Danielle Bowler, Eyewitness News
Between me and the other
world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of
delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it… How does it
feel to be a problem?
The St Louis County grand
jury’s decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed
18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, did not come as a surprise.
While it registers as unthinkable, it simultaneously fits within a paradigm
that continually devalues black lives.
Its effect, nevertheless,
was surprising to some who cannot understand how its impact is not limited to
the United States. Brown has come to stand as a metonym for the lived
experience of blackness that transcends geographic confinement and the neat
compartmentalisation of the black experience in state borders. Beyond the
important particularities of context, place and time, this experience is rooted
in the dilemma that arises when oppressed bodies are framed as problems, devoid
of the content of full humanity. It is the phenomenon that Lauryn Hill
describes as being ‘two-thirds a person’.
This phenomenon speaks to
pervasive narratives of power and its repeated abuse and misuse through a
codified system that gives us recurrent riffs on the du Bois theme: “How does
it feel to be a problem?” What du Bois argues is that black people are not seen
as people who have problems, but rather dehumanised as those who are themselves
the problem. This manifests itself in sophisticated ways that are embedded in
every aspect of human life. It is inescapable and pervasive and allows events
to be framed as if they are divorced from race, or any other power structure.
As if they just are. It skews the narrative and distorts the facts.
Recently, a series of
events have been reported in the South African media that have brought the
question of race to the fore once again. These are not new phenomena. Rather,
the media and national attention have brought these acts of violence into sharp
focus. They collectively reveal how narratives of power attempt to distract
from the lived experience of race and endorse claims to the exceptionality of
the perpetrators. From Tim Osrin to Djavan Arrigone, the Tiger Tiger Five and
beyond, the same structure that manifests violence on black bodies sees its
stark replication. As writer Sisonke Msimang phrased it: “You literally cannot
make this stuff up.”
Many continue to look for
reasons to justify these actions, dismiss the influence of race, or explain them
away. Nevertheless, there are constant reminders that it is not safe to be a
person of colour, or a member of any other oppressed group, in the public
space. That mere existence is a threat. That this existence itself is a
problem.
Philosopher Lewis Gordon
names this phenomena ‘illicit appearance’. He argues: “Offending blackness is
in fact a hyper-visibility” which “manifests epistemic closure, where to see a
black as such means there is nothing more to be known or to be learnt. Black
men stay at the centre of the prison industrial complex”. Just as one struggles
to reconcile the idea of an impartial legal system with the reality of racial
disparities, there is a tension between the idea that we all live the same
reality, and the facts that continually prove otherwise. These race events
repeatedly masquerade as unconnected incidents, rather than manifestations of a
structure that devalues black bodies through multiple forms of violence.
As Associate Professor
Carol Anderson commented on events in Ferguson, this violence can be “cloaked
in the niceties of law and order”, a codified white supremacist rage that is
now “respectable” and operates through a sophisticated subtlety. This subtlety
often allows people to believe that these are unconnected incidents committed
by monsters, a narrative that belies the fact that we can all be, and often
are, complicit in racism – which embeds itself in things that often masquerade
as ‘normal’, or ‘just the way things are’. But the actions, gestures and words
of the everyday are touched by the politics of the white supremacist capitalist
heteropatriarchy. It is inescapable.
To quote writer Zadie
Smith, “it is in the air, or so it seems”.
The mechanism that often
allows us to “escape”, disregard, ignore or discredit narrative that do not fit
with our perception of reality is privilege. Privilege can facilitate a
remarkable cognitive dissonance and dissociation. It allows us to say “it is
not about race/class/gender” et cetera, rather than to focus on the
uncomfortable realities, believe the narratives of the oppressed, and deal with
our own blind spots and the power afforded to us by virtue of who and what we
are. It allows us to avoid the incredibly hard, uncomfortable and necessary
work of unpacking what it means to live abbreviated forms of humanity. As TO
Molefe argues, we are all “capable of actions that in effect perpetuate and
enable anti-black racism” and other forms of oppression.
Despite the increasing
appearance of these race incidents, privilege attempts to tell us these things
are not about race. Narratives are spun to reinforce this idea: “She was a
prostitute.” “They are just young, naïve boys.” “He stole cigars.” They are
made matters of class, citizen justice or law enforcement and any excuse is
made to stand in the place of the idea that race is at the core of these
incidents. The matrix of race-class-gender-sexuality-privilege, and their
unavoidable connection, is confusing to those who seek singularity in their
explanatory narratives, who would like it to be about just one thing.
But these factors cannot
be untethered, and their connection and complexity doesn’t make these incidents
any less about race. To argue that these incidents are not about race is a
silencing tactic and a distraction. It attempts to invalidate the lived
experience of blackness and is part of the constant reminders that the system
will defend itself, even in the face of its blatant contradictions. It will
attempt to defend the indefensible. Mike Brown will be remade in the image of a
thug. Cynthia Joni will be refashioned as a prostitute for the simple fact of
walking while black at 09:50am.
When oppressed groups
share their experience of the world, they are rarely heard and scarcely
believed. Lewis Gordon argues “the grammar of American ‘race and class
relations’, so to speak, is generally one of continued disavowal of their
legitimacy, of their being ancillary aberrations of an otherwise pristine
societal order”. His words have a profound echo in the South African context.
Claims to race are viewed as illegitimate by a social order that continually
seeks to disavow the black experience and seeks refuge in democratic discourse.
When President Barack
Obama stood up to address the American public, he remarked: “Communities of
colour are not making these problems up.” This comment has global resonance.
Those who experience the world differently, by virtue of racism or any other
oppressive system, often feel remarkably gaslit by a system that is designed to
protect, endorse and hold up the dominant reality as the only version of the
way things are. It produces narratives that say the reality of the oppressed is
the product of overactive imagination rather than rooted in lived fact.
Consequently, the rage
that oppressed groups feel is constantly invalidated. Offensive acts are
committed by “ghosts”, violence is trumped up by those committed to racial
mythology, dehumanising experiences are the product of overreaction and
hypersensitivity. Anything will be made to stand in the place of the way things
are. There is an appeal to “reason” and not rage, as if there is no logic to
the overwhelming anger that oppressed groups feel, as if this rage is divorced
from both real content and context. This rage does not lack content. It is
built on multiple, constant micro and hyper aggressions and repeated physical,
emotional, psychological and institutional violence. Its founding principles
are reality in stark colour. It is maintained through numerous factors that
include a justice system that operates as ‘codified terror’, and continually
appeals to the idea that it is able to operate outside the organising
principles of life.
The repetition of these
race events keeps the global black community in an endless cycle of
simultaneous frustration, anger, despondence, exhaustion, distress and utter
disillusionment. As Fanon argues, blackness is “haunted by a galaxy of erosive
stereotypes”. The law is upheld as the final bastion, as the institution that
will ensure justice for black bodies, but repeatedly fails to reflect the
conditions of black reality. From Ferguson to South Africa and beyond, black
reality has to constantly defend its existence against a system designed to
render it remarkably invisible and to see black people as problems. The words
of poet Jennifer Davids have profound resonance in articulating this
phenomenon, it seems: “We are locked/By particular associations/Of ages in
us/To the symbol/The word/And cannot reach/Beyond the limits of this cycle.”
