Burn This B**** Down

"Burn this bitch down! Burn this bitch down!"

These are the words Mike Brown's step-dad shouted over and over again right after the grand jury announcement.  He has since apologized.  His wife, Mike Brown's mom, has said that he was just full of emotion, but he didn't really mean it that way.

Well, I gotta say, why the fuck not?  Why not burn the whole thing to the ground?  Let us empty our prisons, our police stations, our courtrooms, our prosecution offices, then burn the whole damn thing down.

That's honestly seeming like a good option at the moment.

I posted this quote from a Jezebel article on Facebook yesterday:

We knew Ferguson would burn. We prayed it wouldn't, but we knew that the protests that have taken place over the past 108 days have been an accumulation of emotion, deep disappointment, and anger. Last night, along with all the other days and nights in Ferguson since Mike Brown was killed, was a culminated response to years of violence and oppression and racism and injustice. You're a fool if you think protesters were only protesting against Darren Wilson. They were protesting for Mike Brown, of course, but also for Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride and Danroy Henry and Fred Hampton and Medger Evers and Emmett Till.

In the comments, I said:  "And if you're a white person complaining about the property damage last night, but don't know the names of the martyrs listed here, then you have no right to talk.  Open your eyes to the violence inflicted on black bodies before you moan about the violence done to store windows."

I also re-posted a status update from Andrea Gibson that said, in part, "If your sympathies lean towards Darren Wilson -- a murderous systems OWNS your humanity."

Needless to say, I haven't been the most popular person in my social media circles recently.  I've gotten in some pretty heated discussions with family members and even some acquaintances I haven't talked to in years.  I've been pissed off and filled with grief and despair and hopelessness.

My family has this tradition at thanksgiving dinner of going around the table and saying what we're thankful for.  I'm having a hard time figuring out how to answer that question this year.  I am so goddamn privileged.  But I can't and I won't claim to be grateful for benefiting from the oppression that kills people who don't look like me.  I won't say that I'm thankful for my education opportunities and for my good job prospects or even for the health and safety of my family.  Because every single one of these things are, in one way or another, benefits I enjoy without any effort or thought because of the systems of oppression that own the soul of this country.

I think I've reached a breaking point.  For awhile now I've been wondering how I can be a prosecutor, be a cog in this system, in this prison industrial complex that owns our country.  I spent this past summer working for the State's Attorney's Office at the misdemeanor and traffic court a few minutes from my house.  I actually seemed to get my love for prosecution back over the summer, and I was blissfully grateful.  Part of the reason why I didn't struggle with my moral opposition to the system as much over the summer was because I honestly thought that fining people for driving without a license or having a small amount of weed couldn't possibly be feeding into the system.  Who could it harm?  It's just a fine.  It's just a bit of community service.  That isn't contributing to a racist system.  They're guilty.  They didn't have a license.  They were legally stopped.  They violated some minor traffic law.  They had a bit of weed on them.  I'm not sending them to prison, so who cares?  It's not like I'm sentencing people disparately based on their race (or the types of drugs used most predominately by a particular race).  So I'm morally clean, right?

Yeah.

That was some ignorant, privileged, bullshit.

We live in a country that funds huge parts of its government functions through the criminalization of every day actions.  We live in a country where it is perfectly constitutional for a cop to pull someone who looks like they might be "up to no good" over as long as the cop has the pretext of a petty traffic offense.

And let me be clear: every single cop in this country can find a petty traffic offense any time that they want to.

Failure to yield.  Failure to signal.  Improper lane usage.

I can't tell you how many cannabis possession police reports I read through over the summer where the pretext for the traffic stop and then the search was "improper lane usage."  All this means is that the cop thinks (or claims) that the driver crossed over a traffic line too early or too late or something.  No one really knows or cares, because there's no way of proving it one way or the other, and chances are that the cop is going to throw out the ticket for the alleged violation if the stop doesn't yield more.

And every cop has pre-conceived notions of what type of person, what type of driver, they should be looking to for one of these pre-textual stops.  And this isn't because every cop in this country is a hateful, racist asshat.  It has nothing to do with personal hate harboured by individual officers.  This isn't a cop problem.  It's an American culture problem.

It's not about whether or not the shooter is racist, it's about how poor black boys are treated as problems well before we are treated as people.  Black boys in this country cannot afford to play cops and robbers if we're always considered the latter, don't have the luxury of playing war when we're already in one.

When the announcement was read Monday night, I threw my computer.  I physically collapsed on the floor.  And I cried.  I cried for so many reason.  I cried because of the injustice for Mike Brown.  I cried because I knew this decision would tear the Ferguson community apart.  I cried because I know, or at least have some clue, about the pain and grief and despair that would be felt by black people across this country.  I cried because I knew that, to them, the decision said that the death of an unarmed black boy at the hands of a cop isn't even worth the question, isn't worth the effort of a trial, isn't worthy of an attempt at justice.

I also cried because my brother and sister-in-law are in the process of adopting a son from Africa.  I cried for my future nephew.  Because he will be a black boy growing up in this country.  I cried for him.  Because no matter what we do, no matter how well my brother and sister-in-law raise him, he will still be a black boy in America.  Unless the current culture and climate that criminalizes black bodies changes quickly and drastically, my little black nephew will have to one day be told that, when faced with a cop, he needs to "be strong.  Be smart.  Be kind, and polite.  Know your laws.  Be aware of how quickly your hands move to pocket for wallet or ID, be more aware of how quickly the officer's hand moves to holster, for gun.  Be black.  Be a boy.  Have fun.  Because this world will force you to become a man far more quickly than you'll ever have the need to."

One month ago in South Carolina, a state trooper pulled up behind a young black man, Levar Jones, in a gas station.  The trooper claims that he saw Jones driving without his seat belt.  The trooper asked Levar Jones for his ID.  Jones, who had already parked and exited the vehicle when the trooper approached him, immediately reached into his vehicle for his ID.  This young black man was doing everything in his power to comply with the officer's instructions.  When Jones reached into his truck, the trooper shot him.  Because the culture we live in today tells everyone, cops included, that young black men quickly reaching into an unseen area probably means that they are reaching for a gun.

This whole incident was caught on the officer's dash cam.  The most haunting part of the whole exchange to me was that even when Jones is lying on the ground, bleeding, trying to figure out what happened, he's still saying "yes, sir" every other word, being as polite as humanly possible, and complying with every single order and instruction of the Officer who just shot him.

It terrifies me to know that my future nephew could be Levar Jones.  One day he could be doing his job, stopping for a snack at a gas station, only to have a cop pull up behind him and ask for his license.  My nephew could be strong, smart, polite, and kind.  He could be perfectly compliant, say "yes, sir" with every other word.  He could lean into his vehicle to grab his license.  And, still, his quick, compliant actions could be misinterpreted by the cop as a dangerous attempt by an inherently dangerous person to get a weapon, to endanger the officer and the public.  And that cop could shoot my future nephew.

My future nephew could be Trayvon Martin, walking down the street in his comfy, mostly white neighbourhood with his hood up, headphones in, talking to a friend on the phone.  And some random vigilante could see this black boy, not fully fitting in in the neighbourhood, and call the 911.  Or follow him.  Or shoot and kill him.

My future nephew could be spotted by neighbours in his own home, and those neighbours could call the police, thinking that this black boy doesn't belong in this white home, in this white neighbourhood.  The police could arrest and pepper spray my nephew, thinking he was burglarizing his own home.  That's exactly what happened to DeShawn Currie, a black teenager, when he walked into his home, where his white foster parents lived.

When they were teenagers, my brothers had airsoft guns, and sometimes they carried them around.  I'm terrified that if my future nephew does the same thing, and a cop sees him with it, he will be shot.  I doubt my brothers every faced that fear.  But my future nephew will.  Tamir Rice, a twelve year old black boy was shot and killed by police in this exact situation.

These are just a few of the stories, a few of the realities of black boys in America today.  I hope and pray that these realities change long before my future nephew arrives in this country, long before my future nephew becomes a teenager, a young black man assumed by far too many people to be a danger, to be a criminal, to be "up to no good" simply because of the colour of his skin.

I don't know how to live in this world.  I don't know how to fix this.  And I don't know how to make this treacherous, oppressive world safe for my future nephew to come into.

Apathy and Ellen Page

Like so much of the queer world, I freaked the fuck out when Ellen Page came out this past Friday.  And not because I was in any way surprised that Ellen Page is gay.  I wasn't.  Like so many other people, gay or straight (or anywhere else on any spectrum), I was about 99.999% sure that Ellen Page is gay.  And yet, as much as there may be a decent sized list of people who the queer community (especially the online queer feminist community to which I belong) "knows" is queer, every single time one of them actually takes their own affirmative steps to come out of their closets, to declare their own truths, we all cheer and freak out so loud and for so long that we start to forget there was ever a time when that person actually wasn't out.

For days after I saw the internet explode with Ellen Page's announcement, I carried on my life with a huge, probably incredibly goofy-looking grin on my face.  And at first I couldn't figure out why this one person's coming out was making me so incredibly happy.  I mean, I cheered and celebrated when Raven-Symone and Michelle Rodriguez came out last year.  I was happy.  But neither Raven's gay marriage celebrating tweet nor M-Rod's bisexual rumour confirming interview made me this ecstatic for days on end.  At first I thought it was just because of how much I love Ellen Page's movies or how much I crush on her, but, let's be honest, Michelle Rodriguez definitely falls more into the latter category for me than Ellen Page does.

And then I thought maybe it's because Raven and Michelle Rodriguez both have histories of awkwardly, defensively, and at times destructively denying rumours of their respective queerness.  And Ellen Page just avoided the subject (or even tongue-in-cheek poked fun at in that 2008 SNL skit).  Or it could be because Ellen Page is still a huge, and likely still rising star, while M-Rod has a long-term and at times messy career of always playing the same bad-ass type of character and Raven's claim to fame rises mostly out her career as a kid on the "Cosby Show" and a teen in Disney's "That's So Raven."

But I think the real reason behind my joyous reaction to Ellen Page coming out is simply because of the way that she came out.  As the icon of gay Ellens would put it, she owned her own truth.  Ellen Page got on that stage and didn't just say, "hey world, I'm gay, now explode!" (even though that's pretty much all that got reported/tweeted in the immediate aftermath).  Instead, she stood up there and slowly built up to her announcement through an exposition of Hollywood culture and societal pressure, both on gender presentation and sexuality.  And, yeah, Ellen Page said those three words "I am gay," and those may forever be the most memorable words from her speech (and after those seemingly simple words, you could see her entire body sigh).  But I truly hope that those words are not the only ones remembered from her speech on Friday.  Because that wasn't the pinnacle of her speech, not by a long shot.  Instead, she went on to explain her own coming out (and why she hadn't until this point), acknowledged her own privilege in being able to come out in such an accepting setting, and ended by saying "thank you" to everyone who enables young people to find the strength to claim their own truth.

Now, while most of the response to Ellen Page coming out was positive and supportive, and I honestly didn't see much hateful or negative backlash, I did see way too many dismissive comments, as Riese over at Autostraddle so beautifully dissects:

Ellen Page said she’d been scared to reveal her truth, and in response way too many people responded with, ”In other news, the sky is blue.” The fact that so many felt comfortable being that rude to someone who’d just publicly shared a private struggle speaks volumes about how important they consider the issues of gay women to be. We should be wary of these people. People like them are why so many believe this country is post-racial or post-feminist when this country is racist as fuck and hates women. This country loves to pass a few laws and then declare everything officially fixed forever. This country has a short memory.

When people respond to a high profile celebrity coming out with some variation of "so what?" or "well duh! who cares?" they perpetuate the notion that the fight is over.  That gay youth don't still face rejection, homelessness, drug addictions, depression, and suicide at exponentially higher rates than non-queer youth.  And the vast majority of these issues stem from familial or communal rejection of them once they come out or are outed.

It can be soul-crushing for a queer person who is struggling with the possibility of coming out of the closet to less than supportive family and friends to see those types of responses to the beautifully eloquent coming out of someone like Ellen Page.  When you are sitting in the darkness of your own closet, having just felt a little bit of warmth and light shine on you because of the encouragement of Ellen Page, and then you see so many self-proclaimed "allies" shun the idea that there is any bravery at all (or even any point for that matter) in someone like Ellen Page ever publicly declaring her label, her truth, you want to slam yourself so tightly back into that closet, nearly forgetting to take note of the incredible support that Ellen Page and her true supporters and community have to offer.

I know what it's like to live for years in a closet.  I've been there.  I spent so much of my life refusing to even let myself face my own truth, the reality of my own attractions and desires.  I wouldn't even acknowledge it in my head because I knew (or thought I knew) that as long as I never faced it myself, I would never have to face even the slightest possibility of sharing that truth with anyone around me.  And I had the vast majority of these frightened and denial-ridden conversations with myself while attending American University, a place so imbued with support and pride for LGBT issues that Westboro Baptist Church (ahem...cult, not church) came to protest us.  And while I felt (and still feel) so much pride at how incredible my school was at embracing and encouraging queers, I still engaged in this circular, internalized-homophobic thought process.  I didn't come out to myself until a good year after I left American.  And, yes, there are many other personal reasons behind the timing of my own journey, but what I know is this: having an immediately supportive community doesn't make it somehow magically easy to come out of the closet.  Sure, on some surface level, would it have been easier for me to face my own truth, to come out as queer, while still at AU?  Of course, without a doubt.  But I also know that if I had come out publicly while at AU, chances are I never would've moved home, never would've put in the work, the sweat and tears, to rebuild my relationship with my family.  Instead, I waited until my family and I were on solid ground for the first time in years before I felt I could even face my own truth for myself.  And then I came out to my family.  And then to the rest of my world.  Now, from a distance, this might seem like I waited until my family and I were on solid ground only to rip the metaphorical rug out from under us by coming out.  I've had people, family members even, say this very thing to me.  But what I know is that I put far too much blood, sweat, and tears into rebuilding my relationship with my parents to allow even a portion of that relationship to be built on the lie that I was perpetuating, by omission if nothing else, that I was straight.  I needed to rebuild that relationship, and then I had to reveal my whole truth, before we could ever be on truly solid ground.  That's my journey.  That's my story.

So when people try to make the argument that coming out in front of an overwhelmingly supportive community like the Human Rights Campaign isn't brave at all, they are flat out wrong.  Because coming out, declaring the truth of your queerness, involves so much more than just needing an immediate pat on the back by those in close proximity to you.  Coming out is a process of finally facing yourself, acknowledging your own truth, and then figuring out where that leaves you in the many different worlds that you navigate.

Some people think that, because they aren't actively spewing hate at a gay person, they don't pull the trigger when a black person makes them nervous (or do but justify it by claiming stand-your-ground), and they don't intentionally try to treat the women in their workplace as less important/intelligent/etc. than their male colleagues, they are not in any way perpetuating the institutions of homophobia, racism, and sexism, respectively.  But for anyone who really takes the time to dig into any of these issues, they have to at some point come to the realization that these oppressive institutions are still very much alive and well.  And once you reach that conclusion, but look around and don't see public lynchings, anti-sodomy laws, or lack of women's suffrage, at some point you also have to realize that it's not just the faceless, nameless "other" that perpetuates these institutions.  It's us.  It's you and me.  Every day we let our own apathy lull us into contentment, every time we let ourselves believe that we don't play a role in perpetuating these oppressive institutions, we are, by that very act of apathy, perpetuating them.

 For the past couple months I've been wrestling with the idea of how to fight against the pull of my own apathy, to truly fight for the things for which my heart breaks.  There's this poem, "Etiquette Leash," by the amazing queer spoken word artist and activist, Andrea Gibson, that has opened my eyes and challenged me so much that I find myself repeating it to myself over and over again each day.  As I was editing this post, I kept trying to figure out which section of the poem I wanted to include, but I don't think it carries nearly the same weight in snippets.  So here's the whole thing:

I want a good heart

I want it to be made of good stuff

I want the stain glass window builder to be my drinking buddy

I want to drink only the punch

of a million genderqueer school kids

taking free martial arts lessons to survive recess

I stopped calling myself a pacifist

when I heard Gandhi told women

they should not physically fight of their rapists

I believe there is such a think as a non-violent fist

I believe the earth is a woman muzzled

beaten, tied to the coal slinging tracks

I believe the muzzled have every right

to rip of the Bible Belt and take it to the patriarchy's ass

I know these words are going to get me in trouble

It is never polite to throw back the tear gas

Just like it's never polite to bring enough life rafts

They crowd the balcony where the wealthy shine their jewels

But sometimes love

sometimes real love

is fucking rude

It's interrupting a wedding mid-vow

just as the congregation is about to cry

to stand up your pew to say

"Is everyone here clear on how diamonds are mined?"

Hallelujah 

to every drag queen at Stonewall

who made weapons out of her stiletto shoes

Hallelujah 

to the Blues keeping the neighbourhood awake

To the activist standing in the snow outside of the circus

holding a ten foot photograph of a baby elephant in chains

when it's probably some little kid's birthday

Hallelujah 

to making everyone uncomfortable

To the terrible manners of truth

To refusing to clean the blood off the plate

Bend this spine into a bow

I can pull across the cello of my "Speak up!"

Love readies its heart's teeth

Chews through the etiquette leash

Takes down the cellphone tower

after millions of people die in wars in the Congo

fighting for the minerals that make our cellphones

Love blows up the dam

Chains itself to the redwood tree, to the Capitol building

when a trailer of Mexican immigrants 

are found dead on a south Texas roadside

Love insists well-intentioned white people

officially, stop calling themselves colour-blind

Insists hope lace its fucking boots

Always calls out the misogynist, racist, homophobic joke

refuses to be a welcome mate where hate wipes its feet

Love asks questions at the most inappropriate times

Overturns the Defense of Marriage Act

then walks the Pride Parade 

asking when the plight of poor, single mothers

will ignite our hearts into action like that

Love is not polite

deadlocks rush hour traffic 

with a hundred stubborn, screaming bikes

Hallelujah

to every suffrage movement hunger strike

Hallelujah

to insisting they get your pronouns right

Hallelujah

to tact never winning our spines

To taking our power all the way back

to that first glacier that had to learn how to swim

To never turning our heads from a single ugly truth

To knowing we live in a time when beauty

recruits its models outside the doors of eating disorder clinics

That is not a metaphor

This is not a line to a poem

An Indian farmer walks into a crowd of people 

and stabs himself in the chest

to protest the poisoning of his lands

A Buddhist monk burns himself alive 

on the crowded streets of Saigon

A U.S. soldier hangs himself

with his enemy's dog tags around his holy neck

May my heart be as heavy as a tuba

in the front row of the Mardi Gras parade five months after Katrina

May it weigh the weight of the world

so it might anchor the sun

so it might hold me to my own light

till I am willing to sweat as much as I cry

till I am willing to press into the clay of our precious lives

A window

Might our grace riot the walls down

May the drought howl us awake

May we rush into the streets

to do the work of opening each other's eyes

May our good hearts forever be too loud

to let the neighbours sleep

It's so very easy for me to rest in my own privileged apathy, to not do that hard work of opening the eyes of those around me.  To know and feel the pain and the heartache caused by so many different problems in the world, but to justify my own silence, my own lack of action by claiming that I'm not actively perpetuating any of these institutions (at least not purposefully).  But this shuffling of blame and responsibility is precisely what allows these institutions to remain so active.

Every time a celebrity comes our or there's a story of a young gay kid committing suicide, and so many self-proclaimed "allies" respond with "so what?" to the former and "I would never bully a gay kid" to the latter, the institution of homophobia rolls on.  Every time we see stories of black boys like Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis being killed and either refuse to acknowledge the role racism plays in their deaths or separate ourselves from it by saying that we don't shoot every black kid we see walking down the street in a hoodie, we are turning our eyes from the overwhelming racism that is ravaging this supposedly great nation.

How do we not see that I, a cisgender, upper class, well-educated white woman, will never have to justify wearing a hoodie, listening to headphones and walking home alone at night to the man with a gun.  That man with a gun isn't going to assume that I'm casing every house I walk by trying to figure out which one I should break into.  But if I were a young black man walking home alone with my hood up and my headphones in, that's what people assume.  That's what George Zimmerman assumed.

I drive around in my economy car blaring my music, mostly alternative but sometimes hip hop, and even at gas stations, sometimes I'll let it blare while I run inside to grab a snack.  I have never once had to worry that if I don't turn my music down when someone asks, that person may pull a gun on me because my music in combination with my skin tone made him "justifiably" afraid.  But that's exactly what happened when Michael Dunn saw Jordan Davis blaring his music at a gas station.  I'll never have to face that.

My parents have never once had to instruct me on how to act when I'm around a police officer.  They've never had to tell me to be constantly aware of how fast my hands move to my pocket for ID in connection with how quickly the cop's hand can move to unbuckle his gun holster.  I've never had those conversations.  I never will.  Because I am white.

My criminal procedure professor from last semester told us that her African-American husband, an Ivy-educated, powerful attorney, would never feel comfortable saying "no" to a cop who asks to search his car.  Not because of the law.  This man knows the law and knows he has every right to deny a consent-search.  But because his skin colour immediately makes most cops suspicious.  It doesn't matter that this man drives a really nice car, is well-educated, articulate and upper class.  His skin is black, so he does not feel safe exercising his full Constitutional rights.

That is the world that we live in.  That is a society that we perpetuate.

For years, I've wanted to be a prosecutor.  I still do.  I clerk at a local State's Attorney's Office and I'm earning my Criminal Litigation certificate along with my J.D.  But increasingly I find myself wondering how I'm going to operate within the modern criminal justice system when I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the modern criminal justice system operates as a new slave system, a modern Jim Crow.  Is it my own apathy towards these heart-wrenching truths that keeps me on this path?  Or am I simply allowing myself to prioritize the feminist struggle over the anti-racist struggle?  Is that prioritization in itself a form of apathy?

These are my digressions, my internal struggles.  And I will likely wrestle with these issues for years to come.  Finding intersectional answers to the intertwining problems of this worlds is never easy.  But what I do know is that I refuse to remain silent about these issues.  I won't stand by and let people claim that Ellen Page's courage doesn't matter.  I won't stand still when I hear those around me, subtly or otherwise, perpetuating racism and sexism.  I have to speak up.  I have to give voice to the screams inside my chest.

Right before Ellen Page uttered those simple words "I'm here today because I am gay," those words that shattered the internet for a little while, she said that she drew on the "strength and support" of the people at the conference.  Likewise, people like me and other queer youth, whether out or still in the closet, draw on the strength of high profile and courageous people like Ellen Page.  And like Ellen Page, "maybe I can make a difference.  To help others have an easier and more hopeful time.  Regardless, for me, I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility."  This blog is a part of that speaking up and fighting back.  But I know that I have to do more.  I'm constantly learning and trying to figure out how to keep fighting, to figure out the balance.  What I've realized over the last couple years though, what has become increasingly clear to me, is that I cannot afford, this world cannot afford, for me or anyone else to remain politely silent, waiting our turn to speak or holding our tongues to allow those around us to remain apathetic and comfortable.  We must speak up.  We must fight back.  We must do the work to make each other see, to not rest, to not be afraid.

To end, I will quote Andrea Gibson once more:

I don't believe we're hateful
I think mostly we're just asleep
But the math adds up the same
You can't call up the dead and say,
"Sorry, we were looking the other way."

There are names and faces behind our apathy
eulogies beneath our choices
There are voices deep as roots
thundering unquestionable truth
through the white noise that pacifies our ears.
Don't tell me we don't hear
Don't tell me we don't hear
When the moon is slain
when the constellations disperse like shrapnel
don't you think it's time
something changed?

Facing Slavery

I watch in horror as the images splay across the big screen.  The kidnappers not caring about the man and family they were destroying.  The sadistic slaveholder forcing Solomon to whip Patsy, a fellow slave, until her back is ravaged beyond repair.  The slaver with, seemingly, some semblance of a heart admitting to Solomon that he doesn't want to know the truth because simply knowing would cost too much.

I could go on and explain just how deeply the movie 12 Years a Slave affected me.  It's one of those movies that was so incredibly painful to watch that, although I will never regret seeing it, I doubt I'll ever watch it again.  It makes me question humanity and God and everything I know and love about the world, about humanity, about myself.

It's easy for me to attempt to relieve myself, my culture, the only world that I have ever lived in, of the guilt of these horrible historical wrongs.  And as much as the scourge of slavery and racism and hate have seeped into and stained this country for eternity, it is easy to try and separate ourselves from it.

So very easy.

It's easy to say that this doesn't happen now, not here.  That we're somehow better than them.  More evolved.  More compassionate.  More willing to see the image of God in every person, no matter our demographic differences.

But there are more slaves in the world today than ever existed throughout the history of the "legal" slave trade.

And again, it's easy to imagine and believe that the modern slave trade is a "third world" problem.  I follow and love and support organizations like IJM and the A21 campaign whose entire mission is to rescue people from the international slave trade.

It's so easy to just donate money to organizations such as these, and still remain blissfully and willfully ignorant.

Here's the truth: the slave trade is alive and well in America.

Here's an even harder truth: the slave trade exists in America because there is a demand for it, here and now.

Every year in every city that hosts the Superbowl or any other major sporting event, the rates of sex trafficking skyrockets in the days before and after the event.  There are always women and children being trafficked blocks from the White House and the Capital, especially during national events such as the a Presidential Inauguration.  Florida has some of the highest rates of child sex slavery due, at least in part, to the perpetual interstate tourist demand.  Demand is especially high during Spring Break season.

 This is the stinging indictment that a former child prostitute laid at the feet of Georgetown Law School:

"With conviction and irreverence, Frundt tells the story her staff told her she shouldn’t — one she agreed not to tell — about the time she was walking the streets at night near D.C. She was approached by two johns who mistook her for a prostitute. Frundt told the men they had the wrong idea. She asked where they were from. 'They said Georgetown Law,' Frundt says. 'Yeah, they go to Georgetown Law.' She doesn’t let it sink in. She jams it in. 'That’s right. They’re right next to you.'  In the crowd, there is a look these speakers know well. It’s not fear, nor compassion, nor grief.  It is shame."

So, no, those who keep up the demand for the slave trade in America are not some faceless monsters.  Sex slavery isn't perpetrated by clusters of evil people in far away places devoid of human connections and emotions.  It's an economy trafficked in by our friends, our acquaintances, our classmates, our neighbours.  It's us.

It's the good looking guy not much older than me in a downtown Naperville bar.  The one with the flash of recognition and the gall to say "hello." A nonchalant greeting from a "client" she wished was long forgotten.

I have lived in Naperville, IL nearly my entire life.  It's known as a great place to raise kids, as the home of a fantastic library, and as a bustling, friendly, and fun downtown.

It's also the home to that john who said "hello" like he was bumping into an old high school classmate.  And it's the home to former and current slaves.  I don't know how many.  So often, it's easier for me to just not think about them at all.  To pretend that Naperville is just this privileged, elite home to so many things about the capitalist society that I hate.

It's also easy for my feelings to flash towards revulsion when I see a prostitute crossing the street in the shitty part of Chicago that I drove through, not realizing that this more "direct" route to the airport would bring me face-to-face with my own privileged assumptions I thought I had long rejected.

As much as I know that I'm going to spend the rest of my life actively fighting the horrors of sex crimes, I have no clue how I will survive.  I don't know how I'll muster the courage to not break down and lash out, not just against the men I will try to convict, but against the society that, with blissful, conceited, and too often willful ignorance, allows the demand for sex slaves to continue.

How am I supposed to live in a world where the horrors depicted so brutally in 12 Years a Slave have not ended?  How do I keep my faith in the beauty of humanity when humanity is so damn good at justifying and perpetuating and, perhaps more heartwrenchingly, ignoring its own brutality.

How will I face this brutality day in and day out for the rest of my life and still keep my faith?

Advancing the Dream

Note: This post is long overdue.  I wrote it a few weeks ago, but just kept forgetting to finishing editing it and then post it.

As I watched a re-airing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech in commemoration of its 50th anniversary, I wrote the following Facebook status update: "Watching the indescribably breathtaking 'I Have A Dream' speech being re-aired in its entirety on MSNBC right now with tears in my eyes and so many emotions in my heart.  How far we've come.  How far we must still go."

Over the past couple months, the reality of the latter statement became explicitly clear to me.  Watching the George Zimmerman acquittal, I came to realize that the biggest problem with the verdict wasn't the fact that Zimmerman "got away with it" (because, truthfully, the prosecution's case wasn't that strong, so I really don't fault the jury for reaching that verdict).  Instead, I struggled so strongly accepting the reality of the legal precedent that it sets: if someone with racial animus in their heart sees someone in their neighbourhood that (in their opinion) doesn't "belong there," s/he can follow that individual, say or do something to instigate a fight (even if it's just making the person feel intimidated by being followed), and then pull out a gun and shoot that person.

I was particularly struck in the aftermath of the acquittal by one viral tweet: "How cool would it be to live in a world where George Zimmerman offered Trayvon Martin a ride home to get him out of the rain that night" (Tom Crabtree @itscrab).

A few weeks ago, I watched Fruitvale Station, the movie chronicling the final day in Oscar Grant's life.  This was a young African American man (my same age, 22 years old, at the time of his death) who wasn't perfect, but he was a good man.  And yet, after getting in an altercation with someone on an Oakland train, was pulled off the train, had his head smashed into the ground repeatedly, and then shot in the back by an Oakland cop (who claimed to have mistaken his gun for his tazer).

And then you have the spotlight being put, in recent weeks, upon the "Stop & Frisk" program in New York City which, even the law's proponents admit, highly unequally targets young African American males than any other demographic group.  And I hear stories of young men, my own age, who, since they were as young as ten years old, have been frisked by the police up to a dozen times.  And how, after so many times, you just stop trusting the police.  You stop looking to them for help, because you assume that they'll immediately look on you with suspicion simply by virtue of your skin colour.  One young man said that he didn't even call the police when he was robbed for this very reason.  And I highly doubt that his story is an anamoly.

Sure, you can make arguments and justifications and excuses for all of these things.

But is that really the type of country that we want?

Why are we still settling for excuses and justifications behind unequal treatment based upon race?

Yes, things have absolutely gotten better since Dr. King shared his dream with us 50 years ago.  You'd be hard-pressed to find a single person who would disagree with that.  There are no more weekly lynchings or images in the media of elementary school kids being sprayed with fire houses.

Yes, the world has changed.

We have an African-American president, dozens of African-American members of Congress, and an African-American attorney general.  And those are just the most high-profile figures nationally.  There are hundreds of African-Americans in positions of power in dozens of fields across America, without such a stark contrast anymore between the northern and southern states.

But we still have a long ways to go.  Changes still have to be made before we can say that we have finally fulfilled the dream which Dr. King prophecied over America 50 years ago.

Dr. King's dream is about more than just having most people be "judged by the content of their character" instead of their skin colour.  It's about economic equality.  It's not just about universal voting rights, but about having something worthwhile to vote for.

I'm not going to pretend to understand every length to which this nation must still go before we reach Dr. King's dream.  Because I think there's more to it than the specific examples that Dr. King proclaimed.  It's about living in a world where no one goes hungry, no one is denied rights due to some demographic category, no one is without the highest quality education, no one is left behind.

And Dr. King's dream doesn't stop at the edges of this nation.  It extends far and wide to every nation on earth.  It's ambitious, and will likely never be fully reached.  But that's not to say we should stop trying, stop reaching, stop changing, stop advancing the dream.

It's been 50 years, but so much of King's speech is just as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.  And his dream will never become irrelevant.

It's All About History

I've often wondered why I’m so uncomfortable with the thought of claiming to be a victim of racism (or reverse racism as it is sometimes worded).  I’ve also always bristled at the thought of arguing that African Americans are no longer oppressed, that racism is over, and that we should all just move on.  I think I've touched on why these ideas bother me so much in my own private musings or  academic writings at one point or another, but it wasn't until I heard U.S. Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps say "It's all about history" (talking about his drive to take so many Olympic and World records) at the same time as I was reading SimpleJustice by Richard Kluger (an in-depth history of African-American's struggle for equality culminating in Brown v. Board of Education, the monumental Supreme Court case mandating school integration) that I was able to fully articulate my discomfort and (at times) outrage at such hypocritical claims of "racism" by people who look like me.

You see, racism isn't some simplistic notion of just reducing an individual to the colour of their skin and nothing more.  Racism involves the systematic and long-term oppression of an entire race by those in power.  The most obvious and clear example of this is the institution of slavery that dominated the political and economic landscape of this country, finally coming to a dramatic and oh-so-bloody clash at the Civil War.

Now, everyone (at least I hope) knows this part.  The part about black people in the South being reduced to chattel from before the very beginning of the Union up until the end of the Civil War.  But I've heard people argue, in one way or another, implicitly or explicitly, that, because the Civil War ended nearly one and a half centuries ago, black people should, essentially, "get over it" and "stop being so sensitive."

But I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around that logic or make that claim myself.  I think that I resisted making such arguments out of the simplistic mentality of not wanting to tell someone else how to feel, especially regarding a sensitive topic like racism, because I have never and will never be able to know what it’s like to be an African-American growing up, living, and working in America.

I don’t know what it’s like to live with the knowledge that the highest court in this land has said that people of my race are “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the [dominant] race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights that the [dominant race] man was bound to respect.” (Dred Scott v.Sanford, 1857).  It was blacks that were deemed property, and nothing more, by the United States Supreme Court.  It was blacks that the United States Constitution declared to be only three-fifths of a person, and that compromise was only made, blacks were only given even that much humanity, because Southern states wanted to be able to have more Representatives in the United States Congress.

I don’t know what it’s like to know that the same Court that declared African Americans less than human, even after the U.S. Constitution was amended by Congress and the States, reduced those some amendments and protections to something between blank verse and utter rubbish.  And the ex-Confederate States, though harshly scolded during Radical Reconstruction, were allowed to reshape the olive branch handed them by Congress and the Union into a whip to de facto re-enslave the black populace.

I could keep going.  I could go on and on (and on and on…) about all of the ways that the dominant white race in this country has chosen to keep African-Americans in a perpetual undercaste, both socially and politically.  But here is the crux of it: while the Civil War may have ended and thus killed the institution which we openly called slavery, black people could not even claim a prima facie case of political equality until the Civil Rights Movement came to a close less than 50 years ago.  And since then America has been devising and implementing a new racial undercaste scheme: the American mass imprisonment system. Few people recognize the criminal justice system as a tool or racism, and those who point it out are often ridiculed, especially by those on the political right.  But the statistics do not lie (and you can read my senior capstone if you want all of the evidence I have amassed): African Americans, while no more or less likely to commit a crime, are exponentially more likely to both end up in prison and stay in the grasp of the criminal justice system for the rest of their lives.

I cannot claim this history about my race.  I can try to shift the blame and claim that it was never my ancestors holding the whip, that my family members weren’t even in this country till my generation and they weren’t even on this continent until a couple generations ago, but it is still me and the members of my race who share in the privileges of being the perpetual dominant race in this country (since the hostile take-over of the continent by Europeans, that is).

I once did an exercise in a class where I listed both the privileges and struggles I face due to my demographic position in life.  While it was initially uncomfortable to begin verbally listing the number of privileges I benefit from as a white individual, I found the experience unbelievably eye-opening.  Here are just a few on a very long list:

1.     I can hail a cab or get on a bus at any time, day or night, without wondering whether or not the driver will slow down and stop for me.
2.     I can shop in nearly any variety of stores without being eyed by store associates wondering if I’m going to shoplift or steal items.
3.     I can drive my car nearly anywhere, any time without being worried that I will be suspected of doing illicit drugs.
4.     If I wanted to, I could even partake in illicit drugs with little fear of criminal sanctions, as, even in the extremely unlikely scenario that I were caught, I would simply get a slap on the wrist instead of a felony record and 5+ years behind bars.
5.     Despite growing up with an American work visa, then a green card, and, recently, a naturalization certificate, I never have to worry about carrying any of these papers with me, no matter which of the 50 states I travel to.
6.     I can attend prestigious universities or get good jobs without people making the untrue assumption that I was accepted or hired to fulfill some quota or otherwise “politically correct” agenda.
7.     I am positive that I will never be asked to speak on behalf of my entire race nor will any of my successes make me some “star” to represent my race.
8.     I can walk into nearly any store that sells magazines, dolls, posters, or books and find the aforementioned items featuring people of my own skin colour.
9.     I know that the way I dress and talk will never be seen as a testament to the overall poverty, illiteracy, or immorality of white people in this country.
10. When I learned about the history of this nation, I was told stories nearly entirely filled with filled with and championed by people of my own race.

Now I am incredibly used to and comfortable with writing blogs railing against the injustices I face as a women or otherwise decrying oppression of some form that I have faced in my own experience.  It’s a much different, more humbling, and challenging experience to try and write a blog post about a form of oppression that I have never experienced first-hand and that I really only have an academic understanding of. 

So I have a few things I want to clarify: first, I’m not writing this as some form of not-so-subtle jibe at my white peers.  It was just something I needed to get out there.  Second, I’m not writing this to appear as or in any way try and be some “courageous” and outspoken “champion” for black people.  That’s not my role in life.  Just as I wouldn’t want some man, no matter how well-intentioned, to try and put on the mantle of “champion” for all oppressed females, I don’t want to assume that unnecessary role for African-Americans.  One of the greatest forms of oppression is silencing the voices of the oppressed, and such outside “championship” can often have a silencing effect, intentionally or otherwise.  I will, however, always be an ally, just as I invite any and every well-intentioned and (preferably) duly-informed man to be an ally for women in their continual struggle for full equality.  Third, I think the biggest thing that I am continually learning on the topic of racism isn’t about history.  It’s about the present, and it’s about me. 

No matter how much I hate the notion that I have even the tiniest racist bone, cell, or even atom in my body, I live in a country where the unconscious privileges of white people are so omnipresent that it is something that I must continually fight.  I have to suppress the unconscious and deeply loathed instinct to get nervous when I see a group of young African-Americans rowdily walking towards me in a big city.  I have to consciously stop myself from suspecting that every tattooed African-American who walks in wearing street clothes to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office where I intern is either a convict or the family member of one.
Now, it’d be easy for me to try and justify some form of logic behind either one of the aforementioned statements, but the truth is that my logical reasoning applies no more greatly to those of the African-American race than to those of my own race.  My assumptions about those individuals have everything to do with their circumstances and nothing to do with the colour of their skin.  Again, circular reasoning could be used to somehow argue that those circumstances correlate to their skin colour, so there’s nothing wrong with making such assumptions because the assumptions correlate to their circumstances and the circumstances to the skin colour…and on and on…  But as I already stated: it’s circular reasoning.  And the fact of the matter remains that socio-economic standings contribute nearly entirely to these circumstances.

No one deserves to be judged by the colour of their skin alone, but whites do not live with the history and knowledge of longstanding and perpetual subjugation to those of other races.  I will not presume to be able to change the way that my entire race will react to this fact, but I can consciously choose to change the way I react.    And I will merely ask that the rest of us will contemplate these same thoughts, will search out the truth of history and of the present, and will never stop fighting to change the injustices that we live with every day.  It’s not easy and it is rarely readily apparent, but the world can continue to evolve and become a more equality- and justice-filled place.

And there is always hope.  This world will never be perfect and there will always be oppression, injustice and subjugation to contend with, but there is this: I am confident that there will come a day when injustice is eradicated, when personal appearances and circumstances play no part in the way we treat one another.  The day will come when we will be surrounded by the true and full majesty of the Shekinah glory, and on that day, nothing else will matter but our utter awe for Yahweh Himself and our complete and total love for Him and for everyone around us, all of us made in the image of Him whom we worship.  Each of us will be siblings, no matter our appearances, and we will forever stand together as such through Christ’s holy sacrifice. 

Oh, how I long for that day.