew what they wanted.
They were loud. And Aggressive.
And smart.
The 60’s: what do these people want.
It is a refrain in Todd Gitlin’s excellent book on the 60’s. An insult directed at dumb white liberals. The joke, of course, is that what the demonstrators wanted was a revolution. Saul Alinsky says somewhere that the ‘movement’ should never give reasonable demands.
But Gitlin came to understand that the revolution wasn’t worth having. No one wanted a revolution. Act up’s demands were in the end pretty specific: they wanted funding for research, and they wanted the FDA and the CDC to get off their ass.
And maybe that is the difference between Act Up and Al Sharpton, and a lesson for everyone. Maybe the issue isn’t interrupting Sanders, maybe the issue is having an idea of what you want from him. A point of view with ideas that can actually be executed on.
Put differently, a list of things you want Sanders to do.
Act Up always knew what they wanted the politician to do.
Indeed. How do you use the federal govt to rectify a local disease that is unaddressed? Seen too many posts repudiating the idea that voting locally matters.
Voting locally doesn’t matter if there’s not anyone to vote FOR.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/07/ferguson-election-results_n_7020472.html
While you wait for the federal govt to get around to it.
Allow me to extend your excellent point about Act Up.
It was formed in 1987. Two years after Matilde Krim and others, including Elizabeth Taylor, formed AmFAR. Same goal but the activists in the two groups were from different demographics and they expressed themselves in accordance with who they were and where they’d come from. Act Up was noisier and not willing to accept “can do” slow progress. They were the “should do” faction.
There is no single issue organization wrt to state violence against Black Americans that is analogous to AmFar wrt AIDS. However, there are multi-issue organizations, activists, and politicians that have long included this issue in their work. NAACP, ACLU, SPLC and politicians such as Bernie Sanders.
Did Act Up disrupt AmFAR gatherings, efforts, etc. to appropriate the spotlight for themselves? They did storm the 1989 Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal and drew attention to themselves in the process, but that wasn’t the goal which was to get a seat in the room and not to disturb or shut down the proceedings. On that measure they succeeded and without disrespecting the Conference or the formal members. The three groups respect each other and their individual successes towards the shared goal.
IMO, BLM demonstrated their protest organizing naivete and ignorance at NN.
of Act Up’s message is that the medical community needed to listen to people suffering from the disease.
That message could be very specific. The relationship between Kramer and Fauci, adversaries turned allies, is perhaps the most interesting relationship of the insider and the outsider since King and LBJ. It exists because Kramer knew what he wanted, and when he finally got the attention of people he was actually constructive, not disruptive. He had to raise hell to get into the room, though, to be sure.
Act UP did, after all, break apart because Kramer thought it had become too successful.
There are lessons to lessons the entire left could learn from Act Up, and I hope someone in BlackLivesMatter tries to sit down with Kramer. He sure as hell won’t tell them to be quiet.
But he might be able to tell them how to win.
The case of the ’89 Montreal Conference is a great example, which I had completely forgotten about.
Act UP did, after all, break apart because Kramer thought it had become too successful.
Or because Kramer recognized that the primary work of the organization was done?
Shouldn’t that be the goal of all activist organizations — to succeed and then fold up the tent and not turn into another sclerotic institution in search of a mission? Institutions that suck up ever larger shares of contributions to fund its existence. i.e. March of Dimes Not that the issues taken on after polio was eradicated in the US aren’t worthy but they aren’t unique to MoD and lack the laser-like focus on one disease that was why it was created in the first place. (If we’re honest, government was fully capable of doing what MoD did, but Congress would have accused FDR of using government funds for this because he was a victim.)
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I’ll give you an easier answer to our weekend with Bernie: Hillary Clinton cannot attack Sanders directly. She can’t call him an old, out of touch, white man because she’s an old white woman with what has been described as hundreds of millions in the bank due to her hubby’s inside connections in the corridors of power.
Clinton has lots of money and lots of connections in the media who will take any incident involving Sanders and send it through the echo chamber. She can afford surrogates to disrupt a “grassroots” gathering. She can afford her ally at Salon, Joan Walsh, to run four “what’s wrong with Bernie and blacks” stories within the last 24 hours.
But the real tell is that one of the right-wing rags this morning called Sanders a Nazi, and an article in “Inside Russia” this a.m. announced that Sanders is merely a tool of the oligarchy and under the sway of Israel, two different flavors of Jew-baiting.
If you remember the dog whistles from 2008 you know how the game is played. Sanders is getting swiftboated and racebaited.
This is the full-court press, and it happened after a couple of weeks of very good news on the Sanders campaign trail.
Like I say, Clinton can’t attack him directly.
Lots of 2003 echoes. While some of that existed in 2007, it was weak tea until Clinton’s shock loss in Iowa then her team ramped up into high gear. Too little, too late? Possibly, but with Wall St and Hollywood divided, they didn’t have the whole cudgel at their disposal.
What a terrible tale!
My heart goes out to you and your wife.