Melissa,
I hope you are enjoying your time away. I promise to take a much needed break at some point, but there is so much happening and I wanted to share some thoughts at the table.
I have gotten news about the premature deaths of two black men I know and admire; one attended my alma mater (Adam Henry '91) and the other was my former colleague who began his academic career with me in the same department (Aime Ellis). Both of these men were wonderful, warm, funny, and well-educated; excelling in their careers and in their relationships with families and friends. They will both be missed.
The lives of these two real black men stand in direct contrast to the fictional characters who apparently thrive on carjacking innocent victims. Reminiscent of the Susan Smith tragedy, another woman accused two black men of carjacking, abducting her and her daughter, and stuffing the two of them into the trunk of a Cadillac. This report triggered major news coverage as well as an Amber alert in our area. It turns out that the mother had stolen money and fled to Disney.
I want to talk about our national psyche, the means by which we, as a nation, criminalize black men from birth. It is no accident that either consciously or subconsciously, this woman from Pennsylvania choose two fictitious black male abductors as did her Southern counterpart, Susan Smith. One part of these stories is the anxiety and surveillance these individual accusations trigger; the other part of the story forces us to face our assumptions, stereotypes, and racist characterizations of blackness, and particularly of black manhood.
I am weary of watching our brothers, fathers, sons, husbands, friends being demonized as criminals or potential criminals. How much of our current criminal system represents a self-fulfilling prophecy? In other words, because we expect black men to become criminals, we treat young black boys as potential felons (through racial profiling and educational inequity), and then when some of them actually do commit crimes, we justify our own racist actions by saying: "I knew that they would be thugs all along."
Melissa, you and I both live in this same small town. As we walk along the main street, I cannot count how many times I have seen an almost life-sized mugshot of a black male face on the local paper, in a report about a crime that has taken place 10-15 miles from our own community. I have yet to see the full page mug-shot of a local white drunken college student who breaks into downtown property during his inebriated state, and that is a crime that occurs regularly in this college town. I have yet to see the full page mug-shot of the white restaurant owner who stole 1.4 million dollars from his investors...another case taking place in our town.
Those faces are "absent" from the criminal enterprise, an enterprise that we assume to be black/brown and male, and increasingly black/brown and female. Why is that? In light of a financial crisis in which shady mortgage lenders (of all races) have bilked people out of billions of dollars, and shady financial investors have straight-up stolen from people's pensions plans, why is the face of a criminal, the real or imagined thug who lurks in the shadows, always a face that looks like mine?
Yolanda
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