Black People Are Dangerous

We are so dangerous that simply stating you are in fear of us grants you license to kill us, even if we're unarmed, even when we're children, even when the police have told you to stay in your car and you disobey them, chase us down and shoot and kill us, you will not be arrested. George Zimmerman's murder of Trayvon Martin was not the first time a black person was killed by a white person whose defense was I was afraid of her/him/them because they are black.

Black and Beautiful and Sunburned

"Can you tan?"

"Do you burn?"
Assumptions about the normatively and inherent value of whiteness - "fair" being light and attractive - are imposed on me as a black woman every day, living in a white supremacist society. I am regularly asked to give an account of my presumptively alternate biology, imagined to be fundamentally different from the interrogator's own normative experience of being human.

"Can you tan?"

"Do you burn?"

I am expected to answer when questioned. To explain myself and my race. Public access to my body is unquestioned.

And deeply entangled with the notion of otherness is the notion of beauty. 

How can something, let alone someone, be black and beautiful?

So never mind that Song of Solomon 1:5 has a simple conjunction, black am I and beautiful, (and emphasizes her blackness by opening with it), a myriad of bible translators continuing into modernity persist with "I am black/dark but beautiful/comely/lovely." Blackness and beauty cannot occupy the same space in the imaginations so they cannot occupy the same space in their translations, no matter what the text actually says.

Some say, they "get" that, but (negate that "getting" with their next comment) doesn't verse 6 say that she is sunburned, therefore, she can't be black - that's what the notes in my study bible say...

As though being black and sunburned were impossible, as impossible as being black and beautiful.

If the text had not said that the woman was as black as the tents of Qedar - as black as the black goats' hair tents woven from the famed goats of Qedar renowned for their beautiful black coats in antiquity, but instead was as white as a lily and that the sun had "gazed" on her, white (and other readers) would have no problem imagining that her lily-white complexion was damaged by the sun, along with all of the class implications associated with laboring outdoors. 

But the antithetical constructions of blackness and beauty, blackness and normatively, even blackness and sunburn mean that far too many readers cannot hear that the woman in the text ruined her beautiful black Qedari completion with a sunburn, in spite of what the text says.

Yes, I am black! and radiant - 

O city women watching me - 

As black as Kedar's goat hair tents 

Or Solomon's fine tapestries. 

Will you disrobe me with your stares? 

The eyes of many morning suns 

Have pierced my skin, and now I shine 

Black as the light before the dawn.

 Rabbi Marcia Falk, 

The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible

Whiteness and assumptions about whiteness permeate nearly all things in our society like an anti-light obscuring non-Eurocentric realities.

The Browning of the World

This post is not about global warming - or global scorching as it might more accurately be called. The browning of the world is a perception in nations that have enjoyed had a majority white population (in numbers and/or power) and now are experiencing cultural and racial shifts in light of global migration patterns.
Early in the history of the United States black peoples made up a numerical majority even as they were commodified as a social and political minority. In modernity and exploding Latin@ population means that several individual states have lost and more are losing their white majority. And it is talked about as a "loss."
In Europe, there are significant tensions based on the immigration of peoples of color - especially Muslims, many of whom are among the large numbers of Asian workers who provide essential services throughout Europe - in recent years. Some nations are desperately trying to stem the tide of immigration, while encouraging their own citizens to have more children. All to maintain a cultural identity that is in part based on (the construction of) whiteness.
This past week I was reminded of this new reality listening to the serial speeches of President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. Netanyahu rejects out of hand the possibility of allowing Palestinian refugees who have been dispossessed from their ancestral land - land to which Israel also has some legitimate claim - because they would dilute the ethnic majority of the Israelis. PM Netanyahu did not deny the legitimacy of their claim. In order for Israel to exist as a Jewish state, Jews must be a numerical and enfranchised majority for him.
There are many sad and tragic ironies in this position. The slaughter of the Jews in the Holocaust was based in part on their exclusion from the category "white." Jews and Arabs are both Semitic peoples - linguistically as speakers of Northwest Semitic languages in the Afro-Asiatic language family and religiously as Abrahamic/Ibrahimic peoples. And the "Jewishness" of Israel is very much in dispute with in its borders. Those who see "Jewishness" in terms of religiosity are a minority in Israel, albeit one with growing political power and influence. And even among Jews, Israel has differing immigration policies, permitting non-Jewish descendants of European Jews to immigrate for two generations while limiting the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to their Jewish family menders and still requiring them to go through conversion rituals. As a result Israel has seen a rise in anti-Semitic skinhead activity from the neo-Nazi grandchildren of European Jews who immigrated for the great social programs and standard of living in Israel.
I am preparing to go to Israel for the third time. I will live in Jerusalem for two months. East Jerusalem. That is code for Arab Jerusalem. I will be near the Palestinian checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
Two walls - the remains of the external wall of the destroyed temple and the security fence on seized Palestinian land - frame Jerusalem. And I feel them closing in on me. Already.

Race Traitors

Race is a construct. Its foundation is more solid: appearance, phenotype, culture, ethnicity, national origin, and kinship. And then there is the web of assumptions, suppositions, presuppositions, stereotypes and deeply held beliefs and belief systems. These threads form a web - a soft, silken, strong, dangerous, entrapment.
The web has two sides. It is constructed from within and without.
The web is three dimensional. There is perception, misperception and reality.
The construction of racial identity works in and on families.
What is a family? A whole 'nother web of webs, biological and social.
When the social strands of the interwoven webs disintegrate, what is left is independent and freelance reproduction tangentially related to dysfunctional familial structures within a subculture infected by the decay permeating the larger culture.
There are some folk constructing a racial identity for the rest of us with whom they share strands in the web by inertia and consumption.
This I think, is the essence of being a race traitor - not marrying or mating outside of the race or producing mixed race children, but rejecting one's responsibility to participate intentionally in the crafting of one's own cultural and racial identity. Today's race traitors are those who consume the caricatures and stereotypes of their own people produced by the dominant culture.