Note: I want to believe we, the American people, are better than police slaughtering people of color, the systematized racist solution to keeping white people in the majority and people of color powerless. How many of you feel fear every time your spouse leaves the house, because you are afraid he won't come home? That he will be stopped by the police and possibly killed? I do -- every single time he goes out the door and even when I go with him, because I know I cannot protect him. I watched that police officer who killed Philando Castile become completely unhinged, unfit for duty, and yet, he got to go home and Philando didn't. He died, sitting in his car, as his girlfriend and her four-year-old watched. The world has proven to me that my beliefs are naive and this post is naive. No justice. No peace.
Alton Castile
Philando Castile
I am immersed in this election campaign, debating and sharing mostly with my liberal friends – most of my conservative friends no longer speak to me, nor I to them. I never thought I would be that person. I always enjoyed having a diverse group of friends, friends who could never gather all together in one room at the same time. Then one day I got angry.
I am an optimist.
If I didn’t have that trait, I might not have made it through my childhood with
an alcoholic mother. I might not have made it through the years when the world
thought our interracial marriage was wrong and took actions against us to prove
it. I might not have picked up and moved from a somewhat comfortable place to a
new place with a new culture – from North to South. From a place where
immigrants are common to a place that takes pride in its generations-long heritage,
no matter how violent, oppressive, exclusionary, and divided it was.
My optimism keeps
me going.
But on the 4th
of July, I lost my optimism.
I am in mourning
for so many senseless, violent, terrorist acts, and the lives they took, being perpetrated
across the world in Brussels, Orlando, Istanbul, Dahka, and Baghdad. I am
holding my breath, anticipating the next tragedy.
In the United
States a vile, negative presidential campaign is building up to the conventions
taking place this month. It is a cult of personality: a clash between reality
and reality TV; between the truth of progress and the lies of racism, hatred, misogyny,
fear, and illusion; and between two different visions of America’s past, present, and future.
Daily I feel
assaulted by the Trump campaign messages and the comments of his supporters. No
political correctness on their parts, just plain discriminatory and hateful
messages. Yet they come with the self-righteousness of disenfranchised, mostly
white people who are impacted by a rigged system – a system rigged in favor of
white, wealthy people and against everyone else, although there is a hierarchy
of the disenfranchised with white males on top and women, people of color, and
LGBT people at the bottom. Unfortunately, these same individuals are supporting
the very person who epitomizes the unfairness of the system.
Then today I heard
about a shooting in Baton Rouge. The alleged suspect Alton Sterling was pinned
to the ground by two police officers when one of the officers pulled his gun
and shot him in the chest six times, execution style. Alton Sterling was 37
years old. He was the father of five. They had already tasered him, and after they shot and killed
him, they pulled a gun from his pants pocket. I watched the mother of his
oldest son speak to the media at a press conference called by the local NAACP,
religious leaders, and elected city officials. I watched his fifteen-year-old
son cry unabashedly in front of the cameras – a child full of despair, who lost his father and
has the video of his execution burned into his brain. A child who is no safer
on the street than his father was.
Where is my
optimism now? It is crushed beneath the weight of Jim Crow.
How is it that
some people can support Trump as a candidate and a military-style, vigilante-style police presence in predominately ethnic minority communities? Racism is alive and well. Jim Crow is thriving. Individuals
unaffected by racism pretend it doesn’t exist. Yet their subconscious racial
bias supports systemic racism. Oftentimes they blame the targeted group, people of color, as being somehow unfit and unworthy of equal treatment.
This case has been
turned over to the FBI and the Federal Department of Justice for a thorough investigation.
However, the burden of proof is so strict in these violent and murderous police
stops that very few are prosecuted. It seems a fruitless endeavor. Strange
fruit, no longer hanging from trees, but lying on concrete, bodies, often left uncovered, surrounded by police tape, growing stiff, families and communities left behind to mourn: all to
warn people of color what will happen to them if they forget their marginalized
status in society.
I still want to feel that
small kernel of hope in my heart. Strange, right? Yet I want to believe humanity
will understand inequality, discrimination, and supremacy and want to stop them,
because it is the right thing to do.
I felt it after
crying my way through Free State of Jones,
which we saw on Independence Day, the same day I suffered the loss of optimism. The truth is human beings are
complex, feelings are complex, and we often have conflicting feelings about the
world around us.
The film is about
Newt Knight, a white Southerner who deserted the Confederate army because he
believed it was a rich man’s war, fought by poor men. He also assisted the
Union army, embraced slaves as his equals, and raised an American flag at the courthouse
of the Jones County Seat in Mississippi, one of the most historically racist
states in our country.
After watching Alton Sterling die over and over on the news, I
started researching Newt Knight on the internet and found this article from Simthsonian Magazine. It parses out the
true story from the poetic license of the movie and talks about the process
writer and director Gary Ross (Hunger
Games) went through to make the film.
Joseph
Hosey, a forester in Jones County, and an extra on the film Free State of Jones said, when
interviewed for the article, “When you grow up in the South, you hear all the
time about your ‘heritage,’ like it’s the greatest thing there is. When I hear
that word, I think of grits and sweet tea, but mostly I think about slavery and
racism, and it pains me. Newt Knight gives me something in my heritage, as a
white Southerner, that I can feel proud about. We didn’t all go along with it.”
Many other
community members of Jones County consider Newt Knight “what we call trailer
trash.”
John Cox,
a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans went on to say, “I wouldn’t have
him in my house. And like all poor, white, ignorant trash, he was in it for
himself. Some people are far too enamored of the idea that he was Martin Luther
King, and these are the same people who believe the War Between the States was
about slavery, when nothing could be further from the truth.”
I find it
interesting when wealthy white people claim that it is poor people who are crafty and unreliable
with the truth. Trump exhibits that same distinction every time he steps up to
the podium and spins his version of America.
Reading the
article on Newt Knight lit the coal of my optimism again. It isn’t because the
history of Jones County and Newt Knight is clear and simple. It is because his
story reveals our country’s complex history and who we are as a people, inclusive of all Americans, not just some.
Newt
Knight, his life story, and the story of his mixed-race descendants, remind me
that there are people who can move beyond systemic racism, the craziness of
segregation, and self-righteous superiority.
There are
people who think as I do and feel as I do. They are the ones who refuse to turn
a blind eye, who refuse to accept an unfair system based on skin color, and who
refuse to be silent. They understand the country and its relationship with race
are complex, but they don’t give up. They are quietly heroic, and sometimes loudly and violently opposed to the directions our
country took, and continues to take, throughout our history. They tell the
stories of race in our country even when Hollywood can’t believe anyone would
be interested and there may be no money made from making the film.
Together
we can challenge those who refuse to see the truth of our country and who will
not acknowledge the systemic racism that ensures continued white supremacy and privilege and makes
life dangerous and deadly for people like Alton Sterling. We can challenge
Trump and the ignorance he is peddling like a carnie peddling snake oil.
Newt
Knight continued to be a true rebel even after death. He asked to be buried
next to Rachel his black common-law wife (he never divorced his first wife, and
mixed race marriage was illegal) who was his grandfather’s slave and with whom
he fathered five children. It was illegal for whites and blacks to be buried
side-by-side in Mississippi, but his family refused to bend, and he was buried
next to the woman he loved for eternity.
His
gravestone tells the story of his life and legacy: “He lived for
others.” May each of us one day be able to claim that truth.
#HandsUp; #Don’tShoot;
#BlackLivesMatter; #AltonSterling; #Morethan500; #Don’tBeSilent
