I posted this link on facebook today, pointing out that Shepard Fairey has made his career from exploiting work by people of color, that he’s been allowed status as a gallery-worthy artist for doing what is considered vandalism when done by youth of color (and let’s face it, with considerably less talent), and that I’m disappointed that Ebony missed the opportunity to commission a piece by a Black artist. A white dude responded that he understands it’s problematic, but maybe it’s a good thing to make a piece that “transcends racial lines”. I have been on edge with race shit lately, enough that I haven’t been able to write anything. I’ve seriously been race-depressed and feeling like people of color are fucking doomed—my students are proof that we aren’t, but they’re also stressed out with end of the year catching up or giving up, and realizing all that they should be taught but aren’t.

So my roommate made me a cup of coffee and I spit all this out finally in response to the dude on facebook:

————————————

I can see where you’re coming from and appreciate the sentiment, but I think it still misses the point. Heads up though, because I am having an even more race-anxious couple weeks than usual, so this hits a raw nerve for me.

First off, it definitely isn’t the only piece of art I’ve seen about Trayvon; that’s part of why it’s disappointing. Black artists respond to our conditions all the time and are often passed up on commissioned work and other opportunities. Most other magazines (read: white-centered media) doing this wouldn’t faze me, but I would expect better from a magazine like Ebony. There’s actually a portrait of Trayvon in the hallway at the school where I work that a Black girl made for an art assignment, and it’s infinitely more moving than something sterile and disconnected like this. And that isn’t the only piece I’ve seen some of my students make about this, but when they do it they are making art about their own experiences and their communities’ experiences and how disempowered they usually feel in a city like this. Once I get my silk screen stuff set up better, I promised to help some students make “DON’T SHOOT ME” hoodies they designed—that’s what we’ve come to. At the very least I want to affirm their idea that they don’t deserve to be profiled, followed, shot, and then posthumously vilified—something I don’t have to put energy into affirming in my white students, and something that no one had to affirm in Shepard Fairey.

But about making it more palatable for white audiences (who are specifically NOT the audience of Ebony, and it’s rare to pull off media that isn’t implicitly geared toward white audiences), I think that’s really dangerous and disrespectful. Black people need space to mourn and defend ourselves and take care of each other. I spend way too much time fretting over my brother and my students and my neighborhood and all the ways they are targeted for this kind of violence. Trying to make race less a part of the telling of Trayvon’s story is dishonest. It doesn’t even make sense. It isn’t a story that transcends race, because it isn’t a story that would happen to just any youth regardless of race. Racial profiling isn’t a universal experience, and neither is the picture the media tried to paint of him being a “thug.” None of that would have happened to a white kid, and pretending it does is an insult to what youth of color deal with.

If white people need to be eased into respecting, understanding, and listening to Black people’s lived experiences, then go ahead and do the work of easing them into it, but don’t expect us to tell our stories dishonestly to make them easier to swallow—we don’t have the luxury of toning shit down when we’re living it. It honestly scares me that we’ve internalized white people’s desire for us to whitewash and tone down our stories so much that we’re now doing it in our storytelling to each other in our own media.

I’m kind of unsure about the thing about Fairey’s Obama posters being iconic. Of course they are, but Obama means lots of complicated things for Black people that he doesn’t for white people. Again, not feelings and experiences that are going to transcend racial lines. You might have said more than you realized by choosing the word “iconic”—these are more than icons to Black people. (ETA: I’m pretty grumpy about Obama personally, but again, it’s way more complicated than an icon can be and I can understand Black people who support him for equally complicated reasons.)

And it’s specifically because of Fairey’s race politics (or lack thereof) that I don’t respect him as an artist. You can read a whole lot more on Fairey’s exploitation of people of color’s art and histories here: http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm

Federal agents and DEA just came through my neighborhood and arrested over 100 people, almost all black men, including some I know. Yale and its real estate interests are literally demolishing Black kids’ playgrounds and Black families’ houses to make condos. My students are at the point in the school year where they’re realizing just how much they’ve been denied by the school system and learning how to point out the whitewashing of their textbooks (well, if we had the money for textbooks). This is the shit I’m losing sleep over. I can’t guarantee my students that they will be safe from racial violence, since many of them have experienced it already, or that our school will value their lived experiences as young people of color, but I’m at least not going to be dishonest with them and pretend we’re not talking about race when we are, that we’re not talking about violence when we are, or that we need to put anything on hold for white people’s idea of what’s polite and palatable and slowed down enough. Our shit is way too urgent for that.

Have you ever been around a teenager before? They’re fucking obnoxious just for the sake of it!

When I was in high school I used to go downtown and play pranks on strangers and make messes and break things that I didn’t intend to clean up and try to buy porn and yell at boys to suck my dick and sneak around the cops when they tried to kick us off school property for loitering after school and say really stupid shit really loudly. Then I went to school and got almost straight A’s and did my homework and only got in trouble when it was for political rabble-rousing and graduated and went to an ivy league college.

These things are not mutually exclusive; they were all going on concurrently. That is how teenagers develop and learn what boundaries to push and what ones to respect and where to set my own. Like if I had had any money, best believe I would have had a ridiculous grill while I was sitting there in AP Calculus. And best believe if facebook existed when I was in high school there would probably be photos in the ether of me giving the finger with one hand and reading political philosophy with the other.

None of that would have made me a bad kid.

And if those photoshadbeen on the same Trayvon that was killed, it wouldn’t have mattered. He wouldn’t have been a bad kid, and he wouldn’t have deserved racial violence from the police.

Our goal needs to be supporting black youth—not the “right” or “good” black youth, butallof them. What are we saying to that other Trayvon Martin, the one who actually was the one photographed giving the finger and wearing a grill? That he would have deserved to be profiled as a criminal?

Fuck that. One of my favorite students, one of the smartest people I know (not just in the school, but in general), picked the wrong battle recently. I can’t give details on it but I had to defend him to someone not affiliated with the school who wanted to just brand him a criminal based on a few actions and profiling him as a young black man. This was just before the photos were put online of the other Trayvon, and I had to start worrying even more then about my students being labelled murderable in that same way. I’m sure every one of the high schoolers I work with and adore can be seen on facebook giving the finger or something similar. But they’re all so much more complex than that.

So what is the black community doing to tell the other Trayvon that had he been in the “wrong” place at the wrong time, he also wouldn’t have deserved to be murdered? What are we telling young people when we say that the Trayvon that was killed was a “good” kid, that he got good grades, that he stayed out of trouble—especially when those are markers of succeeding in a system that is set up against black youth?

The students that I’m most excited to work with are the ones that get in trouble, the ones who are angry and have outbursts and aren’t afraid to yell at authority figures and who have hobbies besides getting good grades. I’m really open about that with both students and staff. Those are not “bad” kids, and they are no more deserving of racist violence than “good” kids are. (And, if anything, my tendencies toward following the rules made me a hell of a lot more boring than my students now who make their own rules and get their own shit done, but that is a whole nother project to get into.)

Building a black community that really fights, that is a culture of resistance, means we gotta get complicated and we gotta let people be complex. And young people are really fucking complex. That’s why I love working with teenagers, they’re at a point of figuring out how the world treats them and how they want to move through it and making sense of what they’re up against. Sometimes that involves flipping off a camera, and in the age of facebook that’s gonna end up on the internet.

So when I want justice for Trayvon, I mean both Trayvons, but I also want justice for all black youth who aren’t allowed to be complex multifaceted developing people the ways white people are. And I want justice beyond labeling someone a token “good” black kid and settling for that, and I want justice beyond putting one token individual in a racist prison system that is generally set up against black people. Basically I don’t want to settle for anything that doesn’t deeply feel like justice, that isn’t clearly enough.

youarenotyou:

thefremen:

fresafresca:

Ya know, with various reports about police overreacting and doing police brutality things at various OWS sites throughout the country, I detect a tone of…shock? surprise? dismay at these “unexpected” happenings of police acting badly? Of course the “tone” I’m detecting is on various media platforms like twitter, or on various lefty blogs on-line and it’s mainly coming from white people and… I’m like really? This was inevitable. This is what the police do.  People of color have been saying this for years: the police can be fucking brutal. The militarization of the police is no joke. And so, they start treating white people like this, in public, for the world to see and there is indignation, and it’s NOT o.k. for the police to act like this, but like, there’s a tone of “surprise” and I’m like, there is nothing surprising about the police acting like this. 

There’s a shit ton of white folks who have absolutely no idea about police brutality and it’s not because the information isn’t there, it’s because they don’t want to fucking read/listen/pay attention and instead want to blame the victim, claim shit isn’t racist, so on and so forth. 

I actually think a good portion of the people reacting with such shock are well aware of police brutality. It’s just that it doesn’t bother them, or it’s just business as usual, when it happens to POC. But white people victimized by police brutality is a big deal because they think they’re less deserving of it. It hasn’t even been all that subtle—like Naomi Wolf and how she kept emphasizing that she was this [white] woman ‘in an evening dress’, implication being how dare they arrested someone like her. It’s all coming across as very “how dare they treat good college-educated white people like this!”. 

I think part of this also comes from assumptions over who, if anyone, deserves violence from the police, or at least deserves our outrage when they are victimized by the police. In other situations, the white middle class is comfortable assuming that the “usual” targets of police harassment and violence (POC, immigrants, trans* people) must have done something to deserve it—they must have committed a crime, or been fairly enough suspected of committing a crime, or have responded wrongly to the police, or…this is the point where people often start grasping for straws, because they know marginalized people being beaten by cops must have done something to bring it upon themselves.

A case we were working on here where the cops beat a guy up on the street where he lives, in front of other people and caught on video, had a lot of issues like this that made it difficult to get people to support the guy. At first, there was all sorts of outrage, but then the police started making statements about his prior arrest record—going so far as to release his record to the press and in a public press release—and allegations that he had a gun immediately before they beat him up. Suddenly it became really hard to get community support together for him, because people didn’t want to support someone with a record and who may have had a gun. And I understand not wanting any more guns in your neighborhood (it’s a hectic neighborhood right near where I live). But none of that needs to warrant beating him up like that.

I am hearing a lot of white people being surprised by police brutality, and the harshness of it. But I think part also is assuming innocence of certain people, and being far far more outraged than about brutality against people assumed guilty. And who is assumed guilty is obviously really loaded.

(via youarenotyou-deactivated2012022)

karnythia:

deluxvivens:

So i was thinking about the incredible amount of upset about how the police have been acting at Occupy Wall Street, and then I remembered this article: A Few Blocks, 4 Years, 52,000 Police Stops. There’s been enough stuff written about police treatment of POC in NYC that I really dont have to rehash any of it, but I’m now just going to wonder out loud:

How many of the people who are so upset about how the police are acting towards them now, at wall street protests, were perfectly happy to ignore how the police have treated people of color in NYC before this?

In fact, how many of them felt — as they cheerfully  gentrified their ways through Fort Greene, Bed Stuy, Crown Heights etc— that police tactics like stop and frisk— aimed at people of color,  were absolutely fine, because it helped them to “feel safe”?

(It wouldnt have made *me* feel safe, but I know my safety— or that nebulous condition known as “feeling safe”— is not at all important to these folks. )

I’ve already seen some people claim what happened at OWS was different because it was a war crime, or they were peaceful protesters & not thugs. Never mind the fact that many POC who are abused, arrested, and/or killed every day by police aren’t thugs or protestors. They’re just people going about their daily lives. But hey, they are living while of color so they’re already criminals right?

Thank you, I actually have had that exact article on my mind as well. That article stuck out for me, not because it was anything I didn’t know went on, but just the sheer numbers presented. Stop-and-frisks were one thing I mentioned in response when someone was trying to claim how shockingly “unconstitutional” the police response was at OWS during the eviction. I’m far more shocked by the unconstitutionality of homeless people being routinely kicked out of the park here where people are now being allowed to camp out…and really, I’m not shocked at all.

People’s surprise, like gut-response surprise, is really telling about what their environment is and who they surround themselves with.

And calling police brutality at Occupy evictions a war crime is insulting. Let’s talk real wars, like let’s be serious about what we mean. Is the Occupy movement really ready to declare social war on the US government? I don’t think so. Let’s talk about the War on Drugs, and the very real damage it’s done, systematically, to communities of color over the past 30 years. Let’s talk about the slow wars the US government has never let up on against indigenous communities. Let’s talk militarism and the US footprint around the world. Let’s talk about the US-Mexico border, established by war and still a war zone. Let’s talk Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Aiyana Jones. The US creates plenty of wars and commits plenty of war crimes; this isn’t one of them. Maybe people who are shocked and outraged about the police response should get involved in fighting in any one of their many local war zones.

(via strugglingtobeheard)

note-a-bear:

so-treu:

nezua:

As it turns out…

As it turns out, Roots drummer—and active Twitter expert—Questlove was one of the first people to warn the protesters. Before midnight, the drummer—who lives in downtown New York—tweeted at Occupy Wall Street, “Omg, drivin down south st near #ows. Somethin bout to go down yo, swear I counted 1000 riot gear cops bout to pull sneak attack #carefulyall” He then reiterated, “im the only one talking cause sneak attacks aren’t planned. i drove past a soul train line of riot cops” and persisted by saying, “ok once again. South St in NYC. blocks from #OWS. saw a GANG (like at least 500+ geared up) standing in line gettin ready for somethin.”

Occupy Wall Street’s twitter team seemed to shrug off Questlove’s warnings by writing back, “Shift change as per usual? RT DiceyTroop:mcduh @questlove all quiet at the Park. What did you see questo? Maybe Batman stuff?” Less than an hour later, the park was raided and several protesters and journalists were arrested. Occupy Wall Street has since moved its headquarters to nearby Foley Square nearby Zuccotti Park.

Whoops. 

……..and when you place it into context, i.e. OWS having a really hard time *listening* to POC……….yeah.

You so silly, pretending like POC have experience with police and organizing, or like they have anything to say, period. (/sarcasm)

Yeah, if you get a chance, jalwhite posted a story about the lack of listening/paying attention to POC voices. It’s beyond disgusting how far they’ve gone with the whole not listening.

I mean, to be expected, honestly, but….*sigh* considering how long POC have been organizing like this, you’d think someone would actually step up and like “Hey, we should listen here” instead of pretending like this is the first time anyone has ever thought to protest.

(via modernistwitch-deactivated20120)

I made a donations page for my friend Jewu Richardson who was shot by the police and is now facing charges of assaulting a police officer. Please check it out, check out our website to support his case, and donate to his legal fund if you can!

What I’ve been working on lately:

• Ali Reed

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) - Many New Haven residents joined a rally on the steps of the city’s court house, asking for justice against police brutality.

In the past, folks have filed lawsuits against the New Haven Police Department and won their case, now they are fighting to stop police from using over excessive force in the future.

Folks told News 8 they are sick and tired of the police brutality that occurs in the African-American and Latino communities.

Dozens of community members came out to support people who say they’ve been victimized by New Haven police officers.

“I refuse to shut up, there are too many people being victimized across the country, I got to speak up for them, no other choice but to stand on these steps and be vocal,” says Jewu Richardson of New Haven.

Another New Haven resident, Abel Sanchez said he was a victim of police brutality. He sued and earned a settlement of $50,000. He said he came to the rally at the court house to show support for other victims who are still seeking justice.

I’m not in the video (although I did make those cute “Justice for Jewu” posters!) because I was on the sidewalk handing out fliers and talking to people. It was kind of a fun role to take on first thing in the morning, before I’d eaten or had coffee, to walk up to strangers and start telling them what we’re doing and get them riled up about the police. A lot of people passing by were really supportive, and several joined us just off the sidewalk, even though it was drizzling. A couple people I talked to said they’d also been beaten up by the cops but didn’t think they could do anything about it, so I told them about where and when we meet and what we’re working on and what we’ve won so far. All in all it was a really good rally, and I usually am not too psyched about rallies (only because they are too often redundant and ineffective).

We held this rally today because my friend Jewu Richardson, who’s quoted above, had a court hearing this morning. He was shot in the chest by a New Haven cop last year and is now being charged with assaulting a police officer. We have a website up about his case here, and I am adding a donation link to my tumblr because we need to raise A LOT of money for legal fees.