Alice Cole knew when rain was coming. With an uncanny accuracy, she could point to the sky and predict its blessings and its curses.
She used to say she could feel it in her bones. There was something about the way her feet swelled ahead of an afternoon summer shower, something about a left hip giving her trouble just before the first clap of thunder. She never wore a watch, but Alice could tell you the time with near precision by the way the sun hung in the sky.
I learned a lot at my grandmother’s knee about the phases of the moon, about tasting dirt to see if it was right for planting, about human frailty.
In the days following the Zimmerman verdict, as Alice was prone to do, I paced the floors, hovered over stewing pots and sat out on my back porch long after nightfall watching the clouds dance in the sky overhead. Feeling a twinge in my own proverbial hip, I waited for the coming storm. It was brewing somewhere in the distance, I knew.
Rain is inevitable.
There were those of us who accepted the verdict, if not the judgment, as a beacon in the night urging us toward change. Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, we believed, deserved a more honorable “home going” than George Zimmerman’s defense lawyers afforded him. It was not difficult to see through the coded language, to hear the shrill wheeze of the archetypal dog whistle, and understand that it was Martin on trial, rather than the hapless Zimmerman.
But this case was, and had always been, about more than what happened that night near Retreat View Circle. For mothers like me, mothers of African-American boys, we saw ourselves reflected in Sybrina Fulton’s eyes. Our sons were her sons. I watched Tracy Martin testify to hearing what he believed were his son’s last cries. With a suddenness I cannot explain, I was stricken with grief. It was as if the bottom of the world dropped out.
Quite honestly, I was not surprised by the verdict. My heart was already broken well before the jury instructions were given. I am not a lawyer, but the ability to take hold of and embrace our collective humanity, no matter how vigorously I chased after it, escaped me. I could not forget the frailty of humankind.
The very notion that shooting and killing and unarmed an black boy was deemed fair to so many people, people who clamored for ways to defame him, to castigate his parents, was maddening enough. They held Trayvon up as the very embodiment of all they believe wrong with black America. That somehow, because of his clothing, because of his skin, he deserved to die.
A conversation about black men and boys was immediately ignited. I, and others, wanted to know: What kind of free is this? We wondered where that fundamental sense of fairness was hiding itself. Peaceful protests were mounted in 100 cities across the country. We took to the streets, bridges, federal and state houses demanding an end to the genocide. Available data tells us that justice does not always bend toward justice based on the race of the shooter. Rather, the race of the victim is all too often the determining factor in investigation, prosecution, conviction and sentencing.
Profiling, you see, does not always result in a physical death. But every instance represents a spiritual death for the society that allows it to persist.
Those of us who study the justice system understand well the institutionalized inequality that lurks in its corridors. We watch uneasily as the name of New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly, who defiantly defends “stop and frisk,” is bandied about as a potential nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
A long walk home from Fruitvale Station
My knees were unsteady as I walked into a showing of Fruitvale Station. Some 90 minutes later, rocked with grief, I said crying and mumbling as the movie credits began to roll. You see, I remember asking my own mother — just as Tatiana Grant did — “Mama, where is Daddy?” I was five when my father was murdered. My brother Christopher was shot to death when we were 22, the same age as Oscar Grant. Grant was fatally shot in Oakland, CA by a BART police officer on New Years Day 2009. The oldest man in my family is just 27.
I pushed open the doors leading to the street. Soused in tears, a catch in my throat, I started the long walk home. “When will this stop?” I asked out loud to nobody. A fellow moviegoer touched my shoulder and said, “Are you okay, Sister?”
I pressed forward, nearly walking into the path of an oncoming car. I stopped, found a waiting bench and let myself fall onto its metal slats. I had been on television and radio every day, doing my damnedest to keep the complex issues confronting black men and boys in the forefront. Asking this America to look beyond cruel and vicious stereotypes, to step out from behind shrouds of bigotry laced with preloaded statistics that say everything about correlation, yet nothing about causation, seemed worthless in that moment.
Until now, it has been easy to cast away the ramblings of Sean Hannity. It is almost second nature to ignore Rush Limbaugh’s misogynist, hyper-racialized bluster and even Bill O’Reilly’s fact-free bloviating. Keep listening long enough and the hustler will have you believing you are, in fact, the hustler.
However, the real danger is that there are some well-meaning people who would have you believe that decades of de-industrialization is simply an excuse. They will say that well-intentioned domestic social policies that ripped the very fabric of families are old hat. They want you to ignore environmental degradation that continues to poison our urban centers, resulting in extraordinary morbidity and infant mortality rates, taxing public health systems to their brink and killing any possibility of economic development. The “drug wars” of the 1980s and 90s that over-criminalized black usage, but set the white dealer free, should be embraced as a good and fair justice system at work, according to them.
O’Reilly told us Lil’ Wayne is to blame for “black culture.” While I have personally pressed against the hyper-sexualized misogyny so prevalent in hip-hop today, one look at the demographics behind iTunes sales tells a different story. Who buys more “gangsta rap” than any other consumer segment? Who buys those expensive concert tickets and fills arena seats? White, suburban children.
“The impact of white flight is a myth too,” they will thump their chests and say. They will tell you with a straight face, that a quality education is available to every child in this country. That a meaningful job at a meaningful wage is equally in reach for the white schoolgirl in tiny Alpharetta, Georgia and the black schoolboy in East St. Louis, Illinois.
Those people will say to you, without so much as the respect of whispering, that the reason “those” people have to live like that is because they want nothing better for themselves. “Those” people lack a moral compass and possess no work ethic, they’ll say. If the boys would just pull up their trousers and roll their shoulders back, they could fully participate in the American economy. If they simply learned manners, got married and quit having all those babies, crime rates would fall precipitously. They are, I have heard roaring through my Twitter account over recent days, their own worst enemy.
I have likened privilege to an intoxicant, one that will have you tripping so hard that you will think you don’t have it. Privilege, I have said, is one “helluva” drug. Inhale enough and you will start believing that you are among the oppressed. At its essence, however, privilege is simply the liberty not to know. I watched in horror this week as a colleague suffered a “contact high.”
A swift kick of ‘tough love’?
A swift kick to the backside, or “tough love” as CNN anchor Don Lemon calls it, will not tear down the strictures of race, class and gender in this country. To say so gives rise to the poisonous notion that distressed communities are simply the manifestation of a collective moral failing.
Arguably, to some extent Lemon and some of the voices on the Right are correct. It is a failing and the failing is ours. For when we fail those living in the margins, we fail ourselves. When we find meaningful ways to advance the quality of life for the least of us, we raise the quality of life for all of us. To do so means to eschew cheap talking points and dig for the root of the issue.
An umbrella will surely keep you from getting wet. It won’t, however, cure cancer.
Dropping out of high school, for instance, begins with failed early childhood education. Veteran educators will tell you that the game is often lost as early as the 4th grade. The cycle of poverty and violence is perpetuated in the halls of an elementary school.
Maybe, just maybe, Lemon did not understand what he was co-signing his name to when he said O’Reilly “didn’t go far enough.” Maybe he was stoking controversy for the sake of improving his poorly rated weekend show and raising his profile. But if his half-hearted explanation on ABC’s The View is any indication, it is a little of both. Despite his self-professed humble upbringing, Lemon betrayed a barely nascent understanding of the societal and political pathologies that left generations of devastation in their wake.
“Blacks are only to blame for their problems,” tweeted Crystal Wright, a conservative black Republican who makes regular appearances on Lemon’s show. “This isn’t 1850.”
Maligning millions of peace loving, law-abiding African-Americans in this country, as O’Reilly and company did, is offensive on its face. However, willfully and capriciously advancing that idea that “black culture” or any other should be judged by its fewest and worst bad actors — the “lowest common denominator” — is destructive. But the continued focus on outcomes affords the perfect avenue by which to advance the “containment” policies still at play today.
This morning, I felt the same dull ache in my bones, just as Alice did. It is a discomfort, it seems, that never goes away. But when I feel a prick in my joints, I know to expect rain.
Follow Goldie Taylor on Twitter at @goldietaylor.