Generic White Woman Cops, Dystopian Minneapolis, & Afrofuturism

Dear friends and fam,

I’d like to issue an official fake-apology, I didn’t *mean* to trash GWM (Generic White Men) in my last Not Safe for School, it just happened “by accident.” Sort of like how when you think you’re tasering someone, but you are in fact shooting them with a real gun. Woops.

We live in a country where a 20 year old dies because he had approx $300 in outstanding tickets. As of right now, thanks to NYC parking rules and my own ADHD, I have $175 in outstanding tickets. AND I keep forgetting to update my registration sticker (sorry mom, doing it after I send this). Do I deserve death too, or is the minimum $300?

[Rhetorical question, the minimum is just being Black]

I have a friend who works at the hospital where George Floyd’s body was taken-- she called me on her way to work Monday morning to ask me to google the police shooting-- you know, that one that turned out to be Duante Wright. She asked if he had survived or not. She wanted to know exactly what type of clusterf*ck her day in the ER would be. But she also knew she couldn’t use the hospital’s portal to look it up-- colleagues were fired for simply looking at George Floyd’s file. And apparently, downtown Minneapolis looks a bit like the set of a dystopian biopic set after the collapse of the U.S…. which I guess looks nearly identical to April 2021. Boarded up windows, police barricades everywhere-- it’s a city bracing for a storm. And they had best buckle up, because we all know how that trial is gonna turn out. The system’s rigged.

The only places I saw that were as heavily boarded up and secured in New York City during the summer protests were luxury buildings and storefronts on the Upper East and Upper West side. The rest of us schmucks were left to fend for ourselves…. And you know what? We were all perfectly fine. And besides, those barricades weren’t set up to protect people, they were set up to protect property.

We were fine, because we were pissed off but peaceful protestors trying to make a point, perhaps even if it is in vain, that we no longer can look away from the Black death and violence perpetrated by our white-run and white-led state.

But damn did those angry white people do some damage to the Capitol tho.

SPEAKING OF WHITE TERRORISTS:

It never ceases to amaze me just the sheer depth of the delusions white people hold of themselves individually as well as collectively. White people’s rap sheet over history literally reads like a horror story. And before you go: every society culture whatever had slaves and exploits people not just white people gah it’s human nature gah why’re you critiquing whiteness you’re racist*-- let me tell you, first: very gooood job at having a hazy grasp on world history ::pats on head:: But, that does not, in fact, change the current reality that the vast majority of the world’s oppression has occurred as a result of white people, or North Americans and Europeans to be ruul specific, and their “colonization” aka “genocide and mass exploitation.” At the hands of men, to get even more specific. One could even say… at the hands of the GWM.

White people are the terrorists. And a whole lot of ‘em are also cops. And judges. And lawmakers. I think it’s safe to say every CEO of charter schools across America is a white terrorist. And clearly much of academia. Don’t @ me with this “not all charter schools” “not all white people” b.s. I got receipts for days (literally, a 47 page annotated bibliography, so if ya gonna come for me, best bring a nerd).

What I’m saying is: the call's comin' from inside the house, y'all. Always has been. And unless we white folk (and all of us, really) start to do some serious reckoning with ourselves, it’s looking like that’s the way it always will be.

If the Minnesota police department can’t keep their shit together long enough to not shoot another Black man during the trial of another white supremacist cop** for… killing a Black man… well, it just doesn’t look great for the future of white people being like, you know, human.

And while I’m at it, just because BIPOC people are also racist does not excuse or validate white people’s racism towards BIPOCs because that is a false-equivalency. The power balance is so skewed and since we white folk still control basically everything, so it’s actually far worse when white people are racist. Eyeroll. I guess I do know what they’re teaching kids in schools these days, so I shouldn’t be surprised at their hazy grasp of a false narrative of history and lack luster critical thinking skills.

A good example of just how dangerous it is for a white person to be individually racist, or even to just “not like” BIPOC people, versus a BIPOC person just not liking white people, is this scenario:

It’s bad because when someone, a white female police officer, say, might have such deeply held internal biases about Black men, that she may “accidentally” use her gun on him rather than her taser because of an imaginary threat.

And that is literally the kindest analysis I can give as to why a veteran cop would be terrified of a 20 year old with expired tags. I can’t wait to see what bullshit excuse gets her off the hook. It all makes me wish hell is real and that it’s the actual bad people who go there.

In other news…

I just finished Ya Gyassi’s spell blinding first novel Homegoing (it is rumored she got a one million dollar advance, and now that I’ve read it, I say it was well worth that and more).

I won’t ruin the plot, but the book follows the descendants of two African sisters, one of whom marries a white man and lives in the “white castle” where beneath her are thousands of Africans stacked like sardines in the holding cells used to house Africans about to be taken on the Middle Passage (this 'castle' still exists, and you can check it out [here] in this cool article about Ghana's slave castles (https://theculturetrip.com/africa/ghana/articles/ghana-s-slave-castles-the-shocking-story-of-the-ghanaian-cape-coast/)).

The other sister is sold into slavery as the other one is trying to manage the whims of a white male husband above her (s/o to the wives reading this, y’all the real MVPS). As the tale weaves the stories of them and their descendants across time and space, one story focuses on a newly freed slave living in Alabama during the 1880s.

He is arrested for “looking at a white woman” and sentenced to 8 years of prison labor in a coal mine. This is historically accurate. This happened all the time. This happens all the time. In the 1880s, Black men were jailed for whatever the fuck the white cops wanted to arrest them for, and worked alongside white criminals who did real crimes, like murder people. The coal mine in Gyassi's Homegoing is bleak. The conditions are excruciating, inhumane, and of course insanely dangerous. I couldn’t help but wonder: how much have things really changed?

If you are living while Black in America, you can still get killed if you are a 20 year old with justifiably poor impulse control, who panics and tries to flee when a white police officer pulled them over for AND I QUOTE “having too many air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror.”

And isn’t that the most terrifying thing of all?

Heaven forbid. Unpaid tickets AND more than one air freshener?!?

And the cruel reality of it all is-- he was right to be terrified.

There is a long history of using the illusion of white women's 'purity' as an excuse to arrest or lynch Black men, whose masculinity has always made white men desperately want to disavow Black men of their right to exist. Talk about an inferiority complex.

So, you have hundreds of years of social conditioning that Black man = rapist of white women, hundreds of years of social conditioning that Black men are violent animals. Pair that with 26 years of being indoctrinated into the systemic racism of a police department, and you get a rather drab looking white woman emboldened by white supremacy and the belief that Black men are all criminals, who “accidentally” shoots a 20 year old instead of tasing them-- when she shouldn't have even done that!

That, my friends, is the difference between BIPOC people not liking white people (all for 100% justifiable reasons, I might add) and white people who “aren’t racist” but just don’t “like” Black people. See who ends up dead there? That’s why reverse racism isn’t real.

What a fucking farce, since that's really what SHE and white cops are-- they're the brutes incapable of being civilized.

It’s well established that men’s pre-frontal cortexes, which controls decision making and impulse control, do not finish developing fully until about 22. Duante was 20, he made a bad decision to try to flee an arrest-- but that decision was a fully human one as well. I looked at his picture and saw my students. They’re amazing, but also dumb af because they’re young. It’s the universal human condition of youth. They should have the right to make a mistake and not get killed for it.

This week is another reminder there is no justice. There is no peace. And now say the rest of it with me, fellow protestors: Fuck these racist ass police.

Shit, if I were a Black man pulled over in Minneapolis for “having too many air fresheners” I’d probably have such a massive panic attack that all of my decision making would be relegated to fight or flight as well.

We all would be. To be Black and pulled over by the police in America is tantamount to when a Gestapo officer asks a Jew for their papers: it's not going to end well, no matter what you do.

And don’t even get me started on the Prison Industrial Complex, but if you want to know more about that, Ava Duverney’s documentary 13th is a good place to start. It's on Netflix, ffs, so if you haven't seen it yet, get on board. That too, is a form of reparations. It’s the missing link between Homegoing’s falsely incarcerated Black man for the express purpose of using him for free labor, and our dark reality of what America truly is.

I’ve been reading a lot of fiction lately since reality is pretty bleak. After I finished Homegoing, I turned to one of my favorite novels of all time: Octavia Butler’s Kindred, which is about a Black woman being inexplicably pulled from her present tense in modern day Los Angeles and plopped into a plantation in the Slave south sometime well before the civil war. As she is tugged between times, the real terror in the book is that you and the heroine have no idea when that jerk into slavery is going to be, nor what is awaiting you.

Octavia Butler, and her writing represent imo some of the best Black speculative fiction has to offer. "Speculative" fiction, btw, is a more elevated form of sci-fi. Butler's works all feature a Black female main character, and the reason we ALL should be reading her is she limns a future beyond societal constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. This ability to imagine a better future, at times called Afrofuturism, is something that can be seen across the works of BIPOC theorists, writers, and artists (here's a cool article about Afrofuturism as an architectural blueprint for the future. Octavia Butler just happens to be one of my favorites-- her work is accessible, and frankly, I'm obsessed with how she can pull the reader in with her very first sentence (a writing feat that is in and of itself impressive #goals).

Butler's *Kindred* is truly horror at its finest because it taps into a fundamental reality that Black Americans carry with them from generation to generation: the deep seated knowledge that, at any moment, you can be ripped from your life and placed back into slavery.

**Reparations Opportunity: **

Honestly, donations aren't going to fucking cut it. But it's worth a shot. Donate to Duante Wright's family. And then do some soul searching about what preconceived notions about race and gender *you're* *still* holding on to.

Until next week’s horror show of Black injustice,

Allison

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*My twitter trolls, of course, do not use proper pronunciation or spelling in their weird little pseudo attacks, but I hate grammar mistakes so I’ve corrected their grammar for them. (the trolls honestly, only bring me delight when I humiliate them with my wordzzz battles-- when you’ve been trolled and publicly scorned by a good share of academia for being an attention-seeking liar, and then sued by your advisor who also stole a career from you, turns out, you develop a pretty tough skin). So, if ya coming for me on twitter, please remember I don’t give a fuck and also have a PhD. Rhetoric is my bitch. And ffs, don’t bring a plastic knife to a gun fight. For the sake of parity, I will concede that some of my trolls understand how to google things; I got called a “borderline personality disorder racist white traitor” by someone, which was the most specific slam yet. Going to a psychologist tomorrow to make it official. Eye roll. I’m joking. Dripping in scorn.

Well aware that the phrase “white supremacist cop” is repetitive and redundant, but for the cheap seats in the back...ACAB

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