Regrets? I'd had a few.

Of all the times to resume writing this blog (encouraged by far away friends who use it the way others use Facebook) I did not want to resume in the middle of a national crisis, one that is played out in my own 1200 sf home.  But, this blog was born of national crisis -- the controversy over building a mosque in downtown Manhattan -- and as long as I'm alive, and as long as I can feel outrage, this blog will exist.

Where to begin.

In my day job I sometimes read papers published in peer-reviewed journals that go to great lengths to describe the physics of a bullet as it travels through human tissue.  The speed, the projectile's rotation, calculation of the frictional force, trajectory, and the thermodynamics of heat loss as a device made of brass and gunpowder tears, maims and often kill you.  Usually there are pictures, e.g., Figure 1, let's call it Mortal Wound to Torso, and if I look closely enough (which I never do) what seems at a distance to be the mouth of an angry volcano is more likely what a tunnel gored by a bullet does to someone's body.  (Imagine the violence required to blast through the mountains of western Pennsylvania so that Interstate 76 can take you from Philly to Pittsburgh; that's what a bullet can do.)  If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, one's imagination is worth a 1,000 pictures.  I don't have to see it; I live with it.

In a city that has been dying for half a century.  Where persistent unemployment of young men of color is the enduring norm, not an anomaly.  Where I, who has been through the sluice gates of corrosive institutional racism and should know better am daily conditioned to fear and distrust men who could be my own children.  I repeat:  fear and distrust men who could be my own children.  That's where I live.

And I live with someone who, the mornings after Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed, and 5 Dallas police officers were killed, rushed to tell me that Black Lives Matter is responsible for what happened in Dallas.  (Like most libertarians, he thinks he lives on Dispassionate Reason Street when he lives on Id Lane.)  All of it, all of it -- outside and inside my home -- reminds me of the bitter and very American joke:

Q:  What's scarier than a white man with a gun?
A:  A black man with a gun.

I am in a rage which makes it difficult to write.  As I write it congeals into a pounding headache.  But, the paradox is that if I don't write I will never ever get to the other side.  I used to make fun of crazy people who would offer me their tiny-margined, single-spaced, double-sided screeds, their manifesto detailing the malevolence of the universe and all its actors.  I won't any more.

to be continued ...

It's Hard to be Poor, Part I

Lately there have been a few news stories about Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty now that it have reached its 50th milestone.  Until the moment I decided to write that sentence, it had never dawned on me that its advent coincides with Black History Month.  The convergence may be wholly accidental but it underscores something I've observed for a long time, that poverty and African-American-ness are used interchangeably as synonyms.

But, instead of exploring that today -- don't have the chops for a long, spit-hurling screed -- I'll tell two stories.  One involves me; the other, a friend:

I was in New York a few days ago.  As is true of my recent visits they are brief, specific and about business.  The day wasn't bitter cold but cold enough, so I was bundled up with my ersatz hunter's cap, mile-long scarf, big-collared winter jacket, and old Timberlands.  Perfect for the weather and normal for me.  As far as I was concerned, I didn't look any different that day than usual.  I should also mention that if it's not overcast I wear shades outdoors year-round; you can't see me seeing you.  That day, for whatever reason(s), people broke through my barriers -- the shades, the bundling -- and talked to me.  I was walking through the long station that is Courthouse Square.  Years ago you'd leave Grand Central on the 7 heading east, cross the East River, get a paper transfer, walk down a rickety steel and wood staircase, turn a corner and then present your transfer at the turnstiles for the G train.  It was a pain in the ass to execute and if you didn't do it often, you'd wind up wandering up and down the street looking for the subway entrance.  Some time (probably after I left the city) it all got connected and now you can transfer, under protection of a glass pavilion, between the 7 and the G which connect Manhattan, Queens and North Brooklyn.

I was heading back to Grand Central, glad that the meeting had gone well and was brief.  While marvelling (once again) about the ease of transfer, I was thinking that I could catch one of many trains before rush hour, so wasn't in any particular hurry.  Perhaps I was in a good mood, perhaps pleased with myself.  Either way I was free and heading home.  Next thing I know a skinny kid in a hoodie covered by a light jacket asks me if I can get him something to eat.

And I say, as I have in the past, would you like me to buy you a meal?  And he nods yes and I crook my head to indicate that I'll follow him and up the escalator, outside the station, around the corner, and across the street (underneath the BQE) we go.  Not a word.  We stop at the corner.  There's a bodega in front of us and a diner to our right.  He enters the bodega and goes through the store, returning to the counter with a can of iced tea.  I thought you wanted something to eat?  I didn't see where.  I'm struck by his candor and lack of greed.  This kid -- maybe 14 -- is hungry.  Hungry.  Grey from malnutrition and cold.  You don't hang out in a heatless pavilion in February begging for food if you don't have to.  We go outside.  I point to the diner.  There?  I point.  He's ambivalent.  He either can't see it because he needs glasses, or he doesn't want to go there because he has never in his life sat down and ordered from a menu, or he can't read.  Or all three.

The intersection before us gathers like Five Points.  We cross two streets to another bodega.  Almost every corner store worth its salt has a deli counter.  Why the first one we went into didn't is a mystery.  But this one does and he orders a Philly cheese steak.  I stand aside as he luxuriates in the power of having and exercising choice.  The clerk bags the sandwich and offers it to me because I'm the one with the wallet open.  I turn to the boy; for a moment the clerk is confused, but I wait for him to figure it out.  The boy steps up and the clerk gives him his food.  The boy thanks me and because of necessity and because when you're poor you learn to abdicate your dignity quickly and often he asks, in front of everyone, the important ask, the one for train fare to get home.  Oh.  Sure.  I say, handing him a few bills.  Then I leave.

A Tragedy's Second Anniversary Without Press Coverage

Exactly two years and a few days ago there was a shooting in a house 2 doors down from us.

I remember it being fairly early in the evening, schoolkids were still up and the air was cool.  We neighbors came out to see what was going on.  Was it a shot we heard?  A voice yelling?  The police arriving as they do, driving the wrong way on our one-way block?  At first we knew little, but when you see EMT's strolling instead of trotting, you know for whoever it is, it is too late.  Many, many years ago that section of the house was a candy store, when this was part of a close-knit Italian and Jewish neighborhood.  That evening it became a crime scene, a tear in the fabric of a city becoming known more for its young male homicide rate than its universities.

The dead one was a 13 year old boy.   He was shot in the head.  By a friend.  In a house that seemed to be connected like adjoining hotel rooms.  There is not much more that I know as fact:  his killer was 18 years old at the time and ran away, leaving behind the other witness, a young man who lived there.  The killer turned himself in and as could be expected, lied to the police (and probably himself).  The newspapers and TV stations lost interest after all the salaciousness was squeezed out of the story -- the boys' ages, the quiet street, the speculation about where and how a gun wound up in the room, the entreaties for money to bury a child.  After a few days there was only a tiny TV reporter in a cheap pantsuit standing alongside the antennaed van, shivering in the late October sun waiting for someone who wanted to be the center of attention at all costs to come outside so she could make her bones.

I'd written here previously about what happened last October.  Since then the family that was living in the house moved out -- traumatized, a little heartbroken, ashamed.  The original charge of murder was revised to manslaughter, and 2 years to the day that it happened the boy's mother and family and still very young friends gathered outside the house to remember him.  Where else can they go?  It is the one place on the planet that they are certain he was at, because this is where he died.  So, a small group gathered to light candles and tie balloons around a street sign, and not say much at all.  As each person left she thanked them for coming.  Then more kids would arrive to pay their respects, walking that cool night across Legion and Frontage from The Hill.  No cops, no press, no curious neighbors.  Just a woman enduring the longest night of her life, her remaining children and family including a couple of toddlers too young to remember, and a handful of teenagers crying.

Each night someone has been lighting the memorial candles.  And then that will end and the balloons will wither in the cold air.  And then that boy's mother will count the days until she must come back.  I plan to be there with her again.

Saturday Poetry: What Did Thou Do to Thy Master?

Old Dead Tunneler:

Look at thee

A young man, strong and black

A musket tore your back.

Three hundred guilders lost

Did Master rue the cost

of his African

so strong and black?

Old Dead Tunnelers (chorus):

It is true

that thee are with us now

Thy Master’s guilders gone

No doubt he mourns the loss

but killed you nonetheless.

One of his best.

What did thou do, my son

to thy Master?

Old Dead Tunneler:

Look at thee

Rings burned around thy neck

Eyes plucked from thy face

The Pearls of Africa

are missing from thy case.

Thy master stole thou eyes?

No others tell thou that

they still are used

to find your way, to this our home?

Young slave made blind.

Old Dead Tunnelers (chorus):

Thy Master’s guilders gone.

No doubt he mourns the loss

but killed you nonetheless.

One of his best.

What did thou do, my son

to thy Master?

Look at thee

Africans strong and black.

(Look at me

African strong and black.)

Thy Master’s loss our gain

Thy mutilation is their shame.

Three hundred guilders thrown away

is not the measure of

Two warriors in our midst.

Returned to the Mother’s land

because of what thee did

to thy Master.

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part V

Lately I've been thinking a lot about American slavery.  Not quite sure why, perhaps it's where the mind goes when reading or listening to commentary about the 1963 March on Washington.  Perhaps it is, as I alluded to before, being in Myrtle Beach and Pawley's Island in the summer.  The other day a friend related a story about the lives of her forefathers.  She is a Yankee, a tribe that I hadn't encountered with any frequency until I moved here.  Her family has probably been here as long as Europeans settled these lands.  In her youth she read a history of her ancestors' town (located in the lobster's tail of Massachusetts).  It was published shortly after the Civil War (in part to make sense of the newly re-ordered Republic) and she found it remarkable for the book's candor about the North's complicity in chattel slavery.

The history's foreword tells a story about a slave named Pomp who one day walked to the water's edge with a parcel of food, laid the parcel down and then hanged himself facing the sea.  He had brought the food for the journey home and he faced the sea because home was across the vast Atlantic.

Back in the mid 1990's I created The Negros Burial Ground with composer Leroy Jenkins.  It was inspired by the discovery of the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan.  In order to write the piece I researched 17th through 19th century New York history.  Prior to manumission (in 1829) New York benefitted from not only the sale of slaves, but the owning of slaves in the city and country.  It wasn't like the antebellum South with its plantations.  A farmer may have had 2-3 slaves, an affluent urban householder a few more.   Armed with that knowledge I wrote a libretto that was fueled by my imagining the lives and deaths of enslaved Africans in New York City, and contemporary victims of police violence (Michael Stewart, Eddie Perry, and Eleanor Bumpurs).  They became wanderers in the Land of the Dead struggling to go home.

To make a long story short, a shitstorm ensued.  (I'm here to tell you that the best colon cleanser ever is sheer unmitigated terror.)  Were it not for the courage and vision of The Kitchen's Laureen Amazeen and John Maxwell Hobbs, of my collaborators Leroy Jenkins (now deceased) and the playwright and director Dominic Taylor, this work would never have been seen.  And in its totality it is a beautiful thing.  We were never able to mount a fully staged production.  What we presented at The Kitchen was an oratorio version.  I am grateful for that.

The poem that follows in my next post was the lyric for what became "What Did Thy Do to Thy Master?"  I read it today and can't help but think of Trayvon Martin.  Selah. 

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part IV

Remember, I said that I was almost finished.  From one of my favorite blogs, The Phil Dyess-Nugent Experience, There's No Riot Going On.  He's uniformly brilliant in his analyses of American culture, literature and politics.  I don't get there often enough.

And, from a humane perspective, and it dovetails with the work our own West River community is doing, a commentary by Michel Martin, on NPR's Tell Me More an audio essay entitled Is It Time To See Each Other's Tears?

Word.
 

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part III

I'm almost finished.  One thing that saddens me is that as we've turned into an almost entirely secular culture, the voices speaking about the morality of actions exits, or at least merely whispers in, the public square.  In it's place is legalistic hair-splitting, high school debate tactics deracinated of any purpose other than to dominate an opponent.  Amy Davidson posted a thoughtful piece, What Should Trayvon Martin Have Done?, and for me the most valuable byproduct of it is a post by someone tagged theoutsider that comes as close to anything I've read so far of looking at what happened from a moral dimension:

OK, there are a lot of things that bother me about this case, but the thing that's getting to me the most right now is that a lot of people, when talking about how Martin behaved or should have behaved, are talking about him as though he was a fully-fledged adult. I don't personally believe he was a helpless innocent child, but he was also not a fully-grown man. And the reason I find this so irritating is because there are so many laws - not just in America but in many countries - which are predicated on the idea that until a person reaches a certain age (16, 18, 21, whatever) they are not allowed to do certain things largely because they lack the capacity to make good judgements in certain situations. It is assumed (sometimes correctly) that most people cannot make responsible judgements about things like alcohol, driving, sex, smoking, and enlisting until they reach a particular age.

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet, Part II

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice.  For me it's this:
 

That conclusion should not offer you security or comfort. It should not leave you secure in the wisdom of our laws. On the contrary, it should greatly trouble you. But if you are simply focusing on what happened in the court-room, then you have been head-faked by history and bought into a idea of fairness which can not possibly exist.

The injustice inherent in the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was not authored by a jury given a weak case. The jury's performance may be the least disturbing aspect of this entire affair. The injustice was authored by a country which has taken as its policy, for the lionshare of its history, to erect a pariah class. (n.b.: emphasis mine)  The killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman is not an error in programming. It is the correct result of forces we set in motion years ago and have done very little to arrest.

 And, for the record, yes, OJ was guilty as hell.
 

 

Fear of a Black (Male) Planet

When I turned on the radio this morning one of the first things I learned is that George Zimmerman had been acquitted.  I was not surprised.  Long ago I learned that criminal law -- either prosecutorial or defensive -- has little to do with ethics.  I was about to say justice but even that term is loaded.

After have read a few of the past days' postings and the subsequent comments I stopped.  There is very, very little more to be learned from the immediate commentary and too many people commenting think they know 1) exactly what happened and 2) that they passed the Florida bar and are qualified to practice law.  But here are a few, I'll call them psychosocial, thoughts: 

1. Males fight.  And fights escalate.  The presence of a knife or a gun changes the dynamic and it allows one of the fighters to become more aggressive, or at the very least turn defense into disproportionate offense.  When that occurs, 2 things happen:  a) one of the aggressors de-escalates so much so that both parties internal "threat" switch is turned off, or b) extraordinary physical harm and/or death happens to the unarmed fighter.
2. Black males are the King-Kong of the American landscape.  And we all know it.  Charles Stuart knew it.  Susan Smith knew it.  Both used that knowledge to great effect.  Extreme examples, I know, but there was little or no initial skepticism of their claims in each instance that black men had been the perpetrators of the crime because it seemed so plausible.
3. A 17 year old kid is dead.  With an acquittal of the man who killed him, how do you possibly square that circle in a moral universe?

Black Manhood is the Devil's Playground

It is now 3 days after the midterm elections and here in New Haven I did my small part to get Democrats elected.  I thought I'd be tired from the Election Day efforts, I just had no idea how tired I'd be and looked forward to having a quiet Thursday evening at home.  But, an e-mail landed yesterday morning advertising a community discussion that very night facilitated by Community Mediation with New Haven's Chief of Police, Frank Limon.  In a larger city I could have ignored it but on my way downtown I was picked up by Stacy (Are you coming?), had lunch with John (who sent the e-mail); and saw Kevin and ran into Blest (both of whom worked to bring a contingent of YBM to the meeting.)  This community dialogue had been planned way before the recent deaths of 2 young men, but the timing made it more urgent.  So, no way I couldn't be there.

The story of New Haven varies with the storyteller and the neighborhood.  It's one thing to live your life in the tony precincts of East Rock.  Another to live it in Newhallville or Hill South.  Last night was dominated by reportage from young men talking about life lived as perpetual suspects and perpetual targets in retaliatory "beefs".  They spoke of encounters with the police ranging from the annoying to the physically violent and emotionally humiliating to the likelihood of getting "violated" over some bullshit so that you're headed back to prison.  There were counternarratives offered, if not direct rebuttals to their lived experience.  Everyone in the room, even those who fear and despise the police, understand that their function is necessary and complex, and that not all cops are bad.  And yet, and yet.

It's national news that  intra-community murders and shootings plague New Haven.  It is a trope of inner city life that law enforcement is more to be feared than trusted.  So the dilemma is, if there is violent crime in your community you can 1) be a snitch, 2) settle it on your own or 3) mind your own goddamn business and hope it doesn't happen in your family.  Choice 1 will get you ostracized, maybe even killed.  Choice 2 means that you have vigilante "justice" in your community and when you do, at some point someone you know, and perhaps even love, is going to lose a fight with a bullet.  Which means that Choice 3 is no choice at all.

The police, the law-abiding, the formerly criminal, the safe and those at-risk know this state of affairs can't go on.  Last night we didn't hear much from the Chief about what the police see as solutions (although he did close with an anecdote illustrating disrespect towards him, his wife, and parents of some kids).  It wasn't the time or place; he came to listen, as did many of the rest of us.  In my understanding, for many YBM (and not-so-young BM), this problem with the police begins with respect.  They know that they are fundamentally held in suspicion and contempt by the NHPD.  That gets translated into police behavior that, ehem, if it is perpetuated on Yale students would make national news and invites lawsuits; but if done to YBM it is business as usual.

The young men talked about the boredom that comes from not having "anything to do" all day.  How they remembered the PAL Leagues and the recreational activities or community centers that were available to them when they were children.  And while I sympathize with them I was looking at young MEN not BOYS.  I can't speak for other adults in the room but as an older woman who has done more than her share of childcare (paid and unpaid), menial work, some of it under the watch of assholes with roving hands, and any kind of job in order to survive, I kept thinking that creating more recreational outlets is a palliative. Don't get me wrong, recreation has its place for all ages, but a 19 year old male should NOT be spending his day playing ball (unless, of course, he’s paid), he should be working.  I'm thinking, if legitimate pathways to respectable manhood weren’t so meager for these YBM we wouldn’t be sitting in a room with a dozen of them talking about disrespect.

The fraught relations between the police (in this city and any other) and YBM are a symptom of a greater, more insidious phenomena.  These young men and their predicament are the waste product of our post-industrial decline.  They were obsolete before they were born.  How are we going to address that?