tea berry-blue

Note: there are spoilers for The Hunger Games in here, that I am trying to keep as vague as possible.

When I talk about racial issues on my blog, it’s largely because I have friends and family members who are people of color, and that to me means:

1) I want you guys to know you are not speaking into empty space.

and

2) When you love people, you support them.

I know my perspective is tinged with privilege, and I probably mess up sometimes, and it’s okay if you tell me I’m messing up, or if you’d rather I not talk about it.

Today was a pretty gruesome day when you start talking about white attitudes toward black Americans. We had people trying to discredit and vilify a kid who was murdered, and we had people who decided a fictional child’s death didn’t matter because her skin was the wrong color.

And these two things are related, because SERIOUSLY. Both are people talking about the death of a black child. Both involve people trying to assign a value to a child’s life and finding ways to make that value less than the value of another child’s life. And that’s pretty sick.

I’m not a published author. I don’t know if I ever will be. But when I was a teenager, I had a play produced by an off-Broadway theater company. Of course, like every writer, I had images of the characters in my head. And like many white writers, I didn’t think to specify when I imagined a character was white, because to me, white was the default. I hope you will forgive me the fact that I was young and raised in a largely white community, and I’ve since learned differently. But I gave the theater a list of descriptions of the cast, where I thought it “mattered.”

They cast a Latina girl as the protagonist, which was exactly as I had imagined her. And they cast a black boy as her romantic interest, which was not. Because I’d imagined him white. And fourteen year old me reacted a little twitchily to the idea that this wasn’t the picture of my male lead I’d had in my head. I probably had some racist inhibitions about this casting at the time, I’ll admit. And I didn’t know about things like unpacking my privilege at that age. I was just sitting there thinking, “wait, that’s not what he was supposed to look like.”

The actor was phenomenal. The two leads were both phenomenal. Getting to see my play onstage was one of the highlights of my young life, but the boy who played that character understood him so perfectly that his performance was illuminating to me as the very young writer. And I will now never be able to see that character as anyone but the young actor who portrayed him when I was fourteen. And he’s the only character I feel that for, out of the twelve characters in the play.

Yeah, I know this reads a bit like one of those white people “AND THEN I WASN’T RACIST FOREVER” things. But I felt like in the light of all this bullshit where people are shocked and dismayed and suddenly don’t care about a character’s death when they discover that that character was black, even when the author described her as black, it was worth bringing up the one experience with that that I have as an author. I don’t know if it helps. I don’t know if it does anything. It’s just one white writer’s experience.

I am getting the less horrific issue out of the way. Because I want to talk about the more horrific issue.

Since yesterday, people and news sources have been trying to “discredit” a dead child. A DEAD CHILD. Because obviously, if the dead child smoked weed, he deserved to die. If the dead child punched a man who was STALKING HIM, he deserved to die. If the dead child tried to grab the gun of a man who STALKED HIM WITH A GUN, he deserved to die.

Let’s go over this.

–If any kid who has ever smoked pot deserves to get shot, most of the people I know would not have made it to adulthood.
–Furthermore, no one had proven that Trayvon Martin had any pot. I am willing to stake money that if his EMPTY PLASTIC BAG were tested for traces of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Crackers, it would come back positive.
–WHICH DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE SMOKING POT DOES NOT MEAN YOU DESERVE TO BE TERRORIZED AND MURDERED.
–Oh my god, Trayvon Martin may or may not have acted like a tough guy on the internet. Do you know how many teenaged boys do that? ALL THE ONES WHO HAVE ACCESS TO CAMERAS.
–APPARENTLY ALL THE BOYS WHO HAVE ACCESS TO CAMERAS DESERVE TO DIE.
–Trayvon Martin may or may not have punched, kicked, beaten up, bitten, pulled George Zimmerman’s hair and given him a wedgie. Let’s go over this again. Facts that HAVE been corroborated: George Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin in his car. Then he called the cops. He was told NOT TO FOLLOW THE KID. He got out of his car and followed him anyway. Let’s say you’re a teenager, and a man who is much bigger than you starts following you, first in a car and then on foot. Would you not be terrified? If you were physically strong enough that you thought punching him might help, WOULD YOU NOT PUNCH HIM? I know I would. I’ve never been big enough or strong enough, but there have been creepy dudes following me whom I totally would have punched if I thought it would help matters.
–Trayvon Martin may have tried to grab George Zimmerman’s gun. Look at this sentence. There is something very obvious implied in this sentence. What is that thing? OH YEAH. THAT THING IS THAT GEORGE ZIMMERMAN HAD HIS GUN OUT WHERE THIS KID COULD SEE IT. So you’re walking home and some strange man who is much bigger that you is following you…WITH A GUN. What the heck would you do? Would it not be utterly reasonable to try to get the gun away?

I remember that I was nine years old when Tawana Brawley was raped. I remember seeing the photos of the pretty young woman who was not that much older than me, but at nine, she seemed like the kind of poised, sophisticated teenager I hoped to be. I didn’t really understand what rape was. I understood she had been attacked. And at first, people were supporting her, but in my mostly-white community, people started saying awful, horrible things about her. As if she deserved what happened to her. As if she would lie about what happened. As if she had a reason to lie. I remember not understanding; I remember asking why she would do that. And I remember growing up and seeing more and more young women discredited when they said they had been raped or sexually assaulted, shamed into believing it was their fault, shamed into retracting accusations, and then being turned into a pariah, told that they were the reason “innocent” women were raped, they were the reason “innocent” women were afraid to come forward.

It was my first real experience in seeing how racism could vilify a child. And yesterday and today, every time I see another article trying to discredit a dead boy who was murdered, and whose murderer has yet to be arrested, I feel the same thing I did then. I have more understanding now than I did at nine, but the chill in my bones is the same one.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

When I was twenty years old, while I was working on a student film, I was in a serious accident that nearly cost me the use of my right arm. Part of the upshot of this accident was that I had unintentionally trespassed on public property that was not well-marked as being off limits.

This was in the days before everyone had a cellphone. The friend I was with had luckily done EMT training and was able to do some preliminary care for me, get information like my blood type, etc, in case I passed out, before trying to flag down a car for help.

When the ambulance came, they were accompanied by a state trooper. The trooper was very kind to me, and assured me that he knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, and that he would testify to that end in court, but unfortunately, since I had technically committed a misdemeanor, I had to be arrested. He was as nice as humanly possible about it, and did the paperwork at the hospital, so that I didn’t have to go to the police station, but when I was twenty years old, I was arrested for accidentally trespassing on public property.

I think about this every single time I hear that George Zimmerman still has not been arrested for murdering a child.

You kill another person, you get arrested. If you’re innocent, or defending yourself, (neither of which I believe about Zimmerman) you prove that in court. That is what court is for. I went to court, I explained to the judge what had happened, the judge kind of laughed at me, asked how my arm was, made me promise not to sue the state, and dismissed the charges.

I unwittingly trespassed on public property, got severely injured, and was arrested.

The guy who sent a non-specific threatening email to the Sanford police chief, Bill Lee, has been arrested.

The guy who murdered an unarmed teenager has not been arrested.

This is hideously wrong.

I’ve been trying to figure out for a while now what to say about this. I’ve been saying a lot about it in person, but not a lot on the internet. Sometimes I don’t want to add more noise to drown out the signal, especially when I see white people co-opting the death of a young boy to further their own messages, and I don’t want to be part of that. I want to listen to what the people who are really being affected by this have to say. But I feel compelled to say something. In some ways I feel like waiting to say something until I could figure out what to say is problematic in itself, because we all need to speak out when horrors are committed. And I feel like a cad when horrible things are happening and I’m posting cute photos of myself going to movies.

Other people have spoken about this a bit, but I’m frustrated and angry when I see other white people pulling the “I am Trayvon Martin” thing, because it’s so dismissive of the real issue, which is that we’re not Trayvon Martin. None of us ever will be. We’re George Zimmerman. Even if we don’t go out and shoot kids for fun, when we allow the images in the media to perpetuate the idea that young black men are violent, when our own speech (I don’t want to talk about the conversation I had to have at lunch today) perpetuates an idea of black Americans as criminals, especially young black American men, we are accessories to murder. We are creating people like George Zimmerman. That’s on us. And it doesn’t matter if we have black friends, or black relatives, or black ancestors– that doesn’t absolve us. In fact, it’s worse when we do, and say nothing, because it’s our loved ones who are suffering and we’re not doing anything to ease that.

In the end, I think that’s why I keep thinking about the time I was arrested. Because I don’t have a right to compare myself to a kid whose life was in danger simply because he dared to buy some Skittles and go for a walk. I can compare myself to the man who took his life. The difference being that the only criminal act I’ve ever committed harmed no one but myself, and of the two of us, I’m the one who’s been arrested. I’m not trying to make this about me– It’s not. I’m using myself as an example because I know the details of the story, and I know what happened. I’m not angry that I was arrested. I get what I did wrong, and that that’s the way it’s supposed to go.I’m angry that apparently murdering a young boy isn’t as serious an offense as walking onto a bridge when the pedestrian walkway is closed, if the boy in question is black.

For those of you who thought this was a lone case of crazy, or who are trying to deal with people who claim that:
22 year old Rekia Boyd died on Thursday after being shot by an off-duty cop.
18 year old Ramarley Graham was murdered by a New York City cop in a “drug bust” (though they had no warrant to enter the home, and I’ve heard conflicting stories about whether there were any drugs present at all) just a couple of weeks before Trayvon Martin.

Love to all of you.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.