Wednesday, November 26, 2014

On Sadness after Ferguson, With Apologies to All the Victims of Injustice

For many years, prominent activists have meticulously documented the structural racism, sexism, classism, and other pervasive, systemic injustices that define the lives of Americans--all Americans, whether to their benefit or to their detriment--systemic injustices so well-worn that they can be hard to see even for people who suffer the consequences. 

Of course, people have been documenting structural, systemic injustices for centuries. Although it undoubtedly started many centuries earlier, I'm thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 1700s and Cherokee activists in the early 1800s; I'm thinking of the Seneca Falls women's rights activists in 1848, and Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells; I'm thinking of W.E.B. DuBois, and Alice Paul, and Wilma Mankiller; I'm thinking of Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Gloria Steinem; I'm thinking much more recently of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Anita Sarkissian, and Tim Wise. The list is endless, and it is filled with people who I respect and trust because the work they're doing to document and confront injustice is hard, and thankless, and even dangerous. 

I often take comfort in these people--that they exist and that they have taken responsibility for confronting the persistent march of injustice that results in death, hate, violence, rape, theft--usually in the lives of people who are already disenfranchised. I try to emulate them when and where I can. But while there is often comfort in knowing that social justice activists are at work, and there is therefore a horizon against which to (try to) orient my own actions for social justice (however meager they may be), I find that today I cannot muster anything but profound sadness. 

I am sad that so many people in Ferguson and around the country today feel like the only recourse they have for voicing legitimate concerns about the deaths of their loved ones is rage. I'm sad that I think they're mostly right. 

I'm sad that people will wake up in Ferguson today and tomorrow to the smell of smoke and burned out buildings. I'm sad that I feel helpless to do anything more than post FB links and talk to my children and teach about structural racism in my classes, knowing full well that the people who most need to hear the message are the ones most likely (and able) to ignore it. 

I'm sad that people I know and love, as well as people I've never met, can't hear the expressions of deeply held pain and sorrow in the narratives that so many people--people of color and women and other human targets of systemic injustice--tell about their daily lives. I'm sad that someone, somewhere is profiting off of all this sadness and happily stoking the fire while people die and cities burn. 

I'm sad that I catch myself backing away from saying anything because I don't want to make people uncomfortable, even when I purport to be (and try to be) an advocate for social justice and an ally to the activists who do the real work of confronting injustice. I'm sad that I don't even know how to talk or think about any of it without feeling despair and anger and fear and utter shame.

And I know that my sadness is meager--disproportionate to any injustices I personally face and unequal to the demands of social justice that I desire. I know, in fact, that my sadness in this moment may even be mawkish and insulting to the people who are facing injustice, whether as target or documentarian or both. And I know as well that my brand of sadness is a form of luxury, available only to the people like me who can step away from systemic injustice long enough to wallow. In the end, my sadness will not change anything, and I know this, too. I can even admit, as much as I do not want to, that my sadness may even be detrimental to the cause in some way. But sadness is, at least for now, what I have. 

Someone someday may accuse me of not doing enough to advance the cause of social justice, and I have to live with the reality that they will probably be right. But I hope in that moment, people will not say I did nothing. I hope I will earn at least that caveat. For now, I don't know what else to do but wallow and post links and talk to my children and teach my classes and be sad. Tomorrow I'll try again to do something better.

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