Feline Warrior

There’s something to be said for being Latina. Depending on the situation, I can fit into either the People of Color Group, or the White People Group. (Since we don’t have a huge Latino population in WV, there’s generally no “middle” for me.)

As a person of color: “Well, you know… I don’t have to tell you - you know how white people are!” Well, yes, indeed I do, because sometimes I am one!

As a white person: “You know, the night shift sleeps the whole time they’re supposed to be working – they’re all Black so I shouldn’t be surprised!” Well, yeah, but have you heard about how lazy the damned Mexicans are? Oy, vey!

Last semester, a classmate actually complained to ME about how all those Mexicans were invading Northern Virginia! It was weird and made me really mad! I looked at her, stunned, and just pointed to myself and said, “HELL-OW!” She didn’t get it. To her, I was not Mexican, because to her, Mexican is an all-encompassing term for people who speak Spanish, and then laborers, at that. Me, I’m a pretty woman with a Spanish background, like, oh, Salma Hayek, or better yet, Natalie Wood - Spanish-looking.

Being included in the White People Group means that I hear “jokes” that are not normally told in the presence of the browner folks. People are stunned when I protest, or, as my mother taught me to do, ask, “Could that person (Black, Polish, etc.) have been any other race (gender, etc.)?” Nobody ever likes that interruption, but it’s important to me to point that out - could the butt of this “joke” be anyone else? Why was that person chosen? It can be exhausting to put joke-tellers into this position, so I don’t do it as much as I once did.

When I’m included in the People of Color Group, I get to find out what is really going on, and I learn first-hand about the experiences that people are having. I wouldn’t ask a man if women are being treated better in the corporate world, nor would I ask a straight man if Gay men are being treated differently in the work place than their straight counterparts! I sometimes feel like a spy for the underdogs, because I can hear things that others might not be privy to. Of course, there’s still the question of what to do with the information I gather. So far, I just write and talk about it.

When, in summers past, I would get very brown, people would sometimes ask if I am “mixed.” Once, a few years ago, a nurse in a doctor’s office asked me about 120 questions, none of which made sense to me, so I finally asked her, ‘What is it that you really want to know?” It turned out that she didn’t know whether to test me for Sickle Cell Anemia - and she was afraid to ask me if I was Black! Earlier in life, my best friend was Black (and to this day, she’s still Black!), and we spent every waking moment together. When I was with her family, who ranged in skin tone from light-skinned to dark-skinned, people assumed that I was a member of the family.

Let it be said, however, that no matter how often people confuse me for being African American, or ”mixed,” or anything else, I am aware that I have the privileges of a white person. Being followed in stores every now and then is nothing compared with not having certain opportunities because of how I look - and how people assume I must be, based upon that look. I grew up with a certain expectation of life that, a level of confidence; there was nobody telling me that I wouldn’t be hired because I was ____. (That happened in terms of gender, certainly, but that’s next chapter!)

As a female, I believe that I understand prejudice fairly well, because those of us for who the “system” was not made tend to better understand its workings. We see it more clearly than do those for whose comfort and success the system was made (made for and by, even). Even so, when it comes down to racial versus gender prejudice, my guess is that it’s a crapshoot - each person’s experience depends upon the other players.

There is a tremendous book that I read back in 1985, Anne Wilson Schaef’s “Women’s Reality: An Emerging Female System in a White Male Society.” I read that book so many times that I had to replace my worn old copy. I was a much younger person, obviously, but that book opened my eyes to a society that was created by and for men - white men. The rest of us are just supposed to make do. (I will, no doubt, bring up this book again when discussing the next chapter.)

In any case, it’s interesting to me, especially here where there is no Latino community (of which I am aware, anyway), to be accepted into both groups, the White People Group and the People of Color Group. I appreciate gaining the insights from the People of Color Group, but even more than that, I feel more of a bond with that group. I don’t know if it’s because of how I look or that my mother grew up in a part of Los Angeles that had only Mexicans and some Armenians. Or maybe it’s because my grandmother, with her mother and siblings, came to the US from Mexico in 1910 and they worked their asses off to make it. Maybe it’s simply my cultural identity, and thus, an awareness of racism, of my own mother’s and grandmother’s experiences, that sets the bond for me.

My husband, who is a white guy, refers to me as a woman of color - a term I did not use for myself for years because I felt that it was reserved for people who suffered injustices constantly and blatantly at the hands of white people. But maybe I can be a woman of color - because I am.

It’s been a few years since anyone mistook me for “mixed” or Black, yet my ethnicity and my cultural background provide reason enough to accept the name. Am I really a member of both groups? It’s hard to say. I don’t feel a part of the White People Group, often because I would be ashamed to be considered a part of that group! Yet I benefit from the privileges of membership in the White People Group. I benefit, too, from the membership in the People of Color Group, but those benefits are more connected to soul, to growth, to expanding self, and to touching the rest of the universe.

I am glad that we saw the film “True Colors” in class today. I have seen and read of similar experiments and they always come out the same - we find that the African American person gets the short end of the stick.

Oprah did something similar on her show years ago. In the first phase of the experiment, she went out shopping to expensive stores, but did not have her makeup on, nor was her hair done - in other words, she didn’t look like Television Oprah. One of the shops that allows customers in by appointment only (and then one must ring a bell from outside to be let in) did not open the door to speak to Plain Oprah. In the second phase of the experiment, Oprah went out looking like Television Oprah and was let in to the appointment-only shop without an appointment, and received all sorts of luxurious treatment at all the other shops where she’d been shunned just the day before, when she was Plain Oprah.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Eddie Murphy did a routine on Saturday Night Live (SNL) where he went out as himself and then later went out made up as a white man - light-colored makeup on his face, a suit, wig, glasses, briefcase. As himself, he got the usual treatment, nothing special, just a ho-hum day on the subway in New York. But when he was in his white man disguise, he was shocked to learn that the minute the last Black person stepped out of the subway car, a big party began. Dancing girls served drinks, there was music, and everyone had a great time. When the train came to another stop and Black people got on, the fun stopped. In another sequence, White Eddie Murphy went to see a loan officer at the bank and the white loan officer offered him piles of cash - for free.

This was not an experiment, but a comedy skit on SNL. The difference in treatment that people receive, based upon their skin color, had made it into our pop culture by the mid-80s (I just checked and found that Murphy stopped being a regular on SNL in 1984).

The point is that this is mainstream knowledge, this business of different treatment among the races. (Instead of “Separate but equal,” how about “Different but -eh- kinda equal”?) When Dianne Sawyer, Oprah Winfrey, and Eddie Murphy all have the same idea, you know it’s not a fluke! It’s good that our media is shining a light on this issue, yet it’s clearly not enough. The Dianne Sawyer piece was in 1996; the Eddie Murphy segment in the 80s, and who knows when the Oprah piece aired. We can make fun of it yet we cannot do anything to change it? Is that the take-home message? I do not understand what is up with that.

Things do not change if nobody makes them change. If people do not report landlords who use old and illegal applications, those landlords will continue to use those forms. (And strangely enough, people will continue to fill them out.) If we continue to laugh at “jokes” that perpetuate a sense of different-than (or less-than, or even hatred), who will stop telling those jokes? If we do not check ourselves constantly, when will we start to think about what we are saying or thinking?

In a racism awareness workshop that I attended in Washington, DC, I learned that it is normal for me to have “bad” (i.e., judgmental) thoughts - some of my socialization lives within me still. However, it is my responsibility, I learned, to check myself. It is my responsibility to ask myself, “What is my motive? Why did I just say/think that? Was that a fair assessment of that person?” The best person to change my way of thinking is me, and I do it through a constant check-in with myself. It is not a shame-based experience; it is just me, asking myself a few questions. I can do it not only in situations having to do with race and gender, but sexual and gender orientation, age, size, ethnicity - the list can go on and on.

Rather than cry, “I am not a racist!” and then brush off any further thought or discussion, I think it is better to say, “I work hard at not being racist,” and then following through on that with my actions. It seems nearly impossible not to have some sort of preconceived ideas when meeting new people; however, I have found that I have met some incredible humans by being open and not prejudging them. Life is so much more interesting when I am open to the possibilities rather than deciding what those possibilities will be ahead of time.

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
and the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

- Lewis Allan, © 1940

The lyrics above were made famous by Billie Holiday, who first sang the song in 1939. Holiday had to record it on a record label other than her usual one, which refused to record such a controversial song. “Strange Fruit” is a haunting song about lynching in America, and is, to me, a perfect prelude to a writing inspired by the film about Emmett Till.

The story of Emmett Till, which is partly the story of Mamie Till, but really the story of the breaking of the camel’s back, the last straw - the shocking horror of the events that took place, the images we saw, but then the goodness that came from the whole thing - wow.

As I’ve reflected on those images of young Emmett, all smashed up, I can’t help but think of the Holocaust — the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Poles and others who didn’t fit the “Aryan mold.” The killing of Blacks in America is not so different. Rather than rounding people up in one fell swoop, however, the Black Holocaust in America took place slowly over a long period of time - really, since Africans were brought here as slaves. There are those, no doubt, who would argue that the Black Holocaust is still in progress, and it would be a tough argument to counter. Have things gotten better? Absolutely. Are people of color occupying more jail cells than any other group, or more often under-educated, under-funded, and under-represented? I offer a resounding Yes!

But back to Holocausts… I wonder - the waiting, the careful stepping, of course the hiding. How can people live like that? Yet they did. There had to be, I think, a sense of immediacy in both situations (Germany and America); we know from saved journals, diaries, and the accounts of survivors of the Holocaust that people did maintain a sense of hope. From similar documents, we know that American Blacks had a sense of hope, or I think there would have been no revolution.

If there’s nothing to fight for, there would be no fight. The publicizing of Emmett Till’s murder was gasoline on an already raging fire. There was definitely something to fight for, and there was most certainly fight.

Just as I wept over Baldwin’s Going to Meeting the Man, I felt hot tears as we watched the film. Neither the story nor the images were new to me, but I do not believe that I will ever become comfortable with them - and for that, I am grateful. I have forced myself to look at old, grainy, black and white images of Blacks hanging from trees and bridges just as I took myself on a tour of the Holocaust Museum. It’s not a perversion, but a sense of obligation. These people -all of these people- must not have died only to be forgotten. Surely, none of them would have been thrilled at the idea of someone studying images of their dead bodies, hanging from trees or piled like trash, and yet I have felt for a long time that it is my responsibility not to let these horrid events go unfelt. As a child, my parents told me I was too sensitive, even too dramatic, but I’ve always known -a deep-down knowing- that looking away is not the right thing to do. The right thing to do can be painful, but without pain, there seems to be little growth.

And so it was in America, in the summer of 1955, when Emmett Till was so brutally murdered. The pain had to have gotten to the point of boiling over, a countrywide blistering wound, and ready to burst. As we were reminded in class, the timing of events played a big part in the reaction to Emmett Till’s murder - Brown vs. Board of Education, another broken promise, and perhaps just one too many people dead at the hands of whites. The publicity of the brutality of Till’s murder, followed by Rosa Parks’ actions, and then those who were ready to get people moving - it all fed into what became the Civil Rights Movement. The people were ready to move!

I hope that this movement will never end. I hope that the images of Till’s murder, and of all the murders, will not ever be tucked away and out of sight. It is the painful reminder that keeps history alive - important not only to honor those who died, but those who put themselves on the line to fight for justice. The memory of those times is necessary for people of all backgrounds, so that we do not ever repeat those horrors. Sadly, I fear that they will be repeated again and again; as long as there are humans, there will likely be power play that uses violence as its primary tool.

I am cranky with myself because I didn’t mention something crucial to James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man during class. Never again will I not speak up, even when I feel like I’m having a one-on-one discussion with the professor!

That said… Here’s the crucial part of the story: When the story opens, the main character, Jesse has failed to either attain or maintain an erection. His wife tells him that he has been working too hard and doesn’t make a big deal out of the situation, but it’s important to him. He can feel excitement “like a toothache,” but it isn’t going to his penis. Jesse thinks about asking his wife to perform oral sex on him, “the way he could ask a nigger girl to do” but that, apparently, would not be proper.

As Jesse lays in the dark, his hand is between his legs. He hears the night sounds, but his mind goes to the events that will come the next day - apparently young Blacks trying to get other Blacks registered to vote and Jesse’s role in preventing them from doing so. Jesse ponders this, and he remembers beating the living daylights out of a young Black man in the jail earlier that day. That memory triggers one from his childhood. The childhood memory is horrific (to the reader, to me) yet it is crucially related to the state of Jesse’s penis - and an erotic state of mind.

Of course, the story about the captured Black man being hung and dipped into the fire is just horrible. (Personal aside: I wept when I read it. I get weepy thinking about it. The reality of it makes me sick and weepish.) One of the white men responsible for the torture of the Black man approaches him with a large, gleaming knife. He holds the man’s “privates” in his hand and stretches them out. Jesse has eye contact with the Black man for not as “long as a second, but it seemed longer than a year.” Then the white man takes the knife and cuts up and then down, slicing off the Black man’s “privates.” After this happens, the crowd tears at the man’s body, with knives, rocks, and their hands, and then someone throws kerosene onto the man’s body, which goes up in a huge flame.

This is the connector, the horrific connector. There is so much to say about it that I hope I don’t get off-track in my attempts to share my thoughts. First, there is to consider the belief at that time (and still now, to varying degrees) that Black men are sexual animals, that they want white women sexually and cannot control themselves. (As we discussed in class, a Black man speaking to, looking at, or otherwise interacting with a white woman often resulted in lynching.) So there is a sense of fear of the Black man’s penis - this is what gives him power (in the eyes of the white people). By cutting off the man’s penis (and presumably his scrotum), his power was taken away from him - right before the eyes of the “offended.” That they did it while he was still alive was, of course, monstrous - the pain alone must have made the kerosene seem a gift. However, he was humiliated all along the way: First stripped naked; then hung by a chain over a fire; then dipped into the fire so that his body hair was burned off; then the rest of the torture… all done in front of a crowd of people - white people.

So then, there is humiliation, pain, even more pain, and then a stripping of power - not even a power that the Black man was likely aware of, but a power in the eyes of the white people. If the Black man was aware of that “power,” it was not something that he believed he truly had, but knew it was a fear conjured up by people who wanted to hate him, who wanted to be afraid of him, and who would -and did- kill him because of it. The Black man would not have intentionally acted on that perceived power, because it would land him exactly where the story finds him - being murdered by a hideously perverted, picnicking crowd of whites.

Jesse felt a sense of sexual arousal when the Black man’s “privates” were being displayed by his captor; he felt a sense of arousal later, when he was beating the crap out of the young Black man in the jail. When he recalls these two incidences, his own penis becomes erect and he has sex with his wife. But not just any sex; he says to her, “Come on, sugar, I’m going to do you like a nigger, just like a nigger.” Jesse’s sexual power is returned to him when he is reminded of the Black man’s power being so violently taken away.

This is not a practice that I am familiar with, cutting off a Black man’s genitalia. It sickens me to think that it happened outside of Baldwin’s story, but I imagine it must have happened more than a few times.

Something else that has struck me as fascinating is the title of the story and its meaning. In relation to Blacks, white men in power positions (isn’t that repetitive?!) have often been referred to as “the man” in literature and other cultural/historical references. Yet in this story, the white people are going to see the torture and murder of a Black man. Who is going to see whom? Is “the man” a reference to Jesse’s penis, to his erection? The story is about, in essence, the power that this white man feels as a direct result of witnessing the dreadful event, the violent removal of the Black man’s genitalia; Jesse’s father also becomes aroused by the event. It’s about the arousal this white man feels later, as an adult, when he carries out violence against a Black man. It’s about attaining power at the expense of a Black man.

So there you have it - my thoughts on the sexual-power theme of the story. What a powerful story.