Oak Creek Blues

Oak Creek Blues

by Courtney Baker | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

Writing this hurts. As I have been reading the reports coming out of Wisconsin, following the tweets (@sepiamutiny has been an exceptionally good source), and watching (barely tolerable and woefully meager) television coverage of the mass shooting of a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, my heart has been breaking.

I simply cannot fathom how another mass shooting could break out less than a month after the country was collectively horrified by the killings in Aurora, Colorado. My stomach seized up when it dawned on me that the Oak Creek shooter—and in all likelihood others as well—felt something other than raw disgust and shock about Aurora’s misery. Some one out there must have thought something along the lines of, “That looks like a good idea,” or “I could do better,” or “Ok, so that’s what I need to do,” or—and this is the one that truly chills me, as a black woman—“That guy in Aurora picked the wrong targets.”

That is when it hit me: That despite the denials of the tweeters and the pundits and of the CNN reporter who deliberately cut off the Sikh interviewee who was historicizing violence against Sikh’s in America, Oak Creek is different because of the way that race figures in.

I am not saying, here, that white people are not victims of gun violence. Of course they are, and that’s a reason that, in my opinion, we need to have a serious conversation about gun control in this country. (I hope that it isn’t the case that we can only talk about gun violence when white folks are involved, though.)

Even if the shooter did not turn out to be white supremacist, we should still have been able to read the event through the clarifying lenses of race. Even before Wade Michael Page’s card-carrying membership member of Wage Apathy (a skinhead band, according to Huffington Post) was exposed, we could already recognize patterns that made it most likely that this was a racially-motivated killing spree. He clearly had an intention to kill a group of people, not an individual, and he didn’t show up at a white church service which, presumably, would have been closer to him and easier to infiltrate).

What I am saying is that acknowledging the reality of race helps us to make sense of this tragedy.

Race is not intrinsically evil. When race is celebrated as a feature of one’s individuality and identity, it can be a wonderful thing. But race is a double-edged sword. Just as we use race to understand ourselves, so too do we use race to understand the world around us. In the worst instances, this plays out as racism—when we make assessments of others based on superficial observations that serve no other purpose than to elevate our own identities over that of others.

When I think of the congregants of the Oak Creek gurdwara (“gurdwara” is the name of the Sikh temple of worship) who were hiding for hours upon end, listening to the moans of those who had already been shot, fearing that another shooter or shooters would strike, I have to imagine that they were recruiting all of their analytical skills to help think them out of that dangerous situation. I have to imagine that they were seeing this white guy, with a gun, in their house of worship, and thinking not, “Who among us is he looking for?” and “Why is he so angry?” but, “Oh my god, they are trying to kill us. Again.”

Because it has happened before that Sikhs were killed just for being Sikh. Or, to be more precise, Sikhs were killed because racists only “know” that the Ayrabs responsible for 9/11 are brown and dress “ethnic.” It was that state of affairs that resulted in the death of Balbir Singh Sodi, a gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona who was shot dead on September 15, 2001 by a white man named Frank Silva Roque who was seeking retribution for the 9/11 attacks. Similar retributive murders followed in New York and Texas, and there were numerous threats issued against Sikhs in the days that followed 9/11, and threats are continually renewed.

All of this is bad enough, and convincing enough to me to disqualify all of the race-deniers calls that we shouldn’t discuss what happened in Oak Creek in terms of race and to ignore all of the insults and threats that they hurled against anyone who did. Not only is the recent record of anti-Sikh hatred (I refuse to that condescending term, “sentiment”) pretty damning, there are also major historical precedents in the U.S. that demonstrate exactly how racist violence operates.

The six murdered Sikhs in the Oak Creek gurdwara got me thinking about the four murdered African-American girls who were blown to pieces in their church by a white supremacist’s bomb in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. I fear that the gall, the misdirected fury, and the heretical disregard for human life was on vivid display that September day was on display again in Oak Creek, Wisconsin this August. I weep at the prospect that this country might arrive on September 15^th in 2013, at the fifty-year anniversary of the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing not having learned a damn thing.

From Birmingham. From the Pequot Massacre. From the Holocaust.

We are truly in a worse place today than we were then if we can’t even talk about racism and racialized violence. We simply cannot turn a blind eye to what is going on. And the deniers cannot gaslight me into thinking that what I and my Sikh brothers and sisters have experienced of hatred is not real.

My experiences arereal, and no one can shut me up or shame me about it. Call me an embedded journalist or a field anthropologist: I knowwhat happened because I was there. This is the skin I live in.

I am so unspeakable tired of those I love and of myself being identified as practice targets based on our non-whiteness. I refuse to hear that that statement is racist because if I didn’t inhabit the world watching my back, being mindful of how I might be perceived at any moment by anyone, you would call me a fool. Emmett Till got killed in part for “foolishly” acting like that target wasn’t always pinned to his back.

We can’t live like this anymore. We need to talk about racism in America. If we don’t start talking now, pretty soon nobody will be left.

***

Courtney Baker is Assistant Professor of English at Connecticut College. A graduate of Harvard and Duke universities, she researches and writes on African-American visual culture and literature, death, and ethics. Her book, entitled Human Insight: Looking at Images of Black Death and Suffering, is forthcoming.

Project iPad

Project iPad

by Courtney Baker | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

On July 17, 2012, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a photograph depicting an eight-year-old black child named Michael Smith, Jr. holding an iPad as he sat on the stoop of the housing project where he lives. The photograph was printed to illustrate an article about the destruction of a public housing project and the attendant concerns that community members had about possible health dangers. One of the most disturbing circumstances, as highlighted by the article, was that many of the residents of Smith’s neighborhood had not been informed of the pending implosion by the city housing authority, but instead learned of it through news reports.

One resident, Lanetter Dorsey, drew her own conclusions as to the significance of this oversight:  “"I keep saying, 'When are they going to come tell us something?'" said Lanetter Dorsey, 54, who is in poor health and doesn't feel comfortable staying inside her Iberville apartment during the implosion. "I guess they've decided we need to fend for ourselves," she said.”

For the black working class, fending for one’s self is a dangerous game. The project of “making do” that is a gold-star achievement under an ethos of austerity is frequently reconfigured in the public visual sphere as looting, stealing, or recklessly indulging when it is undertaken by poor black folks.

At the heart of the photograph of Smith with an (his?) iPad is the loaded question of what the poor deserve. A follow-up article reports that the initial coverage resulted in some state movement. Sort of. “Concerns about airborne particles prompted state officials to offer hotel rooms for residents who live within a 600-foot radius of the demolition site, but the Pallas Hotel and Iberville are separated by 725 feet.” Call it bad math or bad faith, but even the state seems unsure of whether or not the black poor deserve to have their health protected.

To the surprise of the newspaper’s editors, many of its readers were quite certain that Smith did not deserve an iPad. Wrote one reader, “I hope this is nothing more than someone gave him the iPad as a gift ... I hope I am not over thinking this. I am not prejudice [sic] – this  just did not look right.” Clearly, there is a preferred narrative that this person wishes was attached to the image—a narrative that “looks right” in the context of the ‘hood.

The author of the follow-up piece responded laudably here, calling into question the “rightness” of the narrative sought and in so doing spoke to that underlying question of what the poor of color deserve: “The sight of a kid in public housing with an iPad doesn't offend me. Actually it gives me hope. So many poor people have no access to the digital world. They fall behind in school because of it. They miss the opportunity to apply for certain jobs. Yes an iPad is an expensive gadget, but we can't deny its usefulness. As computers go, an iPad comes cheaper than most laptops and desktops.”

All of these points seem right on—both as factually correct and as an insightful way of perceiving the eradication of poverty. The mention of the technology’s utility functions as an especially effective way to defuse the righteous and exclusive claims of the anonymous reader.

But more is at stake when we question what the African-American poor deserve. Particularly when we are speaking about government subsidized income and housing, especially in the United States, we are also speaking about a sense of ownership of the black working class. The rhetoric of deserving employs the toxic language of capitalist individualism that disavows the idea of collective reserves and resources. It is that same language—and that same logic—that spawned the image of the welfare queen and that continues to underwrite the dismissal of a national health care system. It is a language and logic system that treats the poor in general and the black poor especially as effective tenant farmers, as guests in a land who are not pulling their weight and have overstayed their welcome.

This thinking, however, is a trap, for it mistakes education and technology as solely the domain of the entitled. Per this logic, the black poor do not deserve to have anything but their own dispossession—no Air Jordans, no foreign language skills, no “free” food, no safe housing, and certainly no effective and reliable access to the digital tools of their self-enfranchisement. If we dare to think of Michael Smith as entitled to his iPad, we must also consider seriously his right to own himself and to represent himself—a twinned project that has everything to do with having secure access to the digital sphere.

***

Courtney Baker is Assistant Professor of English at Connecticut College. A graduate of Harvard and Duke universities, she researches and writes on African-American visual culture and literature, death, and ethics. Her book, entitled Human Insight: Looking at Images of Black Death and Suffering, is forthcoming.