randomWalks

Black Liberation Movement

The post that’s just below this one is Son of Baldwin pointing to a post by Greg Howard in re a bruhaha brewing on Twitter this past week or so over who represents #Black Lives Matter.

Son of Baldwin steps back from calling anyone out in the fight and instead offers the sound advice, “it would do everyone (including me) some good to occasionally self-evaluate and recalibrate.”

Twitter is good example of how the Internet creates filter bubbles. Unless you are on Twitter and follow DeRay McKesson you probably wouldn’t know about the fight that Greg Howard is writing about. Howard does a good job explaining it for an audience who might not follow any of the folks invloved.

I side more with DeRay McKesson than Howard’s reporting does. This isn’t quite the gist, but, Greg Howard is a reporter who’s on Twiter, whereas McKesson is a Twitter reporter. Andy Carvin on Twitter during the Arab Spring is where I noticed this difference I’m trying to point to. Carvin describes himself: “Real-time news DJ & occasional journalist, but not a social media guru.” And the notion of a “real-time news DJ” seems to fit with what McKesson does and probably is better than calling him a Twitter reporter. Either way, it’s not easy, and McKesson does it well.

There’s an article up at Poynter today by James Warren about how Gene Demby, who covers race for NPR, has almost resigned during the year since the first protests in Ferguson, Missouri because the beat is so distressing and unrelenting. Here’s a recent post by Denby, How Black Reporters Report On Black Death. Demby writes of Black reporters “having skin in the game” for a white guy like me is easy to see and hard to imagine really.

What McKesson and Johnetta Elzie do on Twitter seems especially distressing and unrelenting and how! Using social media for social activism is being invented as we go along. I don’t know how Elzie and McKesson manage; the emotional load is so heavy.

It was a big day on Elizie and Mckesson’s Twitter feeds with the roll out of Campaign Zero–click the link it’s worth checking it out.

As a minor note in the mix, earlier in the day I saw some tweets calling McKesson a racist because she said he hadn’t condemned the killing of Jamyla Bolden. That’s spurious nonsense, but hit me like a fist in the belly because before bed last night Johnetta Elzie shared a photo she took of school friends of Jamyla Bolden at a vigil. I’m an old white guy and the pain is so real to me. I begin to sputter and stutter trying to imagine how anyone familiar with what McKesson posts thinks it doesn’t matter to him, that he doesn’t feel aggrieved.

Day in and day out McKesson and and Elzie present a nuanced mix of observations and links about people reacting to tragedies and reaching for solutions in their Twitter newsfeeds. It’s impossible to think they don’t care. It’s wrong to imagine the documenting they do on Twitter as self-serving attention seeking.

There is so much that needs doing. The criticism of DeRay McKesson for putting his face on Twitter obscures how McKesson amplifies the actions of regular people to a wide audience. And how he and others like Johnetta Elzie inspire more us to act. Twitter is not all they do–really check out Campaign Zero–but what they do on Twitter is significant.

Q: Are you white

medievalpoc:

Let’s pretend for a second that this “question” doesn’t come off as vaguely hostile, that I didn’t have to make several police reports last year about people stalking me in person to “see if I looked white”, and that I haven’t received harassment or death threats based entirely on what people assume is my racial identity, as well my actual racial identity. Let’s also pretend that what I look like is some kind of secret, that I haven’t posted about my racial identity openly on this blog and associated media, that I haven’t spoken at events in person as MedievalPoC, and that hundreds of people who’ve read this blog haven’t also witnessed my physical manifestation in the flesh, demonstrating that I am neither a ghost, nor a sophisticated Turing machine barfing out posts into the great void of the internets.
The thing about genocide, both cultural and physical, is that it erases human histories. I’m mostly Native American, I have non-white European ancestry, and I’m something like ¼ white. And since we’re getting personal, I’ll let you in on something: I can never really know my history for sure, not in the way that many other people are able to. That disconnect is a source of constant grief and loss to me, every day that I am alive.
People of Color in the United States have been systematically disenfranchised for centuries. We are told explicitly and implicitly that we don’t have histories, and/or that they aren’t important. We are shown in many ways, through many vehicles, that even now we don’t exist. And in turn, this deliberate destruction of history and identity is used to delegitimize us as human beings.
And if you can’t parse that sentence, let me put it another way: the first time I was asked the question, “What are you?” I was in kindergarten, and the only answer I had then was “I don’t know.”
The great thing about Medievalpoc is that my personal ideologies can be utterly ignored or removed from the content here, since it mostly consists of images, research, and text sources. I do my best to summarize or explain it in order to be accessible to anyone, not just academics. It is meant to be disseminated as widely as possible, adapted for use in classrooms, read for fun, or shared with friends and family. Additionally, I try to show others how they can do their own research, and make better creative choices.
Removing a person’s history and context drastically affects the formation of their sense of self, their sense of identity. It is an injury to their humanity. Connecting other people to this information is, for me, like replacing something that has been stolen or kept away from someone who is entitled to it. For multiple reasons, I most likely will never be able to reconnect with my own history in that way, but trying to help others feel empowered to seize their own does a little bit towards ameliorating that hurt.
These ideas aren’t new, and they aren’t particularly unique.
My father’s father was Filipino-Chinese… My father’s mother was African American-Native American… My mother’s father was German-Danish… My mother’s mother was German… I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I grew up in Japan…
For once it’s not just black and white. In this compelling chronicle of his journey through life as a multicultural and multiethnic American, Teja Arboleda uniquely and personally challenges institutionalized notions of race, culture, ethnicity, and class. Now, in this book, he fleshes out the depth of his experience as a culturally and racially mixed American, illustrating throughout the enigma of cultural and racial identity and the American identity crisis.
-From the description for Teja Arboleda’s In the Shadow of Race: Growing Up as a Multiethnic, Multicultural, and “Multiracial” American (1998).
I am perfectly capable of seeing that the general idea behind this kind of personal attack is to delegitimize the content here by implying that I have lied at some point about who I am, and therefore am untrustworthy and must surely be capable of all manner of nefarious deeds.
And here’s the thing. None of that holds any water whatsoever. In the end, it’s irrelevant to what this whole project is about. People will quite literally make up anything, say anything, repeat rumors and generally foment drama for its own sake. Or as a scaremongering tactic, a silencing tactic, and an attempt to derail discussions. Or just because they feel entitled to increasingly invasive personal information about me.
They’re not, and you’re not. So then, you might wonder, why did I bother to write this? Simply because while I know all of this is out there, you in particular decided that you just couldn’t allow me to continue ignoring the frankly ridiculous wastes of time time I could indulge in if I were to seek them out. You ignored my repeated requests to respect that, came into my inbox and tried to make THEIR problem into MY problem. Also, sending someone a message like this is rude.
And incidentally, I saw a teaching moment.

Holy shit.

UNARMED BLACK MAN FATALLY SHOT BY VOLUNTEER COP

Eric Harris, who was unarmed, died an hour later after what Tulsa, Oklahoma police officials called a “mistake.” According to several news sources, On April 2nd, the victim had reportedly tried to sell a gun to undercover cops and fled on foot as they attempted to arrest him. A video camera captured him, wearing dark shorts and a t-shirt, running up a sidewalk. Harris was quickly caught and subdued. That’s when a 73-year-old volunteer patrolman, Robert Bates, “allegedly” reached for his Taser, but grabbed “accidentally” grabbed his gun instead. According to Tulsa World, Bates, who has donated thousands of dollars worth of items to the Sheriff’s Office since becoming a reserve deputy in 2008, is a Tulsa insurance company executive. He was working undercover as a member of the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office Violent Crimes Task Force. The World reported that “Bates is classified as an ‘advanced reserve,’ which means he ‘can do anything a full-time deputy can do.’”

Rather than immediately render aid, the officers held Harris down by his neck as a deputy screamed, “Fuck You! You shouldn’t have f*cking ran!”

As Eric Harris lay mortally wounded, face down on the pavement, he begged for his life. “He shot me!” Harris shouted. “He shot me, man. Oh, my god. I’m losing my breath.”

“F*ck your breath!” the officer yelled.

Capt. Billy McKelvey said the officers were not aware the suspect had been shot, despite the unmistakable sound of the gunshot noise. Bates “made an inadvertent mistake,” he said.

The New York Daily News reported that no further investigation is planned, unless requested by the sheriff’s office.

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Black Liberation Movement

Your Baltimore Syllabus

UNARMED BLACK MAN FATALLY SHOT BY VOLUNTEER COP