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On running

. . . Or, on segregation, part I

Dr. Mitchell often reminds us on social media that, for those who are physically mobile, running helps writing. This has been true for me. I’ve been running quite a bit since spring semester ended and the weather warmed up. And I’ve completed an 80-page draft of a chapter on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer (2015) from scratch during the same period. There’s still a lot of work to do on it (besides condensing and cutting), but at least the main argument, close readings, and most of the contextual material is outside my head and put into sentences and paragraphs and sections.

In addition to helping writing, running has helped my thinking. My paltry music playlists wore out real fast, so I discovered, belatedly, the world of intellectual-political podcasts. (When did I become one of those middle-aged people who stopped keeping up with new popular music?) This venture started out rather lukewarm with David Harvey’s Anti-Capitalist Chronicles (meh not so much because of the content — although the episodes that address “race and class” after George Floyd’s murder and the mass demonstrations seem stunningly uninformed about the history of Black [cultural] studies and Black feminism — but because of his talking style).

Things caught fire, though, when I got hooked on Millennials Are Killing Capitalism, hosted by Joshua Briond and Jared Ware, and listened to interviews with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney on their book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), Joshua Myers on Cedric Robinson and the Black radical tradition, Vijay Prashad on CoronaShock and the Tricontinental, Asad Haider on capitalism and COVID-19, Robin Kelley on his previous interview “Solidarity Is Not A Market Exchange,” Ju-Hyun Park on U.S. imperialism in Korea and Parasite, Johanna Fernández on her book The Young Lords: A Radical History (2019), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on her book Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2019), Nick Estes on his books Our History Is the Future (2019) and Standing With Standing Rock (2019) and the Red New Deal, and Danny Haiphong on his co-authored book American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News — From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (2019).

While I have much more to listen to on MAKC, I’ve recently moved to the New Books in Asian American Studies and New Books in African American Studies series on the New Books Network and been treated to interviews with Iyko Day on Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (2016), Jane H. Hong on Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (2019), Dean Itsuji Saranillio on Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood (2018), Aimee Bahng on Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (2017), Jinah Kim on Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (2019), Long T. Bui on Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory (2018), Simeon Man on Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (2018), Anne Cheng on Ornamentalism (2019), Grace Wang on Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race Through Musical Performance (2015), Peniel E. Joseph on The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (2020), Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith on Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter (2019), and Leslie Harris on her co-edited Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (2019).

Listening to these scholars and activists discuss how various colonized and racialized peoples have survived and resisted the onslaughts of settler colonialism, slavery, imperialism, war, segregation, militarism, political repression, racial capitalism, and other forms of devastation, displacement, and dispossession has been enlightening and inspiring — and, of course, infuriating that these practices of radical survival and critique have been necessary in the modern world in the first place.

Only slightly less infuriating is the activity of running itself. Because I do not want to drive somewhere to go for a jog or run along busy streets, my usual route takes me through a wealthy, predominantly white suburb. (I live within the boundaries of the city proper, tyvm.) I’ve clocked about 60 runs since May that average around 5.5 miles each, and I can honestly say that I’ve seen exactly one other person of color not working, an Asian American woman out for a stroll, during all that time. The few other people of color I’ve seen are delivering mail or packages for the postal service, FedEx, or Amazon, or doing yard maintenance or house construction.

When my spouse and I used to frequent a nearby pub in that suburb years ago, we learned why. A server overheard me complain for the umpteenth time about the overwhelming whiteness of the restaurant and cheerfully explained what she learned in high school: that the town implemented racially restrictive covenants in the early twentieth century. In Planning for the Private Interest: Land Use Controls and Residential Patterns in Columbus, Ohio, 1900-1970 (1994), historian Patricia Burgess writes of these exclusionary practices, “In the 1920s deeds often prohibited ownership or occupancy by blacks or Asians or limited it to Caucasians, which generally excluded blacks, Jews, and Asians. State and local courts generally upheld this practice until the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kraemer” (31-2).

Ethnic studies scholar George Lipsitz in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (1998/2006/2008) outlines the limitations of the Supreme Court ruling:

Although it prevented states from enforcing restrictive covenants on their own, the decision did not make it illegal for property owners to adhere to them voluntarily, and it did not ban the registration of restrictive covenants with local authorities. [. . .] White home owners, realtors, and bankers realized that restrictive covenants could remain in force despite Shelley v. Kraemer, and, more important, that the ruling did nothing to challenge the other major mechanisms for real estate discrimination: redlining (denying loans to areas inhabited by racial minorities), steering (directing minority buyers solely to homes in minority neighborhoods), and block busting (playing on white fears of a change in neighborhood racial balance to promote panic sales, getting whites to sell their homes for small amounts and then selling those same homes to minority buyers at extremely high prices). (26-7, in 2006 edition)

One of the ways that this suburb’s developers circumvented the Supreme Court decision was, according to the author of the blog Unshoveling the Past, by “mandating membership in a community or association as a condition of purchase of sale. Potential house buyers had to gain approval of membership by the association in order to purchase the property. In addition, the association retained first right of purchase on all lots or homes offered for sale.” The blogger tells the story of how this particular practice came to an end in 1970. An African American family from New Jersey had wanted to buy the home next door to her family, but the association purchased it instead when they discovered that the potential buyers were Black. The blogger’s parents, another white couple, and the African American buyers filed a suit which “requested the dissolution of the association, the award of $15,000 in damages to Ashley [the New Jersey buyer], and the removal of the restrictive covenants from all deeds.” The Franklin County court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs: “Judge Clifford Rader approved the dissolution of the association Monday and declared all of the restrictive covenants null and void.

There is a pre-history to this form of racial segregation in the housing market. As it turns out, the high school that the pub server attended, and which I pass (giving it a wide berth) on my running route, sits on top of a former cemetery that a master blacksmith, Pleasant Litchford, had designated in the nineteenth century for the burial of African Americans since they were excluded from the “white” cemeteries in the area. According to this informative video made for Columbus Neighborhoods with Diane Kelly Runyon and Kim Shoemaker Starr, authors of Secrets Under the Parking Lot: The True Story of Upper Arlington, Ohio, and the History of Perry Township in the Nineteenth Century (2017), Litchford had been an enslaved person in Lynchburg, Virginia, who bought his freedom then moved with his wife and four sons to what was then known as Perry Township, Ohio, in 1832. By the time of his death in 1879, he and his family had become quite prosperous (a “millionaire” in today’s terms) and had acquired a great deal of land — on which he had previously established a “Colored School” for Black children, and through which he, along with abolitionist and Baptist minister James Preston Poindexter and others, operated an underground railroad system for enslaved fugitives. That land was subsequently sold off as developers sought to incorporate the town, which, in turn, annexed additional large chunks of land during the mid-twentieth century.

In 1955, the Litchford family’s and others’ remains were exhumed and moved to Union Cemetery to make way for the high school. It wasn’t until several years ago that Starr and Runyon learned of the removal and transfer. Props to them and other local folks who are unearthing this history of racial segregation and seeking to make it more widely known through public venues and educational curricula. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Runyon and Starr state in an interview that the UA public library has not invited them to speak about their book.) There is also a Change.org petition to name the high school library after Pleasant Litchford in recognition of his historical presence, social involvement, and success on the school’s grounds.

The effects of these racial and socioeconomic restrictions are hardly a thing of the past, as contemporary demographic information about the suburb shows. Data USA offers these statistics for 2017:

  • Population: 34,943
    • White (Non-Hispanic): 89.7%
    • Asian (Non-Hispanic): 4.92%
    • Two or More Races (Non-Hispanic): 1.85%
    • White (Hispanic): 1.83%
    • Black or African American (Non-Hispanic): 0.904%
  • Median income: $110,397
  • Median property value: $357,200

The U.S. Census Bureau provides these updated numbers:

  • Population estimates (July 1, 2019): 35,366
    • White alone: 91.5%
    • Black or African American alone: 0.6%
    • American Indian and Alaska Native alone: 0.0%
    • Asian alone: 5.5%
    • Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander alone: 0.0%
    • Two or more races: 1.9%
    • Hispanic or Latino: 3.1%
    • White alone, not Hispanic or Latino: 89.1%
  • Median household income (in 2018 dollars), 2014-2018: $115,093
  • Median value of owner-occupied housing units, 2014-2018: $376,400

There is, of course, a much longer pre-history of Native presence in this area and state. I can’t speak to the accuracy or epistemology of that horrific number, 0.0%, in the present and will defer to the American Indian Studies Program at OSU, which notes that “Central Ohio is a traditional homeland of the Shawnee Nation; Delaware, Wyandot, and other Indigenous nations also have strong ties to these lands,” and to the Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio, which is “devoted to preserving and restoring balance in the lives of American Indian and Alaska Native youth and families living in and around Ohio through culture, wellness, community, and education.”

These histories and ongoing processes of racial segregation and settler colonialism are meant to frame my real point — my petty rant — which is a simple Public Service Announcement: WALK/RUN AGAINST TRAFFIC. BIKE WITH TRAFFIC. That typically means walk/run on the left side of the road. Not the right.

As much as I can, I run on the street rather than the sidewalk. I’m not a runner per se. For me, it’s about getting outside and away from my computer, not training or working out or anything like that. But I have read that asphalt is less punishing on your feet and joints than concrete, which makes a difference at my age. And some of the sidewalks themselves are so uneven and buckled from tree roots pushing up, that it’s hazardous to run on them (not “practicable” in legal parlance), especially when you’re trying to focus on a podcast.

So when I have to face a walker or runner coming at me on my side of the street, I get absurdly, ridiculously, exorbitantly angry. As the only person of color out running and as someone who can be mistaken for Chinese during the xenophobic COVID-19 kung flu pandemic, I can only imagine what I look like running on the left side of the street: a brown foreigner who doesn’t understand the rules of the road in this country.

What is even more rage-inducing is when I am forced to get out of someone else’s way who makes no attempt to move over, especially on the sidewalk. I’m way oversensitive about this because of breathing-while-running during coronavirus (leave extra space), and, again, because I look (kind of) oriental. But my rage also wells up from my awareness of the racist Jim Crow custom of Black people and other people of color having to step off the sidewalk to let white people pass. The entitled presumption that oncoming walkers, sometimes in horizontal pairs or groups, don’t have to move over for me sends me into towering heights of fury. And it’s not like I’m a speedy runner, either. My not-training-for-anything-listening-to-anti-racist-imperialist-capitalist podcasts pace is slow. Plenty of time to avoid a (corona cloud) collision and make a decision. So when it’s thrown back in my court, I cannot very well run straight at people, particularly mothers or nannies with double-wide strollers that hog up all the space, yelling this PSA and history in their faces as they scatter like affronted doves. I am no gentleman about it, I am not nice, but eventually I go around.

It is little consolation to take note of the signs that have cropped up in people’s yards since the protests against police violence erupted several months ago. Granted, my route traverses a very small part of the suburb, but in the hundreds of properties I pass, I’ve counted about a dozen or so signs that say “ENOUGH” in yellow letters against a black background (I guess this means: enough with the police and vigilante killings of Black people); about as many “UA Loves UAPD”; and two or three actual “Black Lives Matter” signs. The expressions of support for the police became more visible around July 4th. And all I could think was: of course, you do. The police work exactly as they are supposed to in your neighborhood — to protect your property while respecting your privacy. I often see one police car either parked under a tree or roaming down streets. Never have I seen an officer get out, much less stop or apprehend anybody.

Here is legal scholar Michelle Alexander putting this version of policing into perspective in her highly influential book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010/2012/2020):

From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions, furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that a few joints or a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone’s dresser drawer. Suburban homemakers could have been placed under surveillance and subjected to undercover operations designed to catch them violating laws regulating the use and sale of prescription “uppers.” All of this could have happened as a matter of routine in white communities, but it did not. (124, in 2012 edition)

The ludicrosity of imagining such scenarios is partly a result of the “political rhetoric and media imagery” starting in the 1980s that shifted from depictions of “white recreational users who snorted [cocaine] in its powder form” and focused on “the drug treatment industry, such as rehabilitation clinics, and emphasized the possibility of recovery,” to news and other media representations that fixed “in the public imagination the image of the black drug criminal” (105).

The war on drugs obviously was and is not waged in politically and economically resourced white communities. “Instead,” Alexander writes, “when police go looking for drugs, they look in the ‘hood.” The “hypersegregation of the black poor in ghetto communities” and those communities’ lack of political power has combined to make them “convenient targets” in this domestic war:

What happens to them does not directly affect — and is scarcely noticed by — the privileged beyond the ghetto’s invisible walls. Thus it is here, in the poverty-stricken, racially segregated ghettos, where the War on Poverty has been abandoned and factories have disappeared, that the drug war has been waged with the greatest ferocity. SWAT teams are deployed here; buy-and-bust operations are concentrated here; drug raids of apartment buildings occur here; stop-and-frisk operations occur on the streets here. Black and brown youth are the primary targets. It is not uncommon for a young black teenager living in a ghetto community to be stopped, interrogated, and frisked numerous times in the course of a month, or even a single week, often by paramilitary units. (124-5)

It goes without saying that such policing tactics are not in effect where I go running. I can only speculate that, because of the racial and economic segregation of this capital city and its suburbs as a whole, the majority of the suburbanites not only do not notice what goes on beyond their invisible walls, but also can scarcely believe that this kind of militarized overpolicing — and not just (“enough” with) the killings of Black people — are what the calls to defund the police and reallocate resources to community-building are seeking to redress.

Why do I persist, then, in subjecting myself daily to these torturous uncertainties and indignant resentments? (All in my head, of course.) Leaving aside my refusal to drive to find a peaceful trail that is likely overcrowded with corona breathers these days, the statistics cited above already paint a picture: it’s a nice neighborhood, it’s a safe neighborhood — yes, including for me, who is not a Black man (I am not Ahmaud Arbery) nor a trans or cisgender woman nor a gender nonconforming person. The homes and landscaping are well-kept, the flowers colorful, the curb appeal appealing to look at. The traffic on the side streets is fairly sparse. But most important to me, the mature trees provide protection from the energy-sapping sun (I am the opposite of Superman). In fact, over these many months and years of running, I’ve plotted my route by following the smoothest, newest asphalt and the most shade.

And no, I do not try to stay out of the sun for fear of getting too dark. I look forward to every summer when I can get back to what I fantasize would be my year-round hue, if not for the depressing fade that happens over winter.

I plan to take up the question of Filipinx racialization in another post. There’s some interesting conversating happening on that prickly issue in this moment. In the meantime, I will practice putting my steps on autopilot, my mask on Asiatic inscrutable, bracket the indignities of swerving around the coronawalkers, and concentrate on what’s going on in my earbuds, lest I actually open my mouth and say out loud what’s running through my mind.

On politicization

. . . Or, On Afro-Asian connections, part I

In my last post, I referenced the ways that Black studies discourse has critically engaged with the politics of representing Black suffering and death, noting in particular the wide range of possible effects that these images and live scenes can have on differently positioned witnesses, spectators, consumers, and mourners. That the same image or social event can have widely disparate meanings — for some, another unjust instance of oppression; for the unsympathetic, a justified use of force to maintain the racial order of things — offers one way into the question: what instigates non-Black folks to become politicized? Though that process could be variously defined, I mean it in this context to signal shifts in thinking and behavior whereby a person becomes cognizant of the historical existence and contemporary persistence of state-sanctioned, extra-legal, and interpersonal forms of anti-Black racism and self-consciously seeks to remedy those past and present wrongs.

I’m specifically inquiring about the politicization of Asian Americans in support of Black liberation. Leaving aside, for now, the many articulations of “Asians for Black lives” that are circulating in public discourse, I’ve been able to come up with only a handful of Asian American radicalization narratives more generally in literary history (though undoubtedly there are more I’m missing). Carlos Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical America Is in the Heart (1946) is perhaps the most well-known example of transnational radicalization in the Asian American literary archive. His narrative persona grows up during the U.S. colonial period an impoverished peasant in Pangasinan, Philippines, where his family is subject to immiseration by absentee landlordism and other forms of exploitation, and he later becomes a labor activist and organizer on the U.S. West Coast.

Subsequent Filipinx American martial law novels like Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), Gina Apostol’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter (2010/2012), and Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart (2018, a deliberate play on Bulosan’s classic text) feature privileged female protagonists who reject their elite backgrounds and become activists fighting against the repressive Marcos dictatorship. Interestingly, neither Hagedorn nor Castillo overtly explain why Daisy Avila or Hero (Geronima De Vera) joins the New People’s Army in their respective texts. Dogeaters‘ chapter titles narrate the beauty queen Daisy’s political awakening through allusions to fairy tales — “Sleeping Beauty,” “Epiphany,” “Breaking Spells” — but doesn’t divulge how she came to her decision to denounce the beauty pageant as anti-feminist on public television, renounce her crown, and abscond with the guerrilla rebel Santos Tirador. Castillo as well withholds Hero’s reasons for dropping out of medical school at University of Santo Tomas when she is recruited by two NPA cadres. Though Apostol, for her part, does explain why Sol gets briefly involved in activist work as a college student — she finds out that her parents are supplying arms to the violently repressive Marcos regime, hence the title — hers is the least optimistic about the prospects of what I called “revolution from above” in a review of the novel.

There are other literary examples. The Pakistani immigrant Changez in Mohsin Hamid’s post-9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) comes to recognize how U.S. imperialism operates through military interventions, financial coercions, and immigration policies, abandons his upward mobility trajectory in the U.S. (Princeton degree, a high-paying job at a valuation firm), and returns to Lahore to become a lecturer and political mentor to activist students. The clone Evie in Larissa Lai’s dystopian sci-fi novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) seeks to sabotage the power of the corporations because her and her sister clones’ “human” rights have been nullified by the splicing of 0.03% carp genes into their genetic codes. And a whole array of characters in Karen Tei Yamashita’s recreation of the Asian American and allied social movements in I Hotel (2010) become engaged in a variety of political activities and artistic and cultural work in the Bay Area during the 1960s and 70s.

That period of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements is the setting for prominent Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama becoming political — a process of politicization that, as she tells it in Passing It On: A Memoir (2004), was directly affected by her exposure to and engagement with the Black freedom struggle. Born to Issei parents and raised in San Pedro, California in 1921, Kochiyama writes that “In our Spanish-style house with a cactus garden, I was sheltered, lived comfortably and safely, religious, provincial, and apolitical in thought” (9). She reflects on the privileges and limitations that her early years in San Pedro afforded her:

As much as I enjoyed growing up in a friendly cosmopolitan small town, I needed to leave it and grow up, open myself to new ideas, meet new people, learn from life’s experiences. My provincial mentality and apolitical ideas needed to change and develop. I needed to leave San Pedro in order to enlarge my worldview, so that the people and encounters I speak of could become the primary sources from which my political ideas and philosophy have grown. (xxiii-xxiv)

The first major — catastrophic — event that took her out of her small town and her “provincial mentality” was being evacuated, relocated, and incarcerated along with 110,000+ other Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and FDR’s signing of Executive Order 9066. Kochiyama’s father was detained by the FBI immediately after December 7, 1941, and died the next spring. She and the rest of her family were first sent to live in the makeshift horse stalls at the Santa Anita Racetrack Assembly Center while the camps were being constructed in the U.S. interior, and eventually transferred to the concentration camp in Jerome, Arkansas.

Kochiyama considers the impact of incarceration on her worldview at a couple of moments in the memoir. In the introduction, she writes: “Before the war, I was seeing America with American eyes. What happened to Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor made me see the world and America with entirely new eyes — Japanese American eyes. In many ways, this marked the beginning of my political awakening and development” (xxiii).

In a later chapter, she describes getting a job at the USO in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, so she wouldn’t have to return to Jerome: “It was challenging but very liberating. First, I was on my own, and second, it challenged my thinking. I knew I was beginning to change my thinking, and I welcomed more changes. How little I understood about anything in life, and until that time was I indoctrinated with status quo mainstream American ideas, but I now knew it was time to go on my own and think for myself” (17).

Given the formative influence that Japanese American incarceration had on changing her “mainstream” American ideas, it is all the more remarkable that she attributes the beginning of her “political activism” not so much to her experience in Jerome’s concentration camp but to her family’s move to Harlem in 1960 with her husband Bill and six children ranging from one to thirteen years of age: “In December 1960, we moved to a new housing project in Harlem — the Manhattanville Houses on 126th and Broadway. It was a low-income housing project surrounded by Latino and Black families, and it was in this new neighborhood that at the age of forty, my political activism began to take shape” (47).

The rest of the memoir goes on to describe a multitude of activists and causes that she worked with and for over the next 40+ years, including her friendship with Malcolm X and her involvement with the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki World Peace Study Mission, the anti-Vietnam war movement, Asian Americans for Action, the Republic of New Africa, support for political prisoners (Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, Mumia Abu Jamal, Marilyn Buck, Steve Yip, Yu Kikumura, David Wong, Eddy Zheng, Lolita Lebron, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier), and numerous anti-imperialist struggles (she was part of the 19th Venceremos Brigade in 1988 and visited Peru in 1993 on a human rights mission).

Kochiyama emphasizes the pivotal moment that launched this restless activism near the beginning of the documentary Mountains That Take Wing: Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama—A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation (2009), produced by C. A. Griffith and H. L. T. Quan. The film splices together conversations between the two women that took place in Santa Barbara in 1996 and Oakland in 2008 and is currently streaming for free on the web through Films for Action. (Ok, so the main impetus behind this inordinately long blog post was to cite this documentary and encourage people to watch it. I don’t see it get a whole lot of airplay.) In the first few minutes, Kochiyama replies to Davis’s invitation to “tell me how it all began,” by saying, “I didn’t become political until late. I was 40. And actually, I didn’t become political until we moved to Harlem. [. . .] And that changed our life because, well, we said, we better learn something about the Black community, Black movement.”

By contrast, Davis describes her upbringing in deeply segregated Birmingham, Alabama, and the white supremacist violence she and the Black community there were subjected to during the Bull Connor years. Her recollections of that childhood in 1996 and 2008 are fairly mild compared to the stark description she provides in a 1972 interview with Swedish journalists while in a California prison that is part of The Black Power MixTape, 1967-1975 (2011). Davis responds to questioning about the Black Panthers, revolution, and violence with an exasperated explanation of having been surrounded by state and vigilante violence all her life, citing, among other incidents, the infamous 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 that killed four African American girls and injured at least twelve others. Davis ends her critique of the question, “So that’s why when someone asks me about violence, I just, I just find it incredible. Because what it means is that the person asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through, what Black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first Black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

In Mountains That Take Wing, Davis concludes of the impact that the two women’s differing circumstances had on their political trajectories, “I think place has a lot to do with the politicization,” and Kochiyama agrees.

There is much to say about how segregation can throw up obstacles to interracial relationships for someone like Kochiyama, and make being “political” a matter of necessity and survival for someone like Davis. But it is instructive to hear how the Kochiyama family’s first thought upon moving to Harlem is not to try to maintain distance or differentiate themselves from their neighbors but to learn about the Black movement and immerse themselves in the Black community. Passing It On describes the family’s support for Black struggles, in part, through their “Christmas Cheer” newsletters, which started in 1949 but turned political in 1963, as well as their resonantly titled “North Star” family movement newsletter, which lasted from 1965 to 1969. Here’s one choice snippet from the former that is prescient in its call to white and non-Black people of color to reckon with colorism in our communities:

World renown[ed] sociologist, John Hope Franklin, stated: “Almost invariably the Negro progresses only to the extent that the white man advances in understanding that a human being is a human being. The Negro cannot achieve except where the white man has advanced enough to allow him.” But it is not only the white man, but the yellow man, the brown man, and men of every light pigmentation who have imbued self-elevation by lighter-coloring who are guilty of the ferment in race relationship[s]. Each must examine himself for the varying degrees of prejudice are found in every ethnic and religious group at every level and every area individually and en masse, not only in America, but on every continent. The cry, heard round the world, for human rights, dignity, and freedom must be answered with social justice. . . . (110-11)

The “North Star” newsletters, meanwhile, take up such issues and formations as Black nationalism, SNCC and the Black Panther Party, the Republic of New Africa, and Black political prisoners, along with the anti-Vietnam war and Asian American movements.

What I find most moving and inspiring about the documentary is being given the opportunity to watch two seasoned women-of-color activists talking with one another in their homes. Although the film does include clips of them speaking at public rallies, podiums, and conferences, most of it is comprised of extended scenes of their conversations in interior spaces. They don’t try to one-up each other on points of radical theory or political causes they’ve been involved in or famous activists they’ve known (obviously, they are the famous activists we’ve come to know). They don’t try to prove to each other or the camera who is more down with the people or more woke. And the fact that we are listening in on a Japanese American woman and an African American woman discuss their ideas about and experiences with social justice movements breaks with the predominant Afro-Asian studies tradition which manifests an “almost-exclusive focus on men as political and historical actors in the construction of cross-racial solidarities,” as scholars Vanita Reddy and Anantha Sudhakar write in their introduction to the special issue of S&F Online, “Queer and Feminist Afro-Asian Formations.” What comes across in the film is not “heteromasculinity” or “heterosexual couplehood” as the “structuring conditions of possibility for cross-racial solidarity,” as Reddy and Sudhakar put it, but genuine curiosity about each other’s lives and viewpoints and an equally generous willingness to reveal them.

In giving us this glimpse of their conversations, the film shows Kochiyama and Davis modeling for us what M. Jacqui Alexander eloquently describes as becoming women of color:

In order to become women of color, we would need to become fluent in each others’ histories, to resist and unlearn an impulse to claim first oppression, most-devastating oppression, one-of-a-kind oppression, defying-comparison oppression. We would have to unlearn an impulse that allows mythologies about each other to replace knowing about one another. We would need to cultivate a way of knowing in which we direct our social, cultural, psychic, and spiritually marked attention on each other. We cannot afford to cease yearning for each others’ company. (M. Jacqui Alexander, “Remembering This Bridge Called My Back, Remembering Ourselves,” in Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred [Durham: Duke University Press, 2005], 257-86; 269.)

This isn’t to posit false equivalences across racial-gender experiences and histories, or to assert that directing attention to one group’s oppression to combat the mythologies that substitute for knowledge somehow deflects attention away from oneself or other groups (e.g., the stupid all lives matter response to Black Lives Matter). The dialogues in the documentary themselves contravene such oversimplifications and abstractions, even as they suggest that to become fluent in each others’ histories may require not only yearning for but being present in each others’ company.

Toward the end of Mountains That Take Wing, Davis asserts the need for Kochiyama’s story of politicization to become one of those histories that should be more widely known: “Your history and how you became conscious of fighting racism and inequality and injustice and fighting against war — we need to understand better how that happened so that it’s not accidental, so that we can actually encourage it.”

And she emphasizes Kochiyama’s efforts to work across social differences in these anti-racist and anti-imperialist projects: “Your history as someone who has always encouraged community building across the divisions that usually keep us apart—”

At this point, Kochiyama interjects, “Oh yes, there must be that kind of alliance, that kind of getting to know one another better, and doing things together, oh yes. Ok, so where do you think it has to begin?”

Davis’s answer: “Well, I think it begins wherever you are. My sense has always been that activism isn’t something special. It’s not located in a particular space. It’s about doing the work you’re able to do given the position you’re in at any given moment.”

It doesn’t have to take a dramatic move into open air or closed prisons or a racially different neighborhood to become political. Nor does it require having bombs go off in your neighborhood in response to “integration.” It can begin and continue by critically reflecting on the positions we’re in, here and now, while remaining open to being moved.

 

On evidence

Few can doubt that the 8-minute, 46-second video captured by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier of George Floyd’s death has played a crucial role in galvanizing the demonstrations against deadly police force. To be sure, the previous years, decades, centuries of Black resistance, organizing, and activism have laid the groundwork for present-day uprisings. But in this specific case, regardless of what happened before the camera started recording, it is clear that Floyd had been “subdued” and was not “resisting arrest,” so Derek Chauvin’s persistence in pressing his knee on Floyd’s neck, despite the latter’s calls for air and bystanders’ worries about his well-being, is undeniably excessive and cruel.

Without taking away anything from Frazier for recording the event and posting it to her Facebook page or from the demonstrations that have emerged as the video went viral, it is worth reflecting on this particular piece of visual footage — the killing of a Black man through the literalization of a metaphor of oppression — as the catalyst for the current demands for racial justice.

Dr. Koritha Mitchell’s book Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (2011), again, provides an important historical frame for thinking about this issue. She notes the relative lack of attention given to the plays she examines by Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Burrill, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Myrtle Smith Livingston, G. D. Lipscomb, and Joseph Mitchell compared to the lynching photographs displayed in the Without Sanctuary galleries, website, and $60 hardcover edition (2000):

Decades of antilynching activism and testimony from victimized black families did not move the nation’s leaders at the turn of the century, and today they are not the inspiration for the Senate’s historic gesture [of apologizing in 2005 for never passing an antilynching bill] or for the majority of lynching scholarship. Instead, white-authored photographs have become the evidence that simply cannot be ignored. (6)

Dr. Mitchell points out that the recourse to these visual artifacts as proof of white supremacist violence elevates their authority over the victims’ own voices, while also reinforcing the very narrative of racism that led to their existence in the first place:

[. . .] when we treat images of mutilated bodies as the ultimate evidence of lynching destruction, we reaffirm the authority of the mob. Ultimately, it is because they come from white perpetrators themselves that we have allowed the images to continue to trump testimony from victimized communities. By treating the pictures as records, we pretend that they offer an objective view, that they are less biased than the testimonies of those targeted by this terror. But the pictures are anything but objective. They represent a particular perspective, and they helped the mob to accomplish its work, during and long after the victim’s murder. The photographs did not simply document violence; they very much perform(ed) it. (6)

In line with the long history of the enslaved (and other people of color) being prevented from testifying against white aggressors and defendants, the photographs taken by mob participants posture as “objective” documents but in reality “decontextualize” the scene by “depict[ing] victims as isolated brutes with no connection to a family or community” as is fitting of a social ritual designed to exorcise “evil” from its midst (7).

Granted, the parallels between the period Dr. Mitchell is analyzing and today are not exact. Darnella Frazier (who is African American) did not videotape the scene so that she could take away a “souvenir” of the ritualistic “exorcism” (“Souvenir hunting would complete the drama with audience participation, but because the most coveted keepsakes [such as the victim’s bones and burnt flesh] were in limited supply, pictures became souvenirs” [7]; “the genre [of antilynching plays] helps reveal that real-life lynchings were tolerated because they were read as legitimate scenarios of exorcism. That is, mobs were believed to cast out the evil that blacks supposedly embodied” [17]). Rather, as Frazier herself has stated, she recorded the deadly incident as an act of witnessing and exposure. Despite these differences, though, they share some aspects, most notably, the devaluation of Black perspectives on the violence they have experienced — in this instance, the fact that prior Black criticisms of police violence have not brought an end to anti-Black policing.

It is possible that the calls to defund the police and reinvest in historically defunded communities may alter, if not completely abolish, the police’s customary roles. (There is obviously a lot of debate around this question, some of it stoked by fear and incredulity stemming from the privilege of not living in an overpoliced neighborhood, that I will bracket for now.) But as foretold by the divergent meanings derived from the lynching photographs — one perspective sees a family memento of a social outing; another sees a grisly death whose impact on the community entails “enduring losses, including psychological, emotional, and financial suffering” (Mitchell 7) — there is no guarantee that evidence of Black suffering will have the desired or desirable political or ethical effects.

Literary and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman raises this issue in the opening pages of her book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), by pointing to the range of effects that repetitive consumption of Black pain can have. While discussing the “‘terrible spectacle’ that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery” in his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass — namely, “the beating of his Aunt Hester” (3) — Hartman declines from reproducing the whipping “in order to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the slave’s ravaged body”:

Rather than inciting indignation, too often they immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity [. . .] and especially because they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering. What interests me are the ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes. Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance? What does the exposure of the violated body yield? Proof of black sentience or the inhumanity of the “peculiar institution”? [. . .] At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator. Only more obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible. In light of this, how does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle or contend with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other or the prurience that too often is the response to such displays? (3-4)

Hartman elucidates the double bind of being compelled to show the brutalized Black body to “confirm the truth” of the abuse in the face of protestations of innocence or exaggeration, as noted in my previous post, while also confronting the limits of such expressions: the precariousness of empathy that arises from routinized desensitization, the prurient voyeurism that demands such spectacular displays as proof of racial oppression, and the obscene correlation and even equation between Blackness and violation that these endless recitations make possible. Whatever the incentive or consequence, the countless instances of Black suffering and death reveal a core truth: that racial difference and hierarchy is secured and socially reproduced through anti-Black violence.

While many commentators have pointed out that the videos captured on cell phones have helped to validate claims of anti-Black police brutality and vigilante violence, the ease and casualness with which these visual images are circulated through the technologies of the internet and social media have only increased the potential for the kinds of deleterious effects that Hartman outlines. That the videos of George Floyd’s killing and Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting have gone viral in the midst of a viral pandemic disproportionately impacting Black and Brown populations renders this convergence of multi-sided vulnerabilities all the more grotesque and horrific.

The reliance on visible evidence of Black pain and death to move the non-Black public to take notice and start to believe what Black folk have been saying since their capture on this continent has several problematic consequences beyond the possibilities of compounding trauma (for those who identify in some way with the victim) or eliciting sadistic pleasure (for those who objectify in some way the victim). First, it can obscure from view entire groups of people, most notably, Black cisgender women and girls, transwomen, transmen, and/or gender-nonconforming people. As Black feminist, cultural studies scholar, and OSU professor Dr. Treva Lindsey recently wrote in an essay for Bustle, “Hearing [Breonna] Taylor’s story [of being shot by police while sleeping in her own bed] immediately conjured memories of police killing other Black women and girls, such as Atatiana Jefferson, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Pearlie Golden, in their own homes, where no brave bystanders could bear witness and record their senseless deaths at the hands of police. Not even their homes could offer safety from fatal violence initiated by those paid by our tax dollars ‘to protect and serve.'” The lack of recordings, coupled with the engrained patriarchy of American culture, contributes to the “comparative lack of mobilized outrage for the killing of Black women and girls,” which in turn constitutes “an injurious erasure.”

In addition to this gendered erasure, the dependence on visual corroboration radically diminishes the scale of oppression to the one incident. The scope of justice is thus concomitantly reduced to holding the one perpetrator (or four perpetrators) to account. Finally, this point begs the question: how many incidents does it take before “a few bad apples” becomes understood as a pervasive, systemic problem? What threshold does the body count need to surpass before we’ve entered into a crisis of epidemic proportions?

Rather than end on these sobering notes, I’d like to turn to an essay titled “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” that poet and editor Claudia Rankine published in the New York Times Magazine in the wake of the killing of “Susie Jackson; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; DePayne Middleton-Doctor; Ethel Lee Lance; the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr.; the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney; Cynthia Hurd; Tywanza Sanders and Myra Thompson” in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015, by a self-identified white supremacist. Rankine’s piece echoes some of Drs. Mitchell’s and Hartman’s claims regarding the historical and contemporary ubiquity of Black killings:

We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police or warehoused in prisons: Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against.

She goes on to note that there are no self-evident ways for African Americans to deal with this everyday proximity and vulnerability to mortality by comparing the different decisions taken by Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till who was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955, and Lesley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown who was killed by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, regarding their sons’ slain bodies. The former insisted on an open casket funeral in their home city of Chicago and “‘disidentified’ with the tradition of the lynched figure left out in public view as a warning to the black community, thereby using the lynching tradition against itself. The spectacle of the black body, in her hands, publicized the injustice mapped onto her son’s corpse.” The latter, by contrast, whose son’s body was left out in the street for four hours as an intimidating act of racial terror, had “little desire to expose her son’s corpse to the media. Her son was not an orphan body for everyone to look upon.”

But for all the mass protests that Michael Brown’s death incited in Ferguson and around the world, and for all the militarized response that came rolling down the streets and was beamed into our living rooms and devices to suppress those uprisings, what Rankine ultimately emphasizes about the Black Lives Matter movement is not so much its efforts to occupy public space and disrupt business as usual (as important as those tactics are) but its reenvisioning of mourning as a political and ethical strategy: “The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness.” To engage in a “sustained state of national mourning for black lives” would entail on the part of all Americans (and humanity) an “internalized change” of “recognition” for the grievability — and thus, human value — of all Black lives. Such an ethics of recognition through collective mourning might “break a momentum that laws haven’t altered.” Against the potential for the deceased Black body to effect shock, numbness, identification, or voyeurism (“a spectacle for white pornography: the dead body as an object that satisfies an illicit desire”), Rankine suggests that cross-racial subjective “feeling for another” could very well lead to social transformation: “Grief, then, for these deceased others might align some of us, for the first time, with the living.”

On Black affirmation and non-Black counterreactions

. . . Or, On innocence, part I

It is heartening to see, in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, the mass demonstrations that have taken place over the past two weeks in cities, suburbs, and small towns across the country and in countries around the world. These gatherings, marches, and confrontations imply that many people are ready and willing to support, at minimum, justice for Floyd’s death and an end to the use of lethal police force, particularly against Black bodies. But there are no doubt many of us non-Black folks, in the streets and off, who are uncertain about the methods being used to express those calls for justice, the content of the calls themselves, and the broader implications of what the Movement for Black Lives is actually asking of us. Consider this one, then, a proverbial space-clearing gesture, an attempt to clear some space to allow those calls, critiques, and demands to reach us and sink in.

In her award-winning book Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (2011), my esteemed colleague, Dr. Koritha Mitchell, has persuasively argued that nothing brings out the violence of the white supremacist mob and its state-sanctioned and sanctioning allies quite like Black success and progressive steps, however incremental, toward equity and parity. It is not racial crime or menacing threats that summon acts of domination on the part of the majority but visible manifestations of Black minorities living and thriving. Historical examples of this dynamic are unfortunately too many to enumerate in full. To cite just a few: the reign of terror unleashed by the Ku Klux Klan during and in the wake of Reconstruction; the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma, race massacre; the belligerent responses to the Civil Rights Movement by law enforcement and lay people alike; the crackdown on and infiltration of Black liberation organizations, the gutting of the Civil Rights Acts, and the extreme conservative backlash in the 1970s and 80s; and the extraordinary racial ressentiment, after eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency (hardly a period of racial redress or transformation), that led to the election of 45 in 2016.

Dr. Mitchell’s analysis provides a useful frame for thinking about the incident that took place a couple weeks ago in the Rambles in NYC’s Central Park when (white) Amy Cooper called the police on (Black) Christian Cooper after the latter told the former to leash her dog. At the most fundamental level, Amy Cooper’s tactic of insisting that an “African American man is recording me and threatening me and my dog” directly connects with the history of lynching in the U.S. As anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells writes in A Red Record (1895), the “third excuse” invented by white Southerners during the post-Reconstruction era to justify the killings of Black people, after repressing “race riots” and suppressing the franchise, was “that Negroes had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women. There could be framed no possible excuse more harmful to the Negro and more unanswerable if true in its sufficiency for the white man.” Wells goes on to elaborate: “Humanity abhors the assailant of womanhood, and this charge upon the Negro at once placed him beyond the pale of human sympathy. With such unanimity, earnestness and apparent candor was this charge made and reiterated that the world has accepted the story that the Negro is a monster which the Southern white man has painted him.” Amy Cooper’s reiterated description of Christian Cooper as an “African American man” summons this history and weaponizes the spectre of the Black man threatening the white woman to get the police to intervene — even if, as Dr. Mitchell further explains, “lynching is not about protecting white women or even about miscegenation,” given the white man’s prerogative to have access to Black women’s bodies, but rather “about ensuring that white men can control the sexuality of both black and white women” (171). Calling the authorities is a tactic that aligns white femininity with the state but only through its subordination to patriarchal control in the name of protection.

Even before the deployment of the myth of the monstrous Black man, though, something more immediate and subtle happens that is worth extrapolating and recontextualizing beyond Amy Cooper’s individual motives, fears, and regrets. Her indignant overreaction at being told to follow the rules — that is, of having her presumptive access to public space contested — by a Black man, an avid birder who was trying to prevent the dog from scaring away the ground-dwellers and trampling on the plant life, shows another dimension of the dynamic that Dr. Mitchell describes. What beckons the authorities and asks them to come to the aid of the privileged majority in this instance is when presumptive white innocence is challenged and shown to be in the wrong by a figure who is supposed to be deprived of the authority to issue any such claims. How dare he.

The connection between Dr. Mitchell’s research and this incident prompts me to consider, on a collective level, Amy Cooper-like reactions to the public uprisings in the wake of the deaths of Floyd (killed by police only six days after the Rambles incident), Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and far too many others. When Black folks and their allies march in the streets and call out the systems that oppress them and deny or limit their access to basic conditions for living — safety, peace, health care, child care, housing, education, employment, transportation, utilities, nutritious food, uncontaminated water. Air — those calls simultaneously constitute challenges to privileged, non-Black folks for our complicity with those systems of oppression. They force us to question whose privacy and property and private property the police have been designed and outfitted to protect and which populations have been designated as those to be protected from. These grievances and the strategies used to voice them can easily be misheard and misunderstood.

In an essay addressing the lamentations about the “riots” and the “looting” in the first days of the uprisings, another of my esteemed colleagues, Dr. Pranav Jani, historicizes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s declaration that “a riot is the language of the unheard” in his speech “Beyond Vietnam” (1967). Dr. Jani situates Dr. King’s words within the context of the U.S. military’s escalation of the air and ground war in Southeast Asia: “I could never again,” states King, “raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” Dr. Jani notes that in this speech and another titled “The Other America” delivered ten days later, Dr. King “came out and criticized the riots, which were breaking out all over the country in the late 1960s,” but he also “very clearly talked about the need to understand and not just condemn — and called for an end to the conditions of injustice and impoverishment that created the situation.”

Given this tendency on the part of those of us who do not experience such unjust and impoverishing conditions on a daily basis to condemn, it is unsurprising, therefore, when political demonstrations and rallies for affirmation and solidarity are met with quizzical skepticism, vociferous denials, or, worst of all, support for militarized force to quell the unrest. “We” are not the purveyors of violence. We did not kill anyone or stand by as someone was murdered in broad daylight. We are innocent. How dare they.

The two scenarios I’m describing are not perfectly analogous, by any means. Being told to collar your dog is on a much smaller scale than being told to End the War on Black People and stop the killing — whether by split-second death for playing with a toy gun, by 9-minute death with a knee in the neck, or by the myriad deprivations and disinvestments that allow for premature slow death, particularly as those processes affect Black women, as anthropologist Christen A. Smith details. But it’s the shared response of feeling affronted that I’m trying to get at here.

Such counterreactions also have a long history but among the most memorable ones is that ventriloquized by James Baldwin in “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” which became the opening salvo in his book The Fire Next Time (1963). Addressed to his brother’s fifteen-year-old son, the letter articulates a critique of structural racism and indicts not just the violence but the protestations of ignorance and innocence toward that violence:

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. [. . . R]emember, I said most of mankind, but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. (5-6)

Delineating the limited life chances and options available to his Harlem-raised nephew by virtue of being “black and for no other reason,” Baldwin then anticipates the reactions this grim depiction will inevitably elicit from non-Black readers: “‘No! This is not true! How bitter you are!’” He later imagines his “countrymen” disagreeing with him and saying, “‘You exaggerate’” (7-8). Thus, the last sentence in the block quotation takes on a double meaning: holding onto innocence by rejecting or belittling the truth of the testimony is a crime, but it is precisely that maintenance of innocence which also “constitutes” and perpetuates the crimes perpetrated against Black humanity.

While there are any number of reasons why such preservations of moral innocence occur, I will save those considerations for another time and skip here to the other side. What is the alternative to this defensiveness — a defensiveness that can quickly move, as the Cooper incident and the municipal and federal shows of force reveal, into offense mode? For those who don’t agree with brute state repression, a productive alternative to asserting innocence is not, however, to wallow in guilt. As Audre Lorde famously argued in her 1981 keynote presentation “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” collected in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), guilt is often not a useful emotion since “it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. [. . . A]ll too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness” (130).

Bracketing the impulses to claim a criminal innocence or accept an immobilizing guilt can set the groundwork for listening to the grievances and the demands for justice. Admittedly, those are not always easy to hear over the din of mainstream news coverage of what’s happening on the streets and coming out of the White House. But even when we do encounter them — for example, the Movement for Black Lives’ platform includes an end to the war against Black people, repair for past and continuing harms, divestment from the police and investment in Black communities, economic justice for Black people, community control over local institutions, Black self-determination, (and added in the current moment) respect for the rights of protestors, and immediate relief for Black communities during the pandemic — it can be easy, and is certainly easier, not to hear them, to condemn them, to scoff at them as unfounded complaints or impractical demands for change, derisively denounced as handouts. Are they just bitter? Do they exaggerate?

What else, though, could calls for systemic transformation entail if not expansions of our moral, social, and political imaginations? Many community organizers and activists have not only dreamed up alternatives to exploitative and oppressive business as usual but also put those ideas into practice. At the very least, if we don’t wish to be an Amy Cooper or one of Baldwin’s detractors or Lorde’s guilt-ridden non-actors, we will have to press pause on our knee-jerk dismissals and denials and stretch ourselves out to hear and learn more about those political critiques and utopian proposals. Only then will the actual implications of what working toward such social change become apparent to us, which is when the real hard part begins.

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. 1963. Vintage, 1993.

Jani, Pranv. “A Riot is the Language of the Unheard — Remembering the Words of MLK.” Medium, 28 May 2020, https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/a-riot-is-the-language-of-the-unheard-remembering-the-words-of-mlk-edd673d69762.

Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.

Mitchell, Koritha. Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930. University of Illinois Press, 2011.

Smith, Christen A. “Slow Death: Is the Trauma of Police Violence Killing Black Women?” The Conversation, 11 July 2016, https://theconversation.com/slow-death-is-the-trauma-of-police-violence-killing-black-women-62264.

Wells, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry Printers, 1895.

On indebtedness

It is not an overstatement to say that I owe my livelihood to Black studies — and thus, of course, to Black people, Black lives, Black activism, and Black minds. Although I was hired to teach Asian American literature at Ohio State, much of my graduate training focused on African American literature and culture. My dissertation advisor, Black studies scholar Brent Hayes Edwards, gallantly agreed to chair my dissertation on Filipinx American literature when I switched topics on a dime after my candidacy exams. That project’s transnational and diasporic framework was deeply influenced by my director’s own scholarship and advising, as was the revised book that eventually come out of that initial research. Beyond intellectual influence and mentorship, Black literary studies has materially kept me employed since I continue to teach English courses in the field. And, finally, at the level of inter/disciplinary infrastructure, Asian American studies owes its very existence to the Black-led student activism in 1968-1969 that led to the creation of the first School of Ethnic Studies and eventually to the race/culture-specific departments, programs, and centers that have been institutionalized around the country.

In this time of renewed calls to affirm Black lives, I am compelled to acknowledge these multiple levels of indebtedness to Black studies through the medium that I have learned it most emphatically through — writing. It’s not much, but I’m aware of my own assets (such as they are) and limitations (much as they are). So while I continue to do the research toward the Asian American literature book that I’m supposed to be working on, I will, at the same time, be writing brief pieces on the manifold ways that African American literature, culture, and scholarship has been and continues to be integral to my understanding of and self-positioning within the world.

Another incitement to this prefatory note: I’ve seen a number of folks circulating on social media syllabi and lists of books and articles and videos to read and watch in order to learn about the long history and contemporary manifestations of anti-Black racism, intersectional forms of oppression and privilege, and strategies for affirmation, allyship, and advocacy. These assemblings of resources are necessary, important, and useful, and there are so many available online — many of them temporarily free to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic — that I won’t even try to reproduce them here. While I appreciate being informed about their existence and often consult them myself, I do wonder sometimes about the limits of lists without annotations, descriptions, or robust engagements. It kind of comes off to me as the equivalent of solidarity statements — cringey articulations of “I see you, I hear you” — without any evidence of that recognition. Here is my way of engaging publicly with Black intellectual culture.

If there’s one anti-Black stereotype that, I think, informs and governs so much anti-Blackness writ large, it is the derogatory assumption of Black intellectual inferiority. Select Black people in the U.S. are praised for their athletic prowess and musical abilities but only rarely for the use of their minds. This odious idea goes back centuries. Discussing 18th and 19th-century slave narratives in her essay “The Site of Memory” (1987), Toni Morrison, for example, writes:

One has to remember that the climate in which they [fugitive/former enslaved people] wrote reflected not only the Age of Enlightenment but its twin, born at the same time, the Age of Scientific Racism. David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson, to mention only a few, had documented their conclusions that blacks were incapable of intelligence. Frederick Douglass knew otherwise, and he wrote refutations of what Jefferson said in “Notes on the State of Virginia”: “Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture” — a sentence that I have always thought ought to be engraved at the door to the Rockefeller Collection of African Art. Hegel, in 1813, had said that Africans had no “history” and couldn’t write in modem languages. Kant disregarded a perceptive observation by a black man by saying, “This fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” (89-90)

Part of what is so striking about Beloved (1987), the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that Morrison was working on when she delivered this lecture-cum-essay, is how she uses the roving third-person narrative voice to dip in and out of her characters’ consciousnesses and allows us glimpses into their perceptive observations and thinking. Here, for example, is young Denver, Sethe’s sole child after her brothers Buglar and Howard’s flight and the crawling-already baby’s death, yearning for the exquisite, if fickle, look from Beloved, the young woman who might be an abused runaway, a survivor of the Middle Passage, or Denver’s older sister resurrected, and whom Sethe takes in and cares for:

It didn’t have to happen often, because Beloved seldom looked right at her, or when she did, Denver could tell that her own face was just the place those eyes stopped while the mind behind it walked on. But sometimes — at moments Denver could neither anticipate nor create — Beloved rested cheek on knuckles and looked at Denver with attention.

It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other. (139)

Since such moments of looking are rare as Beloved gives more and more of her attention to Sethe and Sethe seeks to appease her demands in search of forgiveness, Denver has to “step off the edge of the world” (281) and seek help for her deteriorating household from the community that has shunned them. She finds its initial expression in the teacher Lady Jones’s blessing: “Oh, baby”: “Denver looked up at her. She did not know it then, but it was the word ‘baby,’ said softly and with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman” (292).

Such power of intersubjective recognition can only be given and received intracommunally. My efforts here are much more modest, suited to my roles as appreciator, conduit, and perennial student of African American literature. Consider the forthcoming series, then, written in the tradition of Douglass’s refutations of Black intellectual deficiency and in the spirit of amplifying the Black literary and scholarly voices that demonstrate otherwise.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. Vintage, 2004.

Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, Houghton Mifflin, 1995, pp. 85-102.