In March 1991, I wrote about watching 17 police officers paid to protect and serve watch four other officers paid to protect and serve almost kill a man named Rodney King. I watched the video at a friend’s house in a Jackson, Mississippi, neighborhood called Presidential Hills. There were four of us, all Black boys, standing in front of what was then the biggest television I’d ever seen in my life. That night, I didn’t craft an essay or even a paragraph. On the back of a trigonometry test I’d failed, I wrote, “They all just watched.”
I was 16 years old. I did not describe the particularities of the officers who watched. I did not describe the blows to King’s forehead, ribs, legs, neck, eyes, and arms. I did not describe the cars that slowed down to watch before continuing down the road. I did not describe how I felt.
I could not describe the way Rodney King ran.
They all just watched.
All four of us had seen folks beaten up, shot, stabbed, and stomped out at concerts. But in every one of those scenes, those seeings, someone somewhere always came to the person’s defense. By 16, we knew we had to make ourselves meek, small, subservient, docile, and grateful to survive encounters with the police, white mobs, white teachers if we wanted to make it home to Mama, Grandmama, and them.
We knew, just 150 miles from where we watched those 17 police watch Rodney King run, Emmett Till was murdered for being Emmett Till. Ninety miles from where we watched those 17 police officers watch one of their own almost kill, Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten damn near to death in a Winona jail for being Fannie Lou Hamer. We knew that 21 years earlier, five miles from where we watched those 17 officers watch Rodney King beg for his life, police shot up a dorm at Jackson State University, where my parents went to school, killing two students and injuring 12 others.
They all just watched.
The next day, at Saint Joseph Catholic School, we had mass. The school was slightly majority Black, and very few of the Black students I loved were actually Catholic. When the father said, “We offer each other a sign of peace,” I made sure to dap up every Black student in mass, crossing aisles to find those who were not close enough to dap. That was our sign of peace. White students, some of whom were my friends, did not get a sign of peace from me that day, and I was sent to the principal’s office for this transgression. I don’t remember what happened in that principal’s office. I know I was not asked to describe how I felt about watching police almost beat a man to death to the principal, nor a school counselor, nor any teacher at that school.
They all just watched.
In April 1992, just hours after those four police officers were found not guilty of what those 17 other officers all saw them do, I wrote about watching Reginald Denny, a truck driver in Los Angeles, get pulled from his truck and beaten by a number of men who were not paid to protect or serve. I wondered about the men who intervened and possibly saved Denny’s life that day.
All I wrote was, “I am glad they did not all watch.”
In 2017, as a 42-year-old Black man, for a book called Heavy, I wrote about what else happened the day we watched those 17 officers watch those four officers almost kill Rodney King. I wrote about what my mother said when I walked into the house that night. I wrote about what my mother did to my body when I walked into the house that night. I wrote about feeling like I deserved to be beaten for decisions I’d been making in Jackson, decisions that could have easily led to 17 officers watching four officers almost beat me to death.
For over 30 years, I’ve written about, written through, the experience of watching 17 police officers paid to protect and serve watch four police officers paid to protect and serve beat a chained Black human being damn near to death.
They all just watched.
As we near the 30th anniversary of the Los Angeles rebellion, I find myself, for the first time in 30 years, afraid to write or teach what I know. I no longer show the video of those 17 officers watching those four officers almost kill Rodney King in my classrooms. I seldom even describe the scene or the seeing. I let my students know that it is more than okay to not watch things that will make them sad.
I do not let them know that in my lifetime, there was not a more “triggering” or “traumatic” space than the American classroom precisely because my teachers refused to thoroughly engage with the violence that shaped how we talked, where we sat, if we listened. I do not do this work anymore because of what I’ve seen and what I know about myself, not because our students supposedly lack the resilience or because they are more in tune with their mental-health needs than we were. I believe, more than ever, we need to really sit in and reckon and remember what it meant to watch 17 police officers watch four police officers almost kill an unarmed Black human being on video. We need to really sit in the scenes, the seeings, and consider how we made it over —if we made it over—because of those seeings.
But I am afraid to teach like this anymore.
As much as I want to claim this shift in pedagogy is about my students and their protection, it’s really partially because I am an old cowardly man who’d rather watch my students use clever phraseology to disengage than soulful communication to fully engage with what a lifetime of scenes and seeings of Black death have done to the insides of our bodies, our body politic, and our classrooms.
Though I am afraid of showing scenes and seeings of Black death to my students, they are not afraid of talking to me, with vigor, about the traumas and catastrophes of their lives.
And I appreciate that.
But that appreciation does not make me less cowardly. For the first time in my teaching career, my students could be my children. They are watching and becoming in a world where white power is daintily called “white privilege,” where engineered racial humiliation at work or school is called a “microaggression.” We have made a nation for them filled with Americans left and right of center who have butchered the so-called Awakenings our parents’ parents fought, organized, and died for, making “woke,” the literal act of being awakened/no longer asleep, into a pejorative.
Our watching made this nation. And now we want to protect our children from what our watching made, without taking responsibility for the making. That is what old cowards do.
But there is something else.
And I fear that these paragraphs, in this particular publication, cannot, and possibly should not, hold that something else.
We were stolen. We were technology. Stolen technology has no point of view in what Americans call realism. As stolen technology, we were expected to become labor, create more labor, and die. Those terms were made abundantly clear in every historical document signed by white men who wrote with feathers. And though nearly all of us die prematurely because of this nation’s appetite for Black humiliation and Black death, we did not die and have not died on their terms. We have demanded in the face of death that our points of view be centered in all American scenes and seeings.
We actively watch too, as an “I” and a “we.”
Hence, in all of our physical deaths, all of our engineered injuries, and all of our humiliation at the hands of working-class white men with billy clubs and guns who work for wealthy white folks who couldn’t give one fuck about them, there is an awesome absorption. There is the acceptance that “I” am a part of the “we” that was supposed to watch “our” own death from a point of view of the mechanically monstrous. I am writing now about something, some things, beyond good or bad, traumatic or pleasurable, transgressive or progressive.
I am talking about the expansive awe of Black life and Black death in this nation. And how we, particularly we Black Southerners all over this nation, absorb that Black life and death. We, who spend lives watching the watchers watch us die, know this expansive, awesome absorption. It, as much as any public policy, is why we are still here, attempting to hold on and love good from points of view drawn by us, not caricatured perspectives drawn for us by those who will eat through their own lungs just to chomp big bits of our hearts. I no longer teach about the L.A. rebellion in my classrooms the way I did as a younger teacher, because this is one way I keep hold of that which makes me whole. We actively watch too, as an “I” and a “we.” And Black deaths, like Black booms, are real.
This is my point of view.
Opening Image: Glenn Ligon, Red Hands #2, 1996, silkscreen on canvas; Photo by Farzad Owrang; © Glenn Ligon.
This article originally appeared in the April 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR, available on newsstands April 5.
GET THE LATEST ISSUE OF BAZAAR
The Burden of Bearing Witness
Newspaper Updates PH
0 comentários :
Post a Comment