I took myself to a matinee Friday to see “Widows” because I love all things Viola Davis. I was expecting something along the lines of “Oceans 8” but, like, elegant. And “Widows” is something more complex. Not in a bad way. It’s good. It’s just different. Quiet. Intense.
If you’re going to see the movie, I ask that you bookmark my review on Medium and feel free to disagree with me vehemently (but respectfully) there or here. Curious to know what fellow movie lovers think or will say.
It was a gift, especially as I teach the Combahee River Collective statement from 1977 and remind folks that we have been fighting for a long time on behalf of our own freedom not just for the sake of ourselves but so that everyone else can be free, too, to write this for Mic.
It’s more convenient for white sports fans, of course, to turn the healthy, justified rage of black bodies gazed upon for money-making sport into a weapon formed against us. But like Colin Kaepernick, Serena is a generosity. She won’t let anyone or anything make her flat or less complex. Like Shirley Chisholm, she is unbought and unbossed. She contains multitudes. She can be both livid and kind, distraught and sweet, within the same hour.
What audacity, what nerve, that black girl with the big hair and the strong legs and amazing body has, showing up, demanding to be seen as human. What a gift, in this time, in this void of regal reckoning for black or brown bodies anywhere but fictitious worlds, that we get to witness Serena’s humanity unfurl, unedited.
When I spoke to Carol Anderson for Kirkus Reviews, it felt like we could have talked for hours. Her book, One Person, No Vote, is an important read for anyone who cares about what’s at stake for the midterms and for 2020. What stayed with me most about what she said when I asked her about her call to action in the book is that voting is essentially the only remaining lever of power available to most people in our Democracy. I know folks feel various levels of indignation about the suggestion that anyone should be telling you to vote, but opting out combined with the steady erosion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 will set us back farther than anything you can imagine — for generations.
In his 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner wrote the oft-quoted line, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This is true now, it seems, of so many things, but it’s particularly resonant for the fight against voter suppression.
As much as immigration or Supreme Court picks have dominated conversations about the Trump Administration, political power in the United States begins and ends with the vote. Acclaimed historian Carol Anderson’s latest book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, scheduled for publication on September 11th, situates current truncated discussions, exaggerated rhetoric and lies about voter fraud and suppression at the polls meant to disenfranchise voters in a past that feels eerily like it never became history.
Jeff Sessions, for example, when he was Alabama U.S. attorney, referred to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as an “intrusive piece of legislation,” then “rounded up twenty elderly blacks and had Alabama state troopers drive them away from their community into a predominately white area to be fingerprinted, photographed and grilled before a grand jury” to intimidate them out of voting, Anderson writes. There are troubling and astounding stories like this throughout One Person, No Vote from Anderson, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She said the idea for her latest book emerged when she was on tour for her 2016 book, White Rage, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism along with a host of other accolades.
“During the Q&A on the road, I often got a question about the part of [White Rage] about voting, ‘How hard is it to get an ID?’ Because headlines about voter fraud became the shorthand mantra,” Anderson says. “So you begin to talk about which IDs voters need. African Americans and poor people often don’t have the kinds of IDs that you need. I wanted to demonstrate how difficult it is to get those IDs.” She also details the combined effectiveness of voter ID laws combined with the lie of voter fraud, found by law professor Justin Levitt to amount to “31 voter impersonation cases out of one billion votes nationwide” cast between 2002 and 2015 and a “powerful and effective ‘political weapon’ wielded against minorities, youth and the poor.”
I self-published my memoir The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans in October 2016 after spending more than 20 years working on one version of the story or another. The book’s name comes from two sources.
The concept of being an orphan, particular in the Black community, may seem jarring. We are, after all, known for taking care of one another even when we’re messy.
But even before my parents died – my father by suicide in 2010, my mother from cervical cancer in 2012 – I had been orphaned by them in many ways, largely because of untreated mental illness.
In Mira Bartok’s The Memory Palace, she wrote:
The Sami call the period from mid-November to mid-January the Dark Time, or Skabma Dalvi — the Beautiful Darkness. Most of the day, the sky is a deep indigo blue, even in the morning. It is so hard to know when to wake up, when to work, when to eat a meal.
The phrase the Beautiful Darkness stayed with me for a number of reasons: I’m a winter baby; I prefer cold weather to warm; I last saw my mother alive and forgave her for our hard times together during this time and it was the season in which she also made her transition.
The Beautiful Darkness, for me, is also a way of thinking about grief that has been helpful. It’s a time that can be disorienting in the way that Bartok describes, so that you feel lost. This can also be a gift, a way of learning new way.
These days, this season reminds me that we learn these things in order to share them.
Continue reading “Coping with Father’s Day as a Suicide Survivor in 2018”
When the bombings started in Austin, I was distracted by other things like a lot of other folks. I saw 17-year-old Draylen Mason’s name and that he had been attacked, but I didn’t register a connection between him and the other people who were being harmed in Austin until too late, until Governor Abbott decided it was time to offer a reward for information for the bomber who was then later described as a nice young man with challenges.
Writing for the Times is something I’ve always wanted to do. I have dreamed of publishing on the Opinion pages there since I was a college student. On Thursday, that became a reality with this piece, What It’s Like to Be Black in Austin.
By now, because the bomber is dead, and there are other things to think about and be outraged about — Stephon Clark’s murder among them — these reflections might seem to be a forgone conclusion, but because we live in a time of increasing racial terror, perhaps they are not. We are just in a different moment than when I wrote at length about leaving Austin in 2013. So I worry that failing to look at some of these thoughts or ideas will mean that fewer things get resolved, fewer conversations are aired.
Whenever I write about race or have conversations about my experience, I inevitably get questions like, “What should we do?” I feel very strongly that my work in the world is to be a witness and to write. My work is not to solve refusal to see biases at play or anything else.
I’ve been amazed by reconnecting with my friends and colleagues across the country in the wake of the piece’s publication. Most of the responses have been positive. Because this is a piece that is about race and racial critiques of well-meaning people tend to bring out defensiveness (underscored in the piece), it won’t surprise you to hear there’s been some of that as well.
In any event, writing this piece made me appreciate even more the wonderful people we meet wherever life takes us who become our community. Our truths are not other people’s truths and they don’t have to be. I hope that folks will take what is useful here and leave the rest.
In Austin, I felt a loneliness that was hard to explain. I wasn’t just a New Yorker in Texas. I was a tall, dark-skinned black woman with natural hair. I was an outsider in a place that is supposed to value weirdness, but I never felt like the right kind of weird.
I did the things everyone does in Austin. I went for runs around Lady Bird Lake. I went to hear live music. But whenever I looked around, I would always notice that there was no one else who looked like me. I tried to talk to some of my well-meaning white friends about this. They would try to “Well, actually …” me. “Well, actually, Austin is better than the rest of Texas.” What else could they say?
So I moved back to the East Coast, but I kept my home in East Austin and still visit when I can. It’s my home away from home.
I learned about the bombings on Twitter, and it was surreal to read these familiar names in the middle of the horror. These were people I wrote about, people I knew, people I shared laughs with: Nelson Linder, the head of the Austin N.A.A.C.P., and Freddie Dixon, a pillar of the community, discussing the deaths of 17-year-old Draylen Mason and 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House.
I worried for the people I knew, and then I felt, again, that deep, lonely sadness. I wasn’t the only one made to feel that I didn’t belong. Someone was targeting black people, but once the bombs appeared in other neighborhoods, the authorities no longer seemed willing to consider the possibility that hate crimes had been committed.
I don’t know what else to call them. When the bombings started, I had been writing about the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, so I knew the faces of martyrs of the civil rights movement. Whenever I hear about bombs and black people, I think of the four little girls murdered in Birmingham, Ala. I have family ties to Philadelphia, too, so I think of the Move bombings. Are there any black people who can separate news of bombs from notions of terror?
We are in an unusual cultural moment. There has been so much truth-telling over the past few months, so much affirmation about speaking truth to power. I hoped that this time, the authorities might acknowledge that, yes, black people were targeted. I thought someone might make the connection — East Austin is the only place in the city where black and brown people still live in large numbers, and they remain vocal. There are people who are afraid of that, and are threatened by that, and that makes East Austin a target. Instead, there was silence, as these concerns disappeared into the broader panic about where a bomb might strike next.
You can read the rest of the piece here.
I haven’t been blogging that regularly since the holidays because I’ve been working on some longer form essays and works in progress, along with working on work work and doing other things. But I wanted to take a bit of time to reflect on the 50th anniversary of The Kerner Report and its meaning for Dame Magazine.
The Kerner Report marked the first time in modern U.S. history that government officials acknowledged media bias that favored white narratives and disadvantaged blacks to the detriment of all of American society by underscoring how lazy, biased journalists in unrepresentative newsrooms took the word of “beleaguered” officials in American cities to publish inaccurate figures that gave distorted impressions about the impact of riots on cities, leading to more damage.
There are, unfortunately, too many examples in modern media to provide a comprehensive account of the ways that we have devolved since the Kerner Report. One example is the failure of media to accurately contextualize the rise in domestic extremist terrorism at the hands of white supremacist mass shooters like Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine at Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina, as a serious threat to national security on the same scale as an external threat posed by foreign nationals, Black or Brown people. In a January 2018 report, the Anti-Defamation League reported that between 2008 and 2017, white supremacists were responsible for 71 percent of all domestic terrorism-linked deaths.
Another example of this lack of progress is the way that Black victims of police-involved shootings are often criminalized in death. Immediately after Michael Brown’s death, the New York Times inserted a line in a story about him high in the story saying that “he was no angel,” as if that would explain why police left the boy’s body uncovered in the street after he’d been shot to traumatize the city of Ferguson, Missouri, even further.
The secondary finding of the Kerner Report was more far-reaching and resonant, and is the finding that all media still have not appropriately dealt with.
By and large, news organizations have failed to communicate to both their black and white audiences a sense of the problems America faces and the sources of potential solutions. The media report and write from the standpoint of a white man’s world. The ills of the ghetto, the difficulties of life there, the Negro’s burning sense of grievance, are seldom conveyed. Slights and indignities are part of the Negro’s daily life, and many of them come from what he now calls ‘the white press’—a press that repeatedly, if unconsciously, reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America. This may be understandable, but it is not excusable in an institution that has the mission to inform and educate the whole of our society.
This rings true today in what stories make front page news and what stories are completely ignored or never break through.
You can read the whole piece here.
Joshunda Sanders 