(Name-mce) ListServ The Crime of Breathing While Black

[Tracey de Morsella (formerly Tracey L. Minor)]

The Crime of Breathing While Black

By Christopher Rabb, TheNation.com. Posted December 7, 2006.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/45138/
A young black man and an elderly black woman each die in a hail of
police bullets; a comedian invokes the era of lynching, and suddenly it
feels like a crime to be caught breathing while black.

There is nothing like being made to feel like a nigger. Just having to
verbalize it or commit such a thought to text is gut-wrenching. Janitor
or journalist, if you're black in America, that feeling is both
unmistakable and more familiar than it ever should be so long after the
the visible successes of the civil rights movement. But despite the
greater prospects, opportunities and privileges earned for and by many
of us over the decades, the default has remained the same: The power
dynamics that exist in this country at any given time may render us niggers.

I have often joked that if you ever want to see a modern-day Uncle Tom,
look no further than me in the vicinity of a white police officer. The
reality is, that is how I have been conditioned to behave around the
police for pure self-preservation reasons, having grown up black in
Chicago with parents who wanted their boys to live to adulthood. But the
other reality is that whatever newfound liberties I have experienced,
and all too often have taken for granted, I don't ever want to be made
to feel like a nigger -- something far, far worse than its utterance. It
is a status whose roots form the tree from which we are lynched. Without
the corollary lack of humanity and powerlessness, lynching could not
occur, in all of its modern iterations, "contagious shootings" included.

Two recent police shootings involving black victims have a deeper
meaning and impact for those of us who are unwarranted, but nevertheless
prospective, suspects. In New York, Sean Bell, a 23-year-old unarmed
man, died and two of his friends were critically wounded -- caught in a
hail of fifty bullets fired by undercover officers -- as the group
emerged from a nightclub, where they had been celebrating Bell's
bachelor party. In Atlanta, 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston was shot as she
sought to defend herself from police who had stormed into her home in
search of drugs.

This past Thanksgiving I was stopped by an Alabama state trooper for a
minor, unintentional moving violation. It was late, my family and I were
tired and we were driving through rural Alabama in a rental car. Almost
instinctively I knew what I had to become and how I had to act when
pulled over. But as soon as I knew that the trooper had no desire to use
his discretion to let me off with a warning, I committed an inviolable
act that I will not soon forgive myself for as a husband and father of
two small children: I challenged the trooper, albeit politely. It was a
stupid and potentially dangerous thing for me to do, as the stealthy
punches to my thigh from my wife reminded me.

Nothing is more important to me than the safety of my family, and yet
there was this dissonant part of me -- that privileged
post-civil-rights-era, Generation X sensibility that was evoked --
asserting that "we've been niggers long enough," as I recounted the
generations and diversity of indignities my family has had to withstand
with no recourse.

Such indignities still abound in popular culture. Consider comedian
Michael Richards, who recently unleashed a racist tirade after being
heckled by a few black men in the audience. Worse, he made graphic
reference to lynching when he explained what would have befallen them
had they "mouthed off" to a white person fifty years ago.

But whether or not we use the word "nigger" or discourage its use by
others -- or among black folk -- the discrete events that trigger that
visceral feeling in us will remain as long as black lives continue to
have less value than white lives. Because they do. To invoke a newer,
insidious rhetorical tool of conservatives, it is white "innocent life"
that is sacrosanct, not society's moral outrage against violence and
brutality, physical or psychological.

More than a decade after the O.J. Simpson verdict, Simpson is still the
poster boy for brutality and injustice, whereas former detective Mark
Fuhrman is all but legitimated as a bestselling author despite a long
history of his admitted brutality as a member of the LAPD.

For many African-Americans, whether or not they believe a guilty man was
nearly framed, to cast Simpson as a symbol of brutality gone unpunished
is not only bizarrely misplaced and insulting; it is also symptomatic of
a society intentionally blind to the daily realities of what it feels
like to be seen more as a problem than as a person.

Every day we are made conscious of our own race and status in society by
a host of peers and judges in a range of venues. And even if we never
have to endure an altercation with the police, we still are acutely
aware of how easily we can be made to feel like niggers: our gait, tone,
behavior, our proximity to valuables (or more valuable people) is
scrutinized. And our choice to accept this reality and conform to earn
that eye contact, that begrudging customer service or that success in
hailing a cab is related to this issue of brutality, because it is an
assault on our citizenship and very humanity.

"Contagious shooting" may very well be a legitimate assessment of the
events that culminated in Sean Bell's death hours before his wedding.
But it is symptomatic of something larger that undoubtedly correlates to
when such contagions most often occur and to what degree. If there is a
presumption of guilt or reason to fear or distrust someone irrespective
of context, that itself is a crime; it represents the psychological
brutality and ubiquity of institutional racism.

But perhaps institutional racism sounds a bit too harsh for the
thin-skinned mainstream media, the proxy of our willfully ignorant body
politic. Society prefers what is in essence "situational racism" that
dissolves with a well-placed, well-timed apology to the right brokers of
contrition. "Some of my best friends are black." "I was drunk." "He had
a wallet." All socially acceptable mitigators of brutal speech are
deftly untethered from their more vile origins, too shameful and heavy
for those most complicit to bare. But the weight of its impact never
lessens on those of us who do not have a choice as long as we're
breathing while black.


Christopher Rabb is a blogger, freelance writer, web entrepreneur and
activist. He is the founder of Afro-Netizen, one of the largest
Black-oriented weblogs on the Internet, and has also founded the
Progressive Civic Fund.

Tracey de Morsella
The Multicultural Advantage
Phone: 888-750-6132
Email: tdemorsella AT multiculturaladvantage.com
Find Diversity Career Fairs, Scholarships, Fellowships, Jobs,
Internships, Grants, Mentor Programs, Leadership Institutes and
Sponsorship Offerings at:
http://www.multiculturaladvantage.com/opportunity/opportunities.asp