Showing posts with label trayvon martin. Show all posts
    Showing posts with label trayvon martin. Show all posts

  • “But watch who you bring home, they see a black man with a white woman, at the top floor they gone come kill King Kong,” raps a laser focused Kanye West on his new song Black Skinhead.




    I read it. I heard it. More than a few people thought women, mothers would convict, now acquitted murderer, George Zimmerman. They did not think race mattered. It does. Don’t forget the dichotomy of the helpless White woman and the menacing Black predator. In 2008, Lebron James posed mouth agape and beastly in stance, one arm around an off-kilter Gisele Bundchen. Vogue used the racially conscious picture to drum up publicity. America’s tongue wags for racism like a b-tch in heat. We love to use American slavery and racism for Hollywood dollars and media coverage, yet claim we live in a post-racial society or that we as Black people always play the race card. We know how much media and advertisement plays a part in selling us lipstick, blush, hair color, and Nair, but after Trayvon Martin’s case we ignore how we are also sold racism and White privilege.

    Unfortunately and fortunately, my first experience of the fear White America has about me, a Black boy, dating a White girl was a lesson from my parents. I dated a White girl named Lauren; my mother’s message to me was “don’t be alone with that White girl, ever.” She feared for me. For she knew what Adrienne Kennedy wrote in her essay Grendel and Grendel’s Mother “Ever since I’d been an undergraduate at Ohio State there were few white women that I didn’t dislike. White women, I felt since the days of American slavery were instigators of racial cruelties and evil.”




    Kennedy an esteemed Obie Award winning playwright for the 1964 play Funnyhouse of a Negro, and the 1996 June and Jean in Concert and Sleep Deprivation Chamber. She rights in the aforementioned essay “now both my sons were with white women. I’d searched for a way to rid myself of the conflicting torment I felt at seeing my sons with these women. I tried to write about this torment in my essay Letter to Flowers, then I started a murder novel in which both women were found dead in a garden in Virginia.”  Black women know their sons as victims of White women. While, White women have been taught Black men prey upon them. Have we forgotten how quickly we believed Susan Smith, Ashley Todd, and Boonie Sweeten when they claimed Black men harmed them physically or kidnapped them and their kids? In all these instances, it took months for the truth to come out. When women claim to be victims of crimes we tend to take them at face value; however, there is something historically present at work when White women continuously play on America’s fear of the Black man to frame them.  

    In the instructions given to an all female-predominately White jury, the judge wrote:

    however, to justify the use of deadly force, the appearance of danger must have been so real       that a reasonably cautious and prudent person under the same circumstances would have believed that the danger could be avoided only through the use of that force.


    The judge was asking these White women, who have been conditioned to fear Black men and Black youth, to essentially convict themselves, their “reasonably cautious and prudent” self.



  • Apparently, this past Sunday, Justice Clarence Thomas did not tune into the epic night that was Next Chapter and Dark Girls on OWN. Justice Thomas has a great aptitude for prejudice and his reverence for Whiteness is only matched by, well, our own. Twice this week, Justice Thomas has been on the wrong side of history, but he has been in line with a long tradition of Blacks hindering the rights of gays and aspiring to Whiteness. White gays have long seen the Black community as an obstacle to gay marriage in the United States.  At virtually every traditional-marriage rally, African-American religious leaders have played a prominent role. White gays also despise those that are a kin to them (Black gays) for the perceived lack of socio-political engagement in the matter. For White gays, Justice Thomas is now seen as ignorant, one that cannot, or rather, refuses to see the intrinsic link between gay civil rights and African American civil rights. I expected White twitter to be furious with Justice Thomas, but it was Black Twitter who also jumped on the bandwagon. I don’t quite understand.  We are the same community that values ‘good hair,’ ‘proper English,’ and ‘lighter skin’. Of course Justice Thomas is in the pocket of the White man, we all have been. Viola Davis described it best, when she said we create cerebral narratives that “our make up has always got to be perfect, our hair has always got to be perfect, [or] if it’s a male in a narrative he’s always got to have tight abs,” if not we show how much we hate ourselves. As I write this article, I am also watching the Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin trial. I am honestly saddened beyond measure. Rachel Jeantel, friend of slain Black teen Trayvon Martin, is on the witness stand being badgered by a White man with a law degree; while on Twitter, her dark skin, ‘bad hair’, and weight are being shredded apart by Black people. The two that scrolled across my twitter timeline were by two males, one with light skin, and yes, the other with those tight abs Viola Davis mentioned. Before we crucify Justice Thomas lets take a hard look at ourselves; there is danger in forgetting we are all n-ggas no matter how assimilated. We demand so much of one man, when we have offered so little ourselves.



    Follow the author of this article: @noose_lme


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