I look up and I see red face and hear angry voices.
I looked at the Black woman who helped me set up this event, ever so briefly, there was no surprise. I closed the book, picked up my coat from the back of the chair. I knew she was doing the same. I stood up, and I'm sure she did too, while announcing the book "discussion" had come to an end.
Why am I talking about violence, one of them yelled?
In 2006 or 2007, a representative from the Madison Public Library (MLP) spoke on a local radio show about the necessity to ban Toni Morrison's Beloved, and I thought, yes, we have come to this moment from long ago. When I first taught the book in the late 1990s, I waited until near the end of the semester. By then, students, mainly Black students, were exposed to writers presenting firsthand accounts of what it meant to be enslaved in the US. After 9/11 (with the exception of one African American Women's Literature course), it became increasingly difficult to have semester where students, now mainly white, even bothered to read the slave narratives. The day discussion on Beloved was to begin, few had read the text and it was a struggle to coach out of them any questions about what they read.
It wasn't a surprise when I hear the MPL representative tell a town, over 90% white, that Beloved had too many "dirty parts." As if Morrison had the audacity to point to violence of American enslavement! If Morrison had written about Blacks as criminals, as pathological, she would have garnered praise as an "American" writer who refused to dwell on the violence of the Atlantic Slave Trade and enslavement. The "dirty parts" of US history.
Too many "dirty parts!"
And what questions would Black children generate in the classroom after reading such a book? Who would answer those uncomfortable questions from children who want to learn?
Too much "blackness"?
White America lives in the land of feelings, and similar to immature teens, white America has yet to recognize that this feeling of something ominous, black and creepy, corrupting the innocence of their towns and neighborhoods, into their lives, their children's minds, is but their collective fear of difference. Racial difference.
How real is it? It's real enough to defend with AR-15s. Real enough to receive an acquittal. Real enough to return to the office, having shot and paralyzed a young man. Real enough to be sent home from the courtroom. Real enough to be offered an internshipin Congressby a Congressional member. To paraphrase Beloved 's Baby Suggs, white America doesn't know "when enough is enough."
I'll say it again, since the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, I have yet to have one white resident of Kenosha express a word of compassion. Not a word to even acknowledge knowledge of these acts of violence. Not one white has showed me their humanity and connection with other human beings. In fact, in the silence, I have acknowledged the memo: a complicity with whiteness is required!
Particularly since last year, since a string of shootings of Black Americans, white residents have stood in my face and referred to "looters" and "rioters." It was no surprise to me when the judge in the Rittenhouse trial asked the prosecutors, defense attorneys, and anyone listening to refer to the three white Black Lives Matter supporters, two murdered and one serious injured, as "looters" and "rioters." It's not just the judge who surrounded Rittenhouse with protection "love" and "justice."
As the spirit of Baby Suggs warned the young Denver (Sethe's daughter), there's "'no defense for it.'" And when Denver asks, but then what to do, the older woman says, go on. Go on!
Wrong is wrong! There is a right side of history!
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