hoods up
Via @LoveExAsia on Twitpic.
Am I next?
Reply
Tag Archives: racism
Trayvon Martin, “privacy,” and privilege
Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black kid who played football and wanted to be a pilot, was shot and killed on February 26 while walking unarmed through a gated neighborhood in Sanford, Florida. Visiting his father’s fiancee there, he’d gone out to buy her son some Skittles. The man who shot him, George Zimmerman, 28, captained a neighborhood watch, a group of denizens devoting spare time to crime prevention.
All this is for non-American readers, since most US residents by now have heard the story. It’s a very American story. Both the gated community and the anti-crime watch are innovations of these shores: the former, privatizing the idea of neighborhood, a product of post-60s middle-class anxieties about cities and danger; the latter, privatizing the idea of protection, a product of equally middle-class fears about a police hamstrung by underresourcing and liberal-slanted laws.
From one perspective, in fact, this very public story, about a horrible killing on a street, is all about privacy. Specifically: it’s about the different ways black and whites experience privacy in a racist country.
The story exploded, of course, because the killer still hasn’t been charged with any crime. The local cops, besieged by indignation (their chief has now “temporarily” stepped down) sent out a Q&A justifying its inaction:
When the Sanford Police Department arrived at the scene of the incident, Mr. Zimmerman provided a statement claiming he acted in self-defense which at the time was supported by physical evidence and testimony. By Florida statute, law enforcement was PROHIBITED from making an arrest based on the facts and circumstances they had at the time.
The law they scream about in capitals is colloquially named the “Stand Your Ground” law; some in Florida call it “Shoot First.” Time usefully explains:
The cops have been balking in large part because, under the stand-your-ground statute, they’re virtually obligated to accept [Zimmerman's] argument that he was acting in self-defense — even if it was Martin who may have felt more threatened, according to recordings of 911 calls by neighbors that were released over the weekend. The 2005 Florida law permits anyone, anywhere to use deadly force against another person if they believe their safety or life is in danger, and it’s the state’s usually futile task to prove that the act wasn’t justified. Little wonder the St. Petersburg Times found that five years after the law was signed by then Governor Jeb Bush — who called it a “good, commonsense anti-crime” bill — claims of justifiable homicides in Florida more than tripled, from just over 30 to more than 100 in 2010. In that time, the stand-your-ground defense was used in 93 cases involving 65 deaths — and in the majority of those cases, it worked.
Pro-gun advocates like the National Rifle Association [NRA], which pushed hard for stand your ground, say it simply broadens citizens’ capacity for self-defense. But if … Zimmerman do[es] walk, there may be an understandable public backlash against a statute that in reality has made the streets, bars and parks of Florida — and of the at least 16 other states that have enacted similar laws since 2005 — more dangerous spaces.
British and American common law
hold to what’s called the “castle doctrine” — you know, an Englishman’s home is his castle. Generally it means that within your dwelling (extended in some cases to such places as a car or workplace) you can attack an illegal intruder without risk of prosecution. There are certain conditions; for instance, in the common-law version of the doctrine, if you can safely retreat, the protection doesn’t apply.
Gun lobbyists tried to dub the Florida legislation a “castle doctrine” law, but in fact it turned the old principle on its head. Instead of limiting lethal self-defense to the home, the law says that, like a turtle, you carry your castle anywhere: you can shoot to kill anyplace anybody menaces you. And the whole point of the new law is that you don’t have to retreat: you should “stand your ground,” armed with righteousness and an NRA-endorsed weapon.
In other words, the domestic privacy the original doctrine was meant to protect now follows you down the street in your personalized penumbra, porcupined with gun barrels.
i see black people outside
Whose privacy? Well, look at George Zimmerman, a would-be cop who had appointed himself guardian of a middle-class gated community. His own ethnic identity has been debated– he seems to have had a white father and Latina mother; but there’s no better way in the US to ratify an uncertain claim to whiteness than by taking the fight to black people, preferably in defense of white people’s property. Indeed, if you look at previous 911 calls Zimmerman had made to police, clearly he was waging what Dave Weigel identifies as a “long, lonely war against black youths doing things.” In the collective psyche as it insinuiated itself into Zimmerman’s brain, white folks are the possessors of privacy; black kids are the invaders. Mother Jones writes:
[E]ven more than cars, he was concerned about black men on foot in the neighborhood. In August 2011, he called to report a black male in a tank top and shorts acting suspicious near the development’s back entrance. …Three days later, he called to report two black teens in the same area, for the same reason.
Coupled with the shoot-first law, this attitude is a road map to murder. Timothy Noah cites a University of North Carolina psychological study six years ago that looked at how race inflects “weapons bias.” Researchers asked subjects
to distinguish between images of harmless hand tools and images of guns, both projected onto a screen. Immediately before each image appeared there flashed a lightening-quick (more or less subliminal) image of a white face or a black face. The subjects were told to ignore the faces and focus on identifying the objects.
The result? In a carbine shell: if a black face flashed first, it made both accurate IDs of guns and false positives more likely. This suggests the Florida law and its clones are “catastrophically bad public policy,” Noah says. “If people are more likely to imagine guns in the hands of black people than white people then the result will be disproportionate deaths for innocent black people.” Invade my privacy, will you?– says the white guy standing in the middle of the public street. Die, invader, die!
But the other side, of course, is how African-Americans experience their bodily existence under view. Is there any comparable umbrella of inviolability there? And the answer, clearly, is that where somebody’s monitored and surveilled constantly for signs of deviance and violence, you watch yourself and police your movements for your own life’s sake. One of the saddest things I read this week was from Janice D’Arcy’s “On Parenting” blog at the Washington Post, about “parents who say that to raise a minority in this country, particularly an African American boy, is to live with the understanding that the child will be arbitrarily mistreated. It is also to live with the burden of explaining this reality.” She found an account by Jonathan Capehart, for instance, of the warnings his mom gave him before his first day at a mostly-white school:
“Don’t run in public.” Lest someone think you’re suspicious.
“Don’t run while carrying anything in your hands.” Lest someone think you stole something.
Or a blogger who listed “the rules” she’s instilling in her 6-year-old black daughter:
1. Don’t touch anything when you go into stores. …
2. Always ask for a bag for the items you purchased. … My mom didn’t want anyone thinking that we walked out of the store without paying for our merchandise. …
3. Know who you are. You can’t do everything they do. In other words, just because your white friend does something that doesn’t mean you can do the same. Whether it’s hanging at the mall or going to a house party, police, teachers, and other authorities treat white children differently than black children. …
This is grimly awful. These children are learning at home, in what’s supposed to be the safe space of the family, precepts of inculcated inferiority that could save their lives. As Khaled Beydoun and Linda Sarsour write for Al-Jazeera: the après-Obama myth that the US has become a “post-racial” society is way premature.
no blacks in headgear wanted here
Obama himself weighed in about the Martin killing today, saying that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon … I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this. And that everybody pull together.” It’s a moving thing to say; but it also situates the grief and the suffering back behind closed doors, as a “family” issue, when in fact it reaches into most every part of our public life. So, too, I resist his calling this a “tragedy.” Tragedies are the work of Fate, or the hero-victim’s overreaching; in that spirit, exculpating the world around him, Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera attributes Trayvon’s death to blind pride in wearing “gangsta” style, the hubris of the hoodie. (For photos of Geraldo wearing a hoodie, see here. Shoot first, criticize fashion later.) But there are no resentful gods exacting retribution here. Just historical legacies and human choices.
The truth is: white people get to be private even in public. And for black people, public facts and figments follow them home even to the private sphere. These are truths that, given suitable laws and armaments, kill. When we talk about the “right to privacy” — in contraception, in abortion, in Lawrence v. Texas – all of us need to be conscious of the different enjoyments and possibilities it can mean.
Peter Tatchell, Whitney Houston, Malcolm X, and race remixed
I hear dead people (© Max Sparber)
Madcap Briton Peter Tatchell enjoys ventriloquism. It’s a skill he’s probably been practicing since childhood; and anyway, he knows what people should be saying, even if they don’t. Dead folks are easy marks as dummies, since they’ve got nothing to say for themselves. And Tatchell’s talent at taking on the voices of dead Iranians is notorious.
Tatchell also has a driving concern with black people. Look at his recurrent need to speak about and for Africans, even when Africans are doing a perfectly fine job of speaking for themselves. Or his peculiar way of attaching to himself a few tokenized black folks from time to time in his advocacy– as if he draws deep pleasure from their dependency, but knows they have an authority he wants to pirate somehow. He seems to think, one might say, that black people are less sexually civilized than he, yet need him to enlighten them: a form of self-flattery magnified at continental scale. Plenty of Africans haven’t forgotten, after all, how in his unwanted intervention on Nigeria’s anti-homosexuality bill in 2006 , his key description of the legislation was: “savage.” (That Tatchell’s political deputy for years was the weirdly obsessed Brett Lock — known for defending what in the US we call the “n-word” as merely an inoffensive derivation from the Latin – further suggests his odd attitudes.)
Brett Lock of OutRage! discusses race and discourse: Hurryupharry.org
Most interesting, though, is his periodic expropriation of the sexualities of dead black icons. Tatchell appoints himself posthumous press agent, and sets up a dynamic where anyone who objects to a white guy doing this is simply proving that black people can’t stand gays.
He did this most famously with Malcolm X: branding Malcolm GAY!, then brandishing the outraged response as evidence of black homophobia. When Manning Marable devoted one page of his brilliant, magisterial, 576-page biography to Malcolm’s sexual relations with white men early in his career in Boston, Tatchell read and responded to that page alone, proclaiming to the world he’d been right all along. Marable himself was dead by then too, making Tatchell’s man-grab easier and more fun. (Fellow grave-robber Doug Ireland did the same; to read these necroerotic writers’ reviews of Marable, you’d think the biography was the long-lost, mixed-race episode of Will and Grace.)
Marable’s sensitive account makes it clear that the principal relationship in question had nothing to do with identity, but rather with – mutual — exploitation. Malcolm was hustling: using somebody for money and power, and being used for sex in the process. What Tatchell reads, blindly, as a story of love and identity was in fact an episode in African-Americans’ ways of confronting subjugation. Tatchell can’t grasp that the interaction, however much one of exchange, was founded on the partners’ inequality. Its contribution to Malcolm’s ideology, if it had one, surely was to deepen his awareness of how intimate both exploitation and resistance were, how they shaped experience at all levels. In taking the relationship as equal affection, Tatchell erases African-Americans’ historical passage. A white man has no right to do that. But this is one rights issue Tatchell greets with indifference.
No surprise, then, that Tatchell himself hustled to latch on to Whitney Houston. Nothing like milking a dead celebrity for publicity! Within six hours of her death Tatchell was tweeting about her “#lesbian partner in 1980s”! He parlayed this into plenty of press, and a slightly creepy piece in the Daily Mail. None of his story quite checks out. It’s strange, for one thing, that a deeply closeted celebrity would meet the most famous practioner of outing in the UK, and say to him, “Hello, Mr. Tatchell! This is my lesbian partner!” But hey: it upped the Lexis-Nexis count.
Two, though, can play ventriloquist. The blog Racism Remixed has decided to tell us what Tatchell really meant. Their reconstruction is here – and reblogged below:
Whitney Houston- The Unofficial Inside Story – By PETER TATCHELL
Tatchell has taken Whitney Houston’s death as an opportunity to ‘out’ another black person. It appears that ‘Whitney’s REAL tragedy was giving up her greatest love of all – her female partner Robyn Crawford’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2103164/Whitney-Houstons-REAL-tragedy-giving-female-partner-Robyn-Crawford.html
NOTE:PETEY LOVES ADDING CREATIVELY TO OTHER PEOPLE’S HISTORIES AND BIOGRAPHIES, SO WE THOUGHT WE MIGHT, TOO.
I met Whitney and her female partner at the Reach Out & Touch HIV vigil in London in 1991.
Whitney spoke movingly in support of people with HIV, at a time when many other stars kept their distance. Her support was much valued.
She advocated the welfare and human rights of people with HIV. It was a commendable stand.
I have, in the past, declined to name Whitney’s female partner EVEN THOUGH YOU KNOW HOW I LOVE A GOOD OUTING, AND HAVE FOR A WHILE BEEN FASCINATED IN THE INTIMATE LIVES OF BLACK PEOPLE MOST OF WHOM YOU KNOW ARE ON THE DL OR MSM, I MEAN WSW (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/oct/20/malcolm-x-bisexual-black-history
). SEE I AM NOT AS SEXIST AS PEOPLE SAY I AM, AND I DO CARE ABOUT LESBIANS, EVEN WHEN THEY ARE BLACK. MOST of the media DO TOO, AND have since named her PARTNER as Robyn Crawford, SO HERE GOES. WHITNEY’S FEMALE PARTNER WAS NONE OTHER THAN ROBYN CRAWFORD.
When I met them, it was obvious they were madly in love. Their intimacy and affection was so sweet and romantic. LESBIANS ARE ADORABLE AND MATE FOR LIFE.
They held hands in the back of the car like teenage sweethearts. Clearly more than just friends, BECAUSE WHEN LESBIANS HOLD HANDS IT BASICALLY MEANS THE SAME AS WHEN WE ARE HAVING SEX, AND WOMEN WHO ARE NOT HAVING SEX WITH EACH OTHER NEVER HOLD HANDS, they were a gorgeous couple, EVEN I COULD SEE THAT AND I’M WHITE, I MEAN, AND I’M GAY, and so happy together. To see their love was infectious and uplifting. BLACK PEOPLE, FINALLY UPLIFTED IN MY EYES, AFTER CENTURIES OF TRYING ON THEIR OWN. I WAS CERTAINLY UPLIFTED. I FELT LIKE I WAS WALKING ON AIR. IT WAS AMAZING.
Whitney was happiest and at the peak of her career when she was with Robyn. I KNOW THIS BECAUSE WE WERE CLOSE FRIENDS AND TALKED ON THE PHONE EVERY NIGHT ABOUT MATTERS OF THE HEART. AND EVEN IF WE DIDN’T, I KNOW TRUE LOVE BETWEEN BLACK PEOPLE WHEN I SEE IT. Sadly, she suffered BLACK family and BLACK church pressure to end her greatest love of all.
She was fearful of the effects that lesbian rumours might have on her family, reputation and career. SHE TOLD ME THIS ON MYSPACE. AND EVEN IF SHE DIDN’T, I KNEW IT ANYWAY BECAUSE I’M A JOURNALIST. KIND OF. WELL I WRITE FOR THE GUARDIAN A LOT. AND WHEN THE GUARDIAN DOESN’T WANT ME I’M HAPPY TO GO TO THE DAILY MAIL GIVEN THEIR GREAT RECORD ON GAY RIGHTS REPORTING. Eventually she succumbed. The result? A surprise marriage to Bobby Brown.
The marriage was a disaster. Bad boy Bobby was never her true soul mate. I KNOW THIS BECAUSE SHE TOLD ME ON MSN MESSENGER. Giving up Robyn – they’d been inseparable for years – must have been emotionally traumatic.
Whitney’s life started going downhill soon afterwards. Previously wholesome AND AS PURE AS THE DRIVEN SNOW EXCEPT THAT SHE WAS BLACK and clean-living, she went on drink-and-drug binges – evidence of a troubled personal life and much unhappiness.
I’M NO PSYCHOLOGIST, PERSONAL FRIEND OF WHITNEY’S OR EXPERT ON ADDICTION, BUT it seems likely that the split with Robyn contributed to her substance abuse and decline. There is a known correlation between denial of one’s sexuality and a propensity to self-destructive behaviour. DAN SAVAGE SAYS SO TOO, AND YOU KNOW THERE’S A LOT OF MONEY IN THAT NOW. Homophobia undoubtedly added to the pressures on Whitney and hastened her demise.
Soon after her very sad death, I was quoted as saying that Whitney was happiest when she loved a woman. Some fans accused me of ‘insulting’ and ‘smearing’ her. (SMEARING IS ONE OF MY FAVOURITE WORDS EVER, AS MY FANS AND REGULAR READERS MAY KNOW). BUT ACTUALLY THE MOST INSULTING THING I’VE EVER SAID ABOUT WHITNEY HOUSTON IS THE TITLE OF THIS ARTICLE, IMPLYING THAT HER SUPPOSED BREAK UP FROM HER SUPPOSED SOUL MATE IS MORE TRAGIC THAN HER ACTUAL UNTIMELY DEATH. SORRY FRIENDS AND FAMILY, BUT AN OVERDOSE IS NEVER AS SAD AS WHEN TWO SUPPOSED LESBIANS PART WAYS.
But there is nothing shameful about a woman loving a woman. It’s not dirty or sordid and shouldn’t be kept hidden. FORGET ALL THE JOKES ABOUT FISH SMELL AND CARPET MUNCHING YOU HAVE HEARD GAY MEN SAY.
PEOPLE WHO DO KEEP IT HIDDEN ARE BLACK. I MEAN CLOSETED. OR IS IT HOMOPHOBIC? SELF-HATING? ANYWAY, DON’T KEEP IT HIDDEN FOLKS, BE PROUD AND WEAR A RAINBOW.
I did not out her as lesbian/ bisexual. APART FROM WITH THIS ARTICLE, BUT SHE’S ALREADY DEAD, SO. She semi-outed herself by dedicating her albums to Robyn. NO WOMAN EVER DEDICATES HER ALBUM TO ANOTHER WOMAN UNLESS SHE’S HAVING HAND HOLDING SEX WITH THEM. EXCEPT FOR WHEN SOME FEMALE ARTISTS DEDICATE THEIR ALBUMS TO THEIR MOTHERS. BUT EVEN THEN, YOU GOTTA WONDER, RIGHT?
Years ago, she was outed by Bobby’s sister, Tina, and by her former bodyguard, Kevin Ammons. THEY DID IT FIRST FOLKS!
Bobby Brown hinted in his autobiography that she married him to dispel lesbian rumours: ‘I believe her agenda was to clean up her image … The media was accusing her of having a bisexual relationship with her assistant, Robin [sic] Crawford … that didn’t go too well with her image. In Whitney’s situation, the only solution was to get married … [to] kill all speculation.’ AND IF ANYONE KNOWS THE TRUTH OF WHITNEY HOUSTON’S HEART, IT’S BOBBY NOT-HOUSTON’S-SOULMATE BROWN.
Telling the truth does not besmirch Whitney’s memory. It honours the most important relationship she ever had. I KNOW IT WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIP SHE EVER HAD BECAUSE SHE TOLD ME ON FACEBOOK. APOLOGIES TO WHITNEY’S FAMILY MEMBERS – YOU GUYS DIDN’T MAKE THE LIST. BUT DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY – LESBIANS ARE OBSESSED WITH ROMANCE AND DENOUNCE ALL OTHER INTERACTIONS AS INSIGNIFICANT AND MEANINGLESS. THE LGBT PSYCHIATRIST WHO’S NOW PART OF MY CAMPAIGN SAYS IT’S CALLED CODEPENDENCE.
What’s wrong is ignoring or denying the one love that made her truly happy, NOT OUTING PEOPLE AND BELITTLING THEIR DEATHS.
Homophobia contributed to Whitney’s fall.
I want to see a more tolerant society where people don’t feel the need to marry – UNLESS IT’S A GAY MARRIAGE – to deflect rumours of homosexuality, and where they are not driven to self-destruction because of their inability to accept and express their love for a person of the same sex AND I ALSO WANT MORE FAMOUS BLACK PEOPLE TO DIE SO I CAN WRITE ABOUT HOW THEY WERE REALLY GAY LIKE I DID WITH MALCOLM X.
Achieving this goal would be a fitting tribute to Whitney Houston AND TO MY SAVINGS ACCOUNT: sort code - 8-H 5-E 18-R 15-O account number – 19-S 1-A 22-V 9-I 15-O 21-U 18-R
Great moments in Islamophobia: Daniel Pipes is not a Scythian
Here’s a little mystery that intruded on my attention today.
Daniel Pipes (L) on the lecture circuit
Daniel Pipes, hater of all things Arab and Muslim, crusader against campus terrorists, expert linguist, and biographer of Barack Obama, posted this on his blog a couple of weeks ago:
The Pipes Rule of Arab Elections
Offered on the occasion of the “first free” elections in Tunisia:
If you know the result ahead of time, you are voting for the real powerbroker. If you don’t know the result in advance, then you are voting for a position that hardly matters.
This gives me several different occasions for perplexity.
- What the hell does it mean?
- Why is there a button on the post that offers “Translations of this item” into French, Italian, and … Latin, and “Greek (Ancient)?”
- Why did the obsessive British blog Harry’s Place, which doubles as Islamophobia Central and as personal trainer for the “muscular liberal” set, today headline this blog post in its Attic Greek translation, without further explanation: ὁ περὶ τὰς τῶν ᾿Αράβων ἐκλόγας νόμος ὁ τοῦ Δανιέλου Πιπέος, etc.?
I don’t understand these people at all, so I can only speculate that perhaps:
- Daniel Pipes is desperate to prove that he is a civilized Athenian, not a barbarian.
- The enigmatic original post is a code, reading “Bomb NYU!” or something, that can only be decrypted by translation into a dead language, and now the terrorist chatter in the Harry’s Place comments portends the coming attack.
- Harry’s Place has devised a secret plan, involving time travel, to recruit the military genius Alexander the Great to drive the Muslims out of Europe.
It’s good to know that the defenders of civilization against Islamic darkness are making wise use of their time.
