Forgetting
No. 4 | (2021)
Photograph and Words by Jahi Chikwendu (2020).
“This is part of a series of photos meant to be a “Whitest Hands” version of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” In that book, Pecola Breedlove — a young black girl — is convinced that her life would right itself if only she had long, blond hair, white skin, and the bluest of eyes. This image is a startling alarm to wake us from internalizing the myth of white supremacy and the reality of racism, which has led us to blind, deafen, silence, even choke ourselves.”
Cultural Amnesia, Action, Responsibility
I’ve had some really big conversations with all kinds of people in recent weeks. The takeaways? White folks are hungry to know what to do. Now. They’re frustrated, confused, and ready to help. Like, today. Cultural amnesia is part and parcel to anti-racist performance. And it’s absolutely tethered to white privilege.
Let’s start with cultural amnesia. In 2017, I flew back east to attend the Women’s March in Washington DC. Early in the day, the “Mothers of the Movement” (a group comprised of Black women whose Black children’s lives were unjustly taken by police) claimed center stage with Janelle Monae. Together, they performed a call-and-response rhythm to Monae’s anti-police brutality anthem “Hell You Talmbout” (video link below).
Monae chanted the names of Sandra Bland, Natasha McKenna, Tanisha Anderson. Then she walked over to the five mothers who lost their children. "Say your baby's name," she instructed. First came the mother of Jordan Davis, who was murdered in 2012, at a gas station in Jacksonville, Fla., following an argument over loud music. Eric Garner's mother was next. Her son was killed by police on Staten Island in 2014 on suspicion of selling "loosies" (individual cigarettes). Trayvon Martin's mother, whose son was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, in Sanford, Fla., came after. They were followed by the mothers of Mohamed Bah, whose son was killed by New York City police in 2012, and Dontre Hamilton, shot in 2014 by Milwaukee police officers.
I fell to my knees. Thought of my own sons. And vowed to join the fight against police brutality
But I didn’t do it. I forgot. Stepped out of the experience. Stopped watching. I chose to stand by. That’s cultural amnesia. And it’s something that white folks do.
The first thing we can do is not conveniently forget. We can not mitigate or deflect feelings of racial discomfort. We can build (with a sense of true urgency) the racial stamina required to challenge racism.
Watch the Mothers of the Movement and Janelle Monae at the 2017 DC Women’s March.
Uncomfortable Truths
So, what do we do when our once heartfelt empathy turns out to be temporary? When our outrage is unreliable? Black cultural critic Jenna Wortham wonders if white folks are willing to answer that question. She asks (and I’m paraphrasing here) How do Black lives matter to us, both in their death and in life? How do we fix a system that allows Black human beings to be pushed out of their cities and communities? Incarcerated at a rate higher than their Black brethren in South Africa during the height of Apartheid? Impoverished at a rate of roughly 23% (versus 9% for white Americans)?
More uncomfortable truths*:
From 2013 to 2017, white patients in the US received better quality health care than about 34% of Hispanic patients, 40% of Black patients, and 40% of Native American patients.
Black women are 3 to 4 times more likely to experience a pregnancy-related death than white women, even at similar levels of income and education.
On average, Black men in the US receive sentences that are 19.1% longer than those of white men convicted for the same crimes.
In the US, Black individuals are twice as likely to be unemployed than white individuals. Once employed, Black individuals earn nearly 25% less than their white counterparts.
In the US, Black workers are less likely than white workers to be employed in a job that is consistent with their level of education.
Maps
Angela Davis has been advocating for prison abolition since the 60s. Criminalizing poverty through harsh fines and debt regulation, criminalizing addiction through drug laws, criminalizing homelessness by conducting sweeps of people sleeping in parks, and criminalizing mental illness by turning prisons into de facto psychiatric hospitals are all treating the symptom instead of the disease. .
The three pillars of Prison Abolition—or the “Attrition Model” as the Prison Research Education Action Project called it in their 1976 pamphlet, “Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists”—are moratorium, decarceration, and excarceration.
Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) told us during the Black Power Movement that color cannot be "forgotten" until its weight is recognized and dealt with. That, as a first step, “White America will need to acknowledge that the ways in which this country sees itself are contradicted by being black—and always have been.”
In 1857, Frederick Douglass proclaimed, "the whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions have been born of earnest struggle…If there is no struggle, there is no progress…If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice."
Audre Lorde councils "those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."
And more recently, Roxanne Gay, when asked by a white woman what she should do about her white friends who are “absolutely resistant to acknowledging their privilege,” responded “get new friends.”
Witness
At the end of her set, Monae implored everyone to "choose freedom over fear." And don't be scared, she said, "We are watching!" To watch knowingly, to not forget, to bear witness to murders of Stephon Clark, Botham Jean, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd:
against the backdrop of slavery;
as part of the legacy of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was kidnapped, beaten, mutilated, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River in 1955;
In the shadow of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombings, where four Black young girls were killed and many others were injured in what was the third bombing in 11 days in 1963.
So, know our history. Live consciously with uncomfortable truths. Remember. Check yourself and your loved ones.
Read more on Witnessing and the Public and Unbearable Grief of Black Mothers.
Bye for Now
Next post in two weeks. Feel free to check past newsletters.
In the meantime, email me at drcarala@gmail.com. Because…SO. MUCH. LOVE.
