Guns, Violence, and Cultures of Displacement

Two days ago, President Obama gave a speech about guns, gun violence, and gun safety. As a prelude to this speech, Dr. Michael Jeffries, who teaches about race at Wellesley University, wrote in the Atlantic that:

Of course, smart choices and the cultivation of a love ethic are vital to improving our lives, no matter where we live. But the findings are clear and unambiguous: The violence will not cease unless we dismantle American apartheid, mass incarceration, and a labor market with no place for the black and Hispanic working class.

Jeffries argued that this is how Obama must describe the conditions in Chicago. And Obama did…to some extent.

Like Jeffries, I teach about race and racism. However, in teaching students about the power of racism within U.S. society, I push my students to examine the infrastructures that support the racialized person. I ask my students to see the big picture. Basically, as we critique race and identify that “race matters” (to use the title of Cornell West’s book), we try to look slightly beyond race.

The fact is, gun violence is much more than racial conditions as pundits of race in America frame them. For example, Chicago’s murder problem (and the larger national “gun problem” attached to it) is also part of the regionalism that defines the United States as a colonial infrastructure. It is about political binaries that have long plagued the U.S. (North vs. South as much as Black vs. White, for example).  It is also about gun violence as often un-locatable until it makes headlines.

To answer Jeffries, gun violence doesn’t just fester in “apartheid” conditions with certain peoples inclined to suffer because of the pathology of violence. Gun violence is also what makes us safe. Whether through the surrogate cop or your own initiative to carry a “Saturday night special” in your purse, gun violence is ubiquitous. It is both good and evil. It is both a tool of the encroacher and those being encroached upon.

Thus, Chicago is too convenient. The photo-op for Obama is too convenient. Instead of looking romantically on Chicago, how about we consider the ways that gun use in Chicago is part of the same fabric as the paranoia in “red states” that make carrying a gun a part of the American right of passage.  (A business in Virginia is offering 15% off their goods and services for individuals who “practice their 2^nd ammendment right.”) To assume that “violence will not cease unless” a “working class” is freed from “American apartheid” is to assume that all of these stories don’t borrow from similar impulses to create spaces that mark one’s agentive place in a nation-state otherwise celebrated for its gun wielding bad boys named Capone, Jesse James, and Bonnie and Clyde. Gun violence defines the yet to be identified figures who killed JFK. Gun violence makes the Hatfields and McCoys comfortable figures for our prime time television.

Nevertheless, discussions of gun violence and race make gun violence locatable and pathological within the United States. It assumes that we don’t need to talk about the international drug cartels that use and abuse urban areas because the conditions of expecting violence allow drug runners to be comfortable using guns to protect turf.  Violence and expectation are hand in glove. Also, if drug running is ‘illegal’, there are many ways that the expectation of violence is patterned in ‘legal’ ways. Gun ranges and gun stores across the U.S. employ many different peoples, many of whom are ex-military members. Quite a few of these former military men (yes, mostly men) hone their military training for a domestic audience. Their work to educate gun owners, like their former work protecting colonized peoples across the world, is geared toward the possible (some would say ‘expected’) violent encounter.

As we think about Chicago “black-on-black” crime as intra-community, we must realize the persistent displacement and mobility that frames the lives of these young Black citizens. We must understand the ways that this displacement is helped by the forces that abuse these urban communities. Working a full time job (to use Jeffries’ and Obama’s idea) won’t necessarily help this displacement.

Maybe Obama should have discussed the ways that Black Americans in Chicago, like many Native Americans in the past and present, battle to find a position to fight politically. Actually, it is no coincidence that gangs are defining Native American communities in extraordinary ways. The violence practiced in Chicago, like the violence of the past and the expected violence by those citizens following their “2^nd amendment rights”, is part of the United States facing its colonial demons. It was OK for White patriots to carry their gun (to practice the 2nd amendment) because they could be trusted against Native Americans and in service to slave based economics. Enter an era where brown and black people control life and death…and it becomes an epidemic. It’s a bit ironic. Yet, it’s all the same story, the same fabric, the same song. In their abstract calls for controlling guns, pundits and government officials don’t articulate the very complex ways that guns serve as currency in an economy of displacement…a displacement that is ritualized, commodified, and used to condition and recondition us in our everyday lives.

Undermining the Power of Victoria’s Secret

As an anthropologist I am often placed between intellectual “rocks” and “hard places.” For example, I am often left to defend the very presence of Native American studies discourse even as I attempt to change the game in Native American studies. What do I mean by this?

Well, as many of you see in your daily lives, conversations about Native America equate to two questions: (1) what tribe are you from and (2) do you speak a Native language? Who asks a White person if they speak British English vs. French vs. English of the U.S. South. No one. It should be self-evident. But in asking a Native American both where they are from and if they speak a language there is a reinforcement of a very strong power dynamic in the West that makes Native America exist only if Native Americans sit authentically within particular locations and practices where they are perceived to maintain tradition (as illustrated by a language that we should should speak outside the language we do speak).

OK…so why am I bringing this up? Well, it is time that we have a very public and very intimate conversation about the economics that help protect this need to ostracize, alienate, and subvert Native American identity under the rubric of authenticity and tradition. While I understand that a few people are obtaining wealth on several Native American reservations as they serve as the executives of major economies built on Casino profit, this is not all of Native America. Anthropologist Jessica Cattelino, in her study of casinos established by the Seminole tribe of Florida, asks in one of her academic articles why Native American empowerment (or sovereignty) must exist along side the context of need. She states that once Native Americans obtain wealth they are criticized for the power they have ascertained through their wealth making apparatuses. While this is a wise and poignant start to analysis, it assumes (yet again) a localization of Native identity around traditional and contested existences in tribal communities. But what happens when the Native American person attempts to occupy a personal identity? What is the disconnection between the localized, tribal identity and a personal Native American identity that wants to participate in larger national and global markets of representation?

Perhaps the importance of understanding a Native American’s personal identity – how it operates in economies and politics of expertise and representation – is best understood in the contexts of Hollywood. I recently came upon a website owned by two Native American sisters from Canada: The Baker Twins.   These ladies are members of two Native American nations in British Columbia. On their website, they posted this Tyra Banks clip where they discuss the lack of roles for them in Hollywood. One of the most critical portions of this conversation is when they describe their decisions in the past to consider roles that were scripted for Latino or “mixed” characters.

While this may seem innocent to many people – as, possibly, just the nature of changing populations that demands that Hollywood producers and directors represent racialized peoples in particular ways – it is not so innocent when we consider the rampant abuse of Indigenous, Native American, and aboriginal images in the economies of the United States and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Here, I will provide two examples.

The first example is discussed here on ABC news. Essentially, Victoria Secret dressed a white female model in a replica headdress, a leopard skin bikini, and costume turquoise jewelry. Once this fashion show took place, there was a mild outcry against Victoria Secret. Like all organizations that are labeled in the American media as “racist,” they subsequently released an official “apology.”

I asked my students in one of my undergraduate classes why it was so easy for Victoria Secret to both utilize the image of the sexualized Native American vixen and later feel compelled to only issue an apology. One of my students stated with great wisdom that Victoria Secret often uses images of females in racial and regional decoration because these races and regions are perceived to be overtly sexual and scandalous. Essentially, as my students articulated together, you couldn’t put a catholic nun or 16th century pilgrim on the Victoria Secret stage because they aren’t “naughty” enough. You would have to call them the “naughty nun” or the “sex craved pilgrim.” There are no such modifiers given to the image of the Native American female utilized by Victoria Secret. Thus, the Baker Twins found out quickly that if they are going to portray characters that represent typical American life in Hollywood films, they would have to take on the standard identities that Hollywood propagates (e.g. the Latina, the “mixed” girl, etc.). They were dismissed because they had no power to overcome the power of producers and directors to direct what racial and national identities were visualized in their productions. If Native Americans and other alienated racialized individuals were used to represent themselves on a regular basis in the United States, this would undermine the power of the flexible white model to act in buffoonery (contemporary black face, if you will) and the power of billion dollar corporations to flexibly depict the American and global landscape as they choose. Apologies – and no real repercussion – is the privilege of power.

Perhaps this conversation can be continued in the context of the economics of other colonized countries in the Western Hemisphere. In my second example, one of my colleagues recently sent me a video that is an advertisement for the clothing line of international model Gisele. In a fashion similar to the use of images of sexualized Native Americans in North America, the narrative of this video places the more European Gisele in a situation where the Natives are preparing her in makeup and other clothing that is depicted as traditional, authentic, and indigenous. At the end of the video, Gisele looks in a pool of water held by a Native person and sees European beauty.

Like the Victoria Secret model, Gisele is the exemplar of contemporary Indigenous buffoonery. “But what is the Harm?” someone may ask. The harm, in my opinion, is the acceptability that after 400 years of making indigenous peoples invisible – after 400 years of genocide in North and South America – there is no conduit for Native Americans to represent themselves. And I ask, how do we combat this? What do we do within our theoretical analysis that sheds light on the quagmire that Native Americans find themselves in as they attempt to supplant White peoples in contemporary black face (I guess we should call it “red face”)?

I think there is much to be done. While I absolutely agree that we should continue understanding collective senses of Native American empowerment, I also argue that we should understand this dismissal of contemporary Native Americans as individual agents in popular culture. It is in defining these individuals that we have a next realm of Native American and Indigenous studies. This is the beginning of an important conversation.

The American Dilemma

We currently have a wide open system of communication where folks can distribute media…and somewhere the video is not only watched but seen as a representation of “America”…a very racist America. This creates a political dilemma for those of us who are caught in “America”, hoping that “shit doesn’t pop off”…to use the terminology in a few hip hop songs I’ve heard recently. We have quite stupid racists in America, dug down deep in American society with their laptop and video making programs, and what they produce is fodder for the masses across the world (Here is a link to the story my argument is based on).

These aren’t just Southern rednecks. As this article shows, they have various roots…various genealogies. This is the flexibility of racism…this is the flexibility of xenophobia. How is it that we don’t see that the racism and fear mongering at the core of America isn’t tolerated in other nations like it is in the United States? While this nation attempts to cover up its racist and xenophobic core, people in other nations see it for what it is. (Why do you think the whole world was thrilled that Obama was elected after the age of George W.??) And now, unlike previous decades, we can’t cover it up so easily. If anything, the United States is that private laboratory, protected by the supposed merits of national principles like “freedom of speech”, where any individual can spew out hatred and ignorance for the world to see.

An X-Ray to American Politics

What if Native Americans were active parts of the US political process?

First, let me begin by stating that we (Natives) aren’t dead. We are very much alive and in large numbers. However, our absence from platforms such as the Democratic National Convention and Republican National Convention make me wonder how we would be integrated and why we continue to be displaced. I think this sad phenomenon revolves around two main issues: the politics and rhetoric of immigration and the more subtle (but just as important) instability of racial types (or what some may call “multiracialism”). In the latter, despite our all coming out of Africa several thousand years ago, the public consciousness in the United States revolves around the placement of Native people in the blood of its citizens. Everyone has the “Cherokee grandmother”. This makes being Native American a symbiotic relationship. Native America needs otherwise Black and White bodies to host it in their blood. In the former (which I focus on in this post) we must understand that the U.S. is incessantly drawn along lines of immigration and its control and promise. That is the very basis of the U.S. as a historical and political entity. In essence, if we are to discuss being Native American, we must discuss it as it sits between the rock and hard place of the evolution of the U.S. – that is, between the never dying notion that Native blood is forever captured in the average American genome and the politics of immigration to define the U.S. as a political entity.

Discussing immigrationalism is difficult, even to the point of being taboo. The notion of immigration is the legitimizing element in the crafting of the United States. Deny the immigrant and you deny the liberty that we all supposedly enjoy. The United States is paraded as a “melting pot”. Yet, despite all the immigration that this land has endured over the last 600 years, everyone has Native American ancestry.

If you remember, it was in 2008 that former Republican National Convention that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin introduced us to her family. I remember being quite interested when she introduced her husband as partially Native American (part Inuit, I believe). To my knowledge, it was the first time that being partially Indian was a mantra that was used to win over votes in National politics. Outside Winona LaDuke, Native America had been significantly absent in any conversation about presidential politics. But, important here, I was enamored by the ease of the Palin family proposition, especially how being Indian (in this case partially Indian) stood starkly juxtaposed to the RNC’s hard stance against “illegal immigration” that Sarah Palin and John McCain ran on. In 2008, at the DNC, Barack Obama was a presidential candidate who happened to be Black (half Black because of his Kenyan father).

Fast forward to the 2012 RNC and DNC conventions and the presence of immigrationalism sits in stark, stark contradiction to the more subtle use of racial pandering in the 2008 election. In 2012, on the DNC side, there was a concerted effort to bridge the gap — Bill Clinton’s statement said it all: “I want a President who is cool on the outside, and burns for America on the inside”. Clinton, the ever-masterful puppeteer of words, utilized a metaphor that could be utilized according to the psychology of a particular individual: “cool” could mean “personally collected”, or it could easily mean that particular racial coding pushes us to appreciate a particular individual (eg. Being Black is beautiful and cool). The DNC paraded racial beauty across the board. They invited many people to speak: from black Civil Rights leaders to up and coming Asian and Latino leaders.

On the RNC side, the diversity was not as present, but there nevertheless. For example, Senator Rubio of Florida discussed his awareness of challenge and fear in his home country of Cuba. (I think it was comedian Dave Chapelle who mentioned that Cuban immigrants are treated much differently than Haitian or even Dominican immigrants because of pure racism. This cannot be forgotten. See short clip here)  In the candidate acceptance speech, Romney hammered the idea that “we are a nation of immigrants.” As my good friend stated on Facebook, “Since when do we forget the chains that Black people came in…and the people who were here first?” I agree…the descendants of African slaves and Natives still suffocate under the fat derrière of democracy.

But let’s look at why the immigrant story is so powerful. The immigrant experience is alive. It is cutting edge. The immigrant story successfully ushered in the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The early assembly lines at Ford would have been non-existent without the resources of immigration. More recently, scholar and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz writes about it with freshness. He was recently showcased on National Public Radio, and his texts, many of which are personally derived tales, are stories of immigration (of its successes and discontents). Immigration is unlike other stories – ones of tradition, insularity, and historical rootedness. In these other stories there is really nothing to change political opinions, whereas the immigrant story is stimulating and serves as the lungs (the breathing apparatus) of the U.S. as a nation.

Watching the Republican and Democratic Conventions this year, it is obvious (though unstated) that the story of newness isn’t found by bringing Native American people or any other thematically decrepit American element to the stage. For example, if the Civil Rights movement is used as part of these convention platforms it is framed as the conduit through which contemporary politics were born. President Obama invited one of the “Little Rock Nine” to the White House to tell her how she paved the way for him to become President. After Obama’s inauguration in 2009, there were several news articles about how the living members of the LIttle Rock Nine took pride in his being elected.

Insularity and death – that which frames everyday life for Native Americans – aren’t motivational. It makes no sense to talk about the incredibly high rates of suicide and homicide among Native Americans. If Native America in any way ushered in Obama’s presidency, it is buried deep in the facts of colonialism. What is Obama to say, “Thanks for giving up lands, dying of disease, and suffering in many other ways so I could take advantage of the ‘American Dream’”? No other president has.

In that sense, I think of Native America as that deep marrow of the U.S. body politic – alive but invisible and not appreciated until it becomes cancerous. Major news networks televise programs that attempt to depict the death and decrepit situations on Native lands and in Native communities, and there is probably collective “awws” and other sighs before the “average” American family turns off the television, takes their nightly vitamin, and goes to bed. They wake up to CNN Headline News discussing political debates around immigration. You go to bed with your guilt, you wake up with your future. It’s ironic.

There is no denying the viability of immigrationalism as it defines U.S. politics, and it is often the antithesis to neoconservative fear mongering that often parades certain brown and black immigrants as un-American. There is something to be said about how immigration extends across the U.S. consciousness and across racial lines. Yet, there is also something to be said for its inability to properly showcase what ought to be present on the political stages of American politics.

This is not a nation of immigrants. It is a nation built upon tyranny and manipulation, which has been recently pressured by the politics of immigrationalism. What makes Rubio’s parading of Cuban suffering different and possibly more effective than a Native American parading the weekly hanging of an Indian on the Lakota Reservation? It is the fact that this inspiration, tucked softly away in another nation, is just present enough to inspire. To speak of Native realities in the same way would have much broader (and unwelcomed) implications.

We must understand this if we are to offer inclusion to all of our communities. We must understand this if we are to understand the politics on the Left (who parade the supposed diversity of its base) and the Right (who, as witnessed in the Tea Party organizations, seem to think its right to consider themselves the “Natives” of this land).

Change…for what?

For so long, society was captured in the steady progress of colonial and otherwise opportunistic exploration and expansion of certain peoples into and on top of other peoples. Eventually, once the first globalization happened – that is, once the indigenous peoples of the world had been properly mapped out by mostly European colonizers – a shift started to take effect. Peoples were cordoned off into nations, which both aligned with very old community boundaries and were often the product of colonial lines. This eventually gave us the tensions that we live through today.

At first it was the cold war. In the Clinton era, we became participants in probably the greatest global movement of ideas and resources in modern history vis-à-vis the creation of the world-wide-web and national policies such as NAFTA. More recently, we were thrust into the midst of a terrorist-thirsty world. No longer is there a nation to be afraid of…no, we are in constant speculation about where and what we should fear. After “9/11”, we lived, psychologically, according to the color coding of fear.

Now, we are in a perpetual tug-o-war between neoconservativism and neoliberalism in the United States. It seems too easy to think it ebbs and flows like the changing of political guard within the U.S. presidency. But it may. If under the Bush presidency we were made constantly afraid by being given images of terrorists on a daily basis (neoconservativism at its best), under the Obama presidency we are left to change, and change, and change some more (neoliberalism at its best). It’s a bit of social bi-polarism. This is best exemplified in the changing of imagery in pop-culture over the years.

Susan Sontag writes in her essay about photography, titled “On Photography”, that:

[photographing] is essentially an act of nonintervention. Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching out for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photographer and a life, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene (pg. 177).

She continues by saying that the photographer, if not a type of interventionist, is a “participant.”

This set of ideas set out by Sontag in 1977 is quite interesting especially when we consider how the political climate has changed since the 1970s in the United States. As Sontag suggests in her essay, she lived in an era of mass production of images, many of them centered on neoconservative war. But today images are carried farther more quickly and in defiance of national, ideological, and philosophical borders. The human relationship with images, like any other evolutionary aspect of human existence, has morphed into something new, so much so that images (because they are so prevalent) are less the reflection of humanity and more the product of humanity.

Now the cart is before the horse. The cart (images of suffering) is before the horse (human experience). We not only seek images, but we help create them. This happens with such regularity that we are left with a crisis of imagination where we seek difference or change in a highly inequitable and violent world. What was the image of suffering in times of national war is now the vast realm of invisibility in times of global instability. “Movements” like KONY 2012 make sense because they can create the frameworks for evoking meaning in a world of humanitarian aid. Younger generations see themselves not as the perpetual readers of images but as the agents that will create new images. No longer is there a stale, removed image of death or suffering that we see as part of some other nation. We now create our own utopian fantasy about what the world should be and about how that suffering should end. Importantly, it’s not that there is one camera for the sake of a thousand picture holders. There are now thousands of cameras with an attention-challenged viewership.

As members of U.S. society, instead of joining to do the nation’s service (as was the notion of loyalty in the 80s and during post-9/11), we are now pushed by neoliberal apparatuses to do the service of undeniable and impassioned service. That is, if in the aftermath of 9/11 you were asked to be loyal to the U.S. in protection of the nation against the hologram of terrorism, now you are asked to constantly envision change for the sake of change. Osama Bin Laden (or, maybe more correctly, what his image represented) is dead. Now we are left with passion (and a military industrial complex) that must be extended somewhere.

Over the last 5 to 10 years, we have realized the emergence of a new neoliberal shift in society. The terrorist-thirsty agenda was once the only face of the coin of our citizenship. However, now we see that the other face is accented by the quite fascinating fascination with giving, intervention, and empathy. That is, while we still live and are invested in nations, as part of a global economy and political infrastructure, our worlds are full of people who, as parts of churches, civic groups, and other social tribes, expect to be able to affect the world – to change many things – with the same fervor that we were once a fearful citizenry.

What do we do when a neo-conservative set of forces aren’t controlling our loyalties? How do we express passion? I believe that within this neoliberal side of our American identities, we are taken for an interesting ride where large corporations provide us with astutely drawn maps for constantly conceiving ourselves as able agents of change. Take, for example, the Disney campaign to teach children to change. It is called “Friends for Change” and its goal is indefinite and undefined change. Go to Disney website and watch some of the videos: Disney Change. If you look at this website closely, you will see the basic symbols of change in U.S. society, among them the green circle of recycling (Google “green circle of recycling” and click on “images” for examples). I wasn’t surprised by this when I first visited the website. The notion of perpetual and sometimes pointless change is exhibited in almost every facet of U.S. society. Take as alternative examples images I came across at a visit to a local hospital in North Carolina that was implementing what it calls a “transformational” system of hospital care.

the standard eco-green/recycling circle

photo of “transformation” messages at hospital in North Carolina

photo of image used as part of “transformation” campaign at North Carolina hospital

Its way of expressing this “transformation” was to effectively usurp the cliché imagery of reuse and recycling as a motivation for its employees and patrons.

What I see here, in terms of the contemporary fixation on unbounded, unlimited, and often nonsensical calls for “change” or “transformation”, is the swing in the pendulum from the neo-con to the neo-liberal – from outright nationalistic fear to the pervasiveness of a quite frantic sense of needed change. Will we continue to swing back and forth between the two for the next few generations? Maybe so. In a world of unlimited media (re)sources, and the entrenchment of youth in the discourses of schizophrenic change, the ease with which change is conceived is numbing.

As Clint Eastwood (begged by the RNC audience to say “Make my day!”) speaks incoherently tonight at the Republican National Convention, and as U.S. Senator Marco Rubio speaks intimately about the fate of his family in Cuba, I am reminded that the images of fear, as they have been conveniently paraded for decades as a form of inspiration in U.S. politics, are constantly in tension with optimism beyond the rhetoric of fear. This has broader implications as we choose to understand how many parts of U.S. society are at the mercy of conflicting notions of societal volatility (whether this volatility is called “change” or “transformation”, or captured in the image of “never forgetting”) that are constantly written into our psychology. I guess that is why President Obama, during his ’08 campaign, was confident in stating that he was “Change you can believe in”. It was obvious then, as it is today, that volatility in American life engulfs us and becomes expected. As Disney, Obama, and others show, this volatility must be harnessed in some way outside the politics of fear and neo-conservative loyalty. What troubles me is the inevitable murkiness of neo-liberalism’s perpetual spinning of wheels and ignorance of human realities.

Dreaming about my future “rap CD”

The American university is just like many other parts of the American fabric. “We who are dark”, in a lot of cases, to use the title of Harvard philosopher Tommie Shelby’s book, must learn to discern the stigma of our color and heritage even as we are expected to create knowledge in our fields of expertise. Race was a reason why Cornell West left his position at Harvard University. In 2002, former Harvard President Larry Summers argued, among other things, that West was not productive in his academic career because he spent too much time recording rap CDs (link to article).

Non-White scholars in the United States maintain the “double-consciousness” that W.E.B. DuBois discussed years ago in The Souls of Black Folk. However, our academic consciousness is framed in particular ways because of mandates to express the legitimacy of one’s scholarship in certain ways in the American university. Historically, non-White scholars have had to consider the implications of the fight to gain status or “tenure” in the university side-by-side with their recognition that many universities are filled with practices of discrimination, indifference, and racial hegemony.

This video was posted on Facebook by my friend (who is Black, a graduate of MIT, and an MD/PhD):

Black Professor depicted as sodomized gorilla at UCLA Medical School 

Asked if he has felt these same tensions, my friend confirmed that he absolutely did.

So what does diversity mean in the university? In an article from a few years back, Wende Marshall, an anthropologist, states that diversity “is more than just black bodies” in the university (link to Marshall: University of Virginia tenure case). She states that diversity is also about different approaches in academics. If I could add to her words, it’s about non-White people being fully human. We are not animals. We are not caricatures. We are complex humans. We are scholars of the highest order.

Following Marshall, what does the non-White scholar become in the academy? What protections do we not have that White scholars have? It’s frightening sometimes…seriously frightening. I am reminded of the hunger strike that a biology professor at MIT put himself through during my time there.

Here is a link: 
http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N1/1sherley.html

Brilliance, in this case, was dismissed.

I am aware that there are always arguments that the academy has made significant strides in terms of inclusion. Academic departments, across the board, have definitely come a long way relative to the outright segregation that existed just a few decades ago. There are quite a few black and brown bodies in the university. It is kind of exciting. However, what do the people who occupy those bodies endure? How are they twisted and turned in the tenure process? Once they gain tenure, who understands them? How do they express themselves? What happens when they become the subjects of racist stereotypes? These stereotypes may be explicit (e.g. pictures of a gorilla with a Black professor’s face) or more implicit (e.g. Summer’s heavy handed use of the “rap CD” to define West’s career).

Wende Marshall, according to people I have spoken with, spent a lot of time in advocacy roles on UVA’s campus and beyond. In addition to her great “academic” work, her advocacy might have been her “rap CD”, if I can turn Cornell West’s experiences into a metaphor. It is my hope, as I dream of my future in the university, that I won’t endure racist prejudices as an administration attempts to describe me and my presence in the university. I might have my own version of the “rap CD”. In those moments where my work is evaluated, I trust that my “rap CD” won’t be used as a reason for disgust. Rather, I hope it will be considered a statement of my value to the university.

Some thoughts on the North Carolina Marriage Ammendment

 

On Tuesday May 8, 2012, North Carolina voters were asked to vote in the state’s primary elections. Large numbers of people turned out for the main issue of the day, the N.C. Marriage Amendment. On the voter’s ballot, there was a simple proposition: Are you for or against the N.C. Marriage Amendment. The amendment, effectively, denies any future changes in state law that would condone and support gay or lesbian marriages (or, maybe more specifically, marriages not between a man and woman).

With the N.C. Marriage Amendment vote one week in the past, I decided to look at some of the statistics from this important political event. My recent dissertation research took place in Robeson County, North Carolina. Robeson County dons a population that is comprised of Native Americans (primarily Lumbee Indians), Black Americans, and White Americans in relatively equal proportions.  There are also small numbers of people from other ethnicities and nationalities. The county has the highest concentration of Native Americans in North Carolina and in any county/region in the U.S. South. About 46,000 of 126,000 total Robeson County residents are Native American.

Robeson County had the second highest percentage of voters in favor of the N.C. marriage amendment, coming in at 86% in favor. The highest percentage of voters for the amendment came from Graham County at 89%. Graham County is a much smaller county in the Appalachian Mountains.

I have been considering what the vortex of Native American community and the relatively high voter turnout for the marriage amendment means. Other counties, made up primarily of White and Black citizens, had much lower numbers of votes for the amendment. As you can see on the map, the state’s average was well below 86%, and most counties fell in the range from 70-80 percent of voters for the amendment.

So, how do we explain what is arguably the most socially conservative county in North Carolina in terms of its core Native American community? We are taught to think that conservatism is a White, Southern element of U.S. society. Well, you can’t deny the Southern element in this case. Lumbee people will tell you that they are absolutely Southern. However, there is something much more than Southern conservatism here.  Lumbee people and other peoples in Robeson County share the same Christian denominations as other people in North Carolina ( for example: Southern Baptist, Assemblies of God, Church of God, and many other denominations). Since they share the same denominations, church affiliation becomes a non-factor (relatively speaking).

We are then left with the notion that what we would otherwise consider Southern conservatism lies squarely within (yes within) Native American community. It is not something that can be excused as oppressive to the Native community. Rather, Native American people, in this case, possess within their community something that is illustrated by a high percentage of votes for a marriage amendment that states opposition to gay or lesbian marriage in North Carolina.

That’s why I was slightly concerned when political voices against and for the amendment did not consider the Native American vote in North Carolina. In fact, the Native American vote was quite substantial in at least 8 counties in North Carolina. The head of the NAACP of North Carolina, William Barber, in his plead for Black voters to vote against the amendment, did not reference the substantial numbers of Native American people who had stakes in the marriage amendment.

See video here: 
http://www.youtube.com/watchNR=1&feature=endscreen&v=3GrnJQ83zIo

In Barber’s words, a vote for the amendment is a stance that works against the fight for Civil Rights in the United States. While he speaks particular truths in this statement, he (like many other voices, including former President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama) did not consider the ways that strong, dichotomous issues, such as the N.C. marriage amendment, actually reflect how Native American society breathes and lives (quite substantially) through popular American politics.

But how are we to know this if we consistently hear important voices, such as the one that belongs to Rev. Barber, dismiss Native America in their appeals during these political debates?