0 Dylan Saba Would be an Awesome Senator

I met this kid my junior year.  I was sitting on a comfy leather couch in my room in 123 when my roommate, Geoff Gardner, walked in with his daily calzone from Hodgdon and two other guys following him inside.  They were both tall -- one of them really tall and he had a big afro.  Everyone probably knows that dude, Ruben; Ruben from B.E.A.T.S., Ruben with the 'fro, Ruben the guy who makes sweet music.  The other kid, the shorter-but-still-tall guy who came from Oakland just like Geoff, he had the most impressive knowledge of hip-hop this side of the Mason-Dixon.  Now, that same guy, Dylan Saba, is running for TCU Senate and it would be irresponsible if I didn't explain to you why he deserves your vote.

First and foremost, Dylan listens.  It sounds simple but it isn't.  You could be better at it; I'm pretty bad at it; Senate is absolutely atrocious at it!

If you haven't talked with Dylan, I urge you to seek him out with ceaseless enthusiasm and sit him down for coffee, a Hodgdon quesadilla, or a beer (only if you're over 21, of course).  Find him, chat with him, ask him about the production of Kanye West's I Heard 'em Say, and then tell him about what's on your mind -- and don't hold back!

Dylan will listen to you.  He will listen to you, offer his honest opinion, and then seek to understand further.  Dylan Saba is an advocate and a concerned citizen who believes in active engagement and consciously endeavoring to improve the community and people around him.  In the truest sense of the word, Dylan is a public servant.  If anything, bringing Dylan on to Senate will only enhance your time here at Tufts.  You will have a champion for you in student government and that is invaluable.  As someone on Senate now, let me tell you that student government at this school could do so much more if the Senators only knew how to listen to their constituents, and their peers, and their community like Dylan Saba.

And second, Dylan is a real person.  He isn't a Senate kid and Senate wouldn't be central to Dylan's identity.  Dylan has gone out on the weekends and stayed in on others, been among the rest of the student body, and shared countless experiences with the greater Tufts public.  In a short year-and-a-half at Tufts, Dylan has garnered a reputation for being one of the most earnest and genuine people here; friend to all, enemy to none -- a "chill bro" in every positive sense of the word and without the negative riff-raff inherent to a sabre-rattling masculinity.  Being a Tufts student, someone who has lived beyond Senate, gives Dylan invaluable insight and readies him to be your voice, your advocate, your arm that will confront the administration with your interests in mind.  

I believe in Dylan Saba, plain and simple.  If you want more reasons than this, please, allow me to convince you.

0 Rage is Forever in my Memory: Trayvon Martin, One Year Later (2/26/13)

I wrote this speech for Tufts’ Pan African Alliance’s (PAA) “Remembering Trayvon Event” which took place outside on a cold solemn Tuesday night (2/26). It took me so long to find the words to write this speech, to say everything just right but honestly, it’s heavy. His death is heavy but in that weight there is always a need to think critically, remember critically, and love critically.

Please Note: The term “Black bodies” is referring to people that are raced as black, with black skin. However in my reference to black bodies specifically in this speech, “black bodies”  cross an axis for various bodies of color. 

Tuesday's Speech, a year after his murder:

Since we in PAA announced that we were holding this event, many have approached us asking why we were having this event outside. While my immediate urge was to respond sarcastically, I had no other words than that Trayvon was murdered outside. Our physical presence outside, under the lights but in the dark, is the least we can do as a community to honor a memory that has too soon faded. Standing outside in the cold is not a display of solidarity, but hopefully the piercing cold will wake something up in you like never before.

There are not enough words I can say today that can do his life, and so many other lives, justice. Not enough to mark and battle the white supremacy, anti-blackness, and violence that are continuously inflicted upon and that have historically violated black bodies. From calling a 9 year-old black female actress a “cunt” and murdering a black teenager because he was blasting hip hop music, our bodies are illegal, unwanted, and torn apart. Our flesh wears violence.

When we are outraged, when we are angry, when we flood the streets in solidarity as a community to say enough is enough, things need to change, and “hell no,” we are too often told to turn to the law. It is the law that allows “stop and frisk,” the inhumane deportation of “undocumented” immigrants, a NY assemblyman to wear blackface at a Purim festival -- all in 2013. The law is what allows “stand your ground,” aka meet suspicion with guns, aka suspicion equals blackness, perceived “hoodness,” and the acceptance of “ghettoized” black bodies, aka stand your ground against blackness.  Black bodies too easily become stacked on ships, “strange fruit,” knocked-down and shot down like dominoes. Under the law, black bodies cannot be understood as “bodies” because they are property: they cannot walk, cannot eat and drink, cannot listen to music, cannot dance, cannot read, cannot breathe because in the hand of the law property is denied the right to live. The law acts with white supremacy in codifying that black bodies are illegal, are violent, and should be stood against and taken down. There is no self-defense for black bodies that is actually read as self-defense. Like our bodies, our anger is read as violent and our fight is read as violent. Meanwhile, the self-defense of white supremacy and anti-blackness is the law. The law does not protect our bodies, it participates in our bodies’ violation. We seek justice, when “justice” and the law will never serve our black bodies; no, it will always do a disservice to them. Black bodies, black bodies, oh hear me when I say black bodies.

But we can stand here and nod our heads, feel bad for ourselves, cry, and say mhmhm, because Trayvon’s murder and anti-blackness may seem distant for many. For some, Tufts is safe and we do not have to worry about what happens outside of this bubble. Well allow me to burst the bubble. Being illegal and illegalized is a more traumatic experience than most will ever realize or suffer through. This is not just a “Florida” matter or an “American” matter, but a global matter, which most certainly means it permeates our home, Tufts. Many have failed to see Trayvon’s relevance to our lives, survivorhood, and existence here on this campus. They fail to see how blackness is illegal even here on this very ground on which we stand today. They fail to see how a black man carrying a wrench being perceived as a black man carrying a gun is traumatic. They fail to see how being stopped at 3am coming from Eaton hall and being questioned even though you have said repeatedly that you are a student is traumatic. They fail to see how being told that black anger, your sadness, and that any emotion you emit is “too much” and an overreaction is traumatic. Our rage in the aftermath of these tragedies, these moments that inflict unspeakable trauma, comes to be seen as irrational.  “Aren’t you overreacting?” “Why are you so sensitive?” “It could have happened to anybody.” But it could not have happened to just anybody. I cannot feel anything but rage tonight because I see how our home, Tufts, like the state of Florida, like our own country, is a symptom of anti-blackness and white supremacy.

Being here, existing in and violated by this system, under this aforementioned symptom, is not something I think about only on the year after Trayvon Martin’s murder. It is something I have to think about everyday. As a young black woman from southeast D.C., the fact that I am still breathing is considered lucky. Will my wearing a hooded sweatshirt be scary to someone to the point where they find it appropriate to shoot me, or worse? Will my black skin cause my death? It wasn’t the just the hoodie that made Trayvon marked for death, he could have been wearing a white t-shirt, a basketball hat, but it was what was under the hoodie that solidified the codification of his body as a threat. Blackness is a code in the white supremacist mind as the ultimate evil, to be eliminated. I have not forgotten about Trayvon, about my friend James, about the multiple dead black bodies in Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland, nor about Rekia and others, because I simply cannot.

I do not know how to stop speaking of something and some-things that are so heavy in my life, that are so embedded in my blackness, and therefore, I shall not. Though the news reporters have stopped watching, though many have moved on, I will never move on. We must always remember. And while that memory can be the most acute pain ever felt, it is in that pain and in that trauma that we remember that our past struggle is foundational in our current reality. Black bodies are not only acted upon, but we act in a rage that is ferocious. Black bodies love inexplicably. Black bodies rage so there can be love.

0 What We're Reading Today (2-27-13)

Three-Fifths Compromise; Slavery; Journalism; Racism; Chicago Police Department; Mali; Counterterrorism; Obama; Republicans

The Constitution's Immoral Compromise - New York Times
Room for Debate

There is no Indonesia Model for the Arab Spring - Foreign Policy
Tom Pepinsky

Racism, Torture, and Impunity in Chicago - The Nation
Flint Taylor

House of Cads: The Psycho-sexual Ordeal of Reporting in Washington - The New Republic
Marian Cogan

Annihilate: Obama's Very Secret Plot to End the Republican Party - The New Republic
Michael Kinsley

A Flawed America in Context - The Atlantic
Ta-Nehisi N. Coates

Iraq to Mali: the Changing Calculus of War - Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera Empire

Once fully instituted, the arrangements of slavery became much more than a machine for generating wealth. They constituted a well-developed system for the social and sexual control of men and women. During slavery, and later under legal segregation, many African and African American women were sexually coerced and raped by white men, including sailors, slave-masters, overseers, and employers. Such sexual violence symbolized white male power to everyone in local communities. Under the North American system, the children resulting from coerced sexual relations were automatically classified as black, even though they had European ancestry. Indeed, it is estimated today that at least three-quarters of “black” Americans have at least one “white” ancestor. No other U.S. racial group’s physical makeup has been so substantially determined by the sexual coercion and depredations of white men.

- Joe Feagin (Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations) 

1 What will Alvaro tell Alvaro Jr about Trayvon Martin?

I have had this on my mind for a long time and this piece needs some polishing but I wanted to publish it on the 5th instead of later.  Hopefully this is just one of a few pieces I'll produce about Trayvon Martin and his death and its implications.  His murder affected me a lot more over the ensuing months than I anticipated.  That said, happy birthday, Trayvon.

I started thinking about this piece a little while ago, a few months or so.  Today is February 4th, 2013, and I'm fixated on flushing out this feeling.

Today is February 4th, 2013, and today is my 22nd birthday.  Mondays are my worst days in terms of workload.  I have three classes and I work on Mondays and the brunt of my assignments are due early in the week so tonight I probably won't be getting drunk.  I'll save that for tomorrow night or the weekend.

Tomorrow, February 5th, 2013, is Trayvon Martin's birthday.  He would have been 18 years old this year and may or may not have gotten drunk with his friends, sipping their local brand of cheap shit-vodka out of water bottles in his parents' basement or trying to sneak a birthday kiss from one of the girls at his high school.  He would have been 18 if he was still alive, still breathing, still smiling, still able to walk freely down the street with a can of Arizona Iced Tea and a bag of Skittles.  Travyon would have been enjoying his senior year of high school and justifying youthful indiscretion by citing the doctrine of "YOLO" just as I am now but in college, trying to suck the marrow out of campus life before I have to depart.

Unlike Trayvon Martin, I've never had a gun pulled on me.  I have seen a gun on a few occasions, seen it brandished in the hand of a man as the sunlight reflects off the barrel.  I have seen that same gun kick back in revolt after being squeezed underneath and I have seen people collapse to the ground and cover their heads with the composure of a second-grader during a fire drill.  I have seen the blood-on-brick-wall-graffiti of that gun, the limp rag doll in a puffy Roca Wear jacket whose eyes have seen God but failed to be see the nine-millimeter bullet.

But still, unlike Trayvon Martin, I have never had a gun pulled on me.  Unlike Trayvon Martin, I was not gunned-down by an overzealous and unstable neighborhood watch guard.  Unlike Trayvon Martin, I am lucky enough to be alive.

Last May, my best friend from home told me that he was going to have a kid, a son it turned out.  Alvaro and his girlfriend-now-fiancee had not been dating for long and looking back on it, I think his son (Alvaro III) was conceived on Valentine's Day.  I try not to think about the specifics of that though.  Alvaro is a light-skinned Mexican-American guy who gets shit from his darker-skinned cousins for being the "Spanish one."  His fiancee is darker though and is routinely referred to as "la morena," the dark one.  So you can imagine where the child's complexion will be.

Trayvon Martin was shot in the same year as Alvaro's son was conceived -- on February 26th, to be exact.   In the months following the drama of that tragedy, I remembered thinking of Trayvon's shooting whenever Alvaro and I had a quiet moment to talk about the fact he was going to be a father.  I remember that every new detail of the case was unsettling to me as I tried to figure out what exactly to make of this.  What is the teachable moment that every tragedy is supposed to be saddled with?  And, on top of that, what is the lesson for Alvaro when he is about to have his own son in a society that routinely criminalizes black and brown folks?  The question I couldn't shake was: "What and when will Alvaro tell Alvaro Jr about Trayvon Martin?"

Seriously, I'm not asking for dramatic effect.  I genuinely don't know.

How do you, as a parent, synthesize a lifetime of hard lessons about how blackness is dangerous, non-whiteness is criminal, how the police and the government and your neighbors are probably going to profile you on the basis of nothing but your skin?  How do you tell your kids that America is the land of opportunity, a place where you can make yourself into what you want, but also school them on the fact that they are going to be subject to harsher penalties for the same infractions as their white peers?

How do you show your child -- or maybe shelter them from -- the fact that if you're a 7-year old Latino boy at the playground and you get into a scuffle over $5, that the police may handcuff you and interrogate you for over 10 hours. What do you tell your kid when he or she, just like little Wilson Reyes, didn't even steal the $5 and the police department plays it off as a "standard juvenile arrest"?  How do you explain to them that this is probably only the first of many abuses they will suffer on the basis of race.

Or what about when your child asks to borrow the car.  What is it like to be the parent of a 22 year-old named Rodrigo Diaz when you are informed that your son was left slumping over the steering wheel of the red Mitsubishi because he made the fatal mistake of turning into the wrong driveway en route to going ice skating with his girlfriend?  Do you even tell him -- or your remaining children since Rodrigo is dead -- that they shouldn't turn into the wrong driveway because their race will be perceived as a threat to any of a number of paranoid white folks who wouldn't think twice about killing a brown or black boy?

How about Salecia Johnson?  What did her parents do when they had to explain to their daughter why she was handcuffed over a temper tantrum?  A teacher saw a six year-old and decided that it was imperative to call the police -- to spend tax dollars and time and resources putting a six year-old girl in handcuffs and driving her to the police station before giving her a soda pop and acting as if everything is peachy.  Are we embarrassed yet?

Imagine your five year-old child with ADHD having his hands and feet zip-tied for hours because the school called in a police officer to scare your son straight -- imagine if in the process, your five year-old was charged with battery against a police officer for hitting the mysterious man who tried to grab him.  It shouldn't be hard to imagine, though, because it happened and it's real.

Mychal Denzel Smith had it right in The Nation when he said,

"The kids get the message at a very young age, and the rest of the world does as well, that they are potential menaces to society and will be treated as such.  That's why, in the Washington, DC, area, black kids are two to five times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their white classmates, and why in New York City, over the course of a four-month period in the summer and fall of 2011, all but four of the sixty-three students arrested in school were black or Latino.  They aren't disproportionately more disruptive, but their behavior is interpreted as such.

This is how you end up with Trayvon Martins and Jordan Davises.  We create these images of monsters and then wonder why people go out slaying them." (The Nation)

Or let's go back to Florida, the land of Stand Your Ground and Disney World.  Let's go back to the place where a seventeen year-old unarmed black male was shot by an older white man for being perceived as a threat when no such threat has materialized in subsequent investigations.  You might think I'm talking about Trayvon but I'm not.  Same year; same state; same dynamics but instead this is the story of another black boy who was killed: Jordan Davis.

This time, not for walking in the rain with a hoodie but for playing his music too loudly.  Seriously.  For playing his music too loudly in a parking lot and refusing to turn it down when asked by Michael David Dunn, the murderer -- Jordan Davis was shot.  And the only justification Michael Dunn's defense has offered is that somewhere in the car a shotgun appeared and Dunn reacted in self-defense.  But the thing is, there was no gun -- at least not with Jordan Davis.  The only person with a gun was Dunn and he knew how to use it and did so with deadly effectiveness.  Another day, another dead black boy and still no gun.

What do we tell our kids about this?

What will Alvaro tell his son?

Does he tell him that black and brown boys are incriminated from the day they are born -- that it isn't about the weapons you carry in reality -- all that matters is that folks, specifically white folks, perceive you to be "threatening"?

Does Alvaro sit his son down and explain that it doesn't even always have to be racially-white people who carry out the murder but, rather, people who operate in the mode of whiteness, that whiteness as property is very real and very much privileged here?

Does Alvaro relay what Melissa Harris-Perry said on December 2nd, that Trayvon and Jordan are no different than the murder of Emmett Till?  Does he unpack what she means when she says that for young black boys there is, "No presumption of innocence for young black men, no benefit of the doubt. Guilt not determined by what they did or said but presumed to be inherent in their very being. They need not wield a weapon to pose a threat because if you are a young black man, you are threat enough."  Does he explain that it isn't just black boys and girls who will be denied due process and the luxury of being innocent until proven guilty; does he explain to his son that walking down the street with a bag of skittles, a can of iced tea, and a hoodie may be cause enough for his own execution?

How will Alvaro tell his son about this?

How did my dad tell me?

How will I tell my son -- a son who, to folks like George Zimmerman, will look like Trayvon Martin?

And that might be the hardest conclusion to have reached and the most difficult truth to produce.  How do you tell your child that in this country, being black and alive is threat enough?

Trayvon Martin was supposed to turn 18 on February 5th, which is today since I couldn't finish this piece last night.  Somewhere in this country, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin are neck-deep in the fact that Trayvon Martin will never, ever, again open birthday presents; he will not go to college and walk across the stage to receive his diploma; he will not pose for another picture or ask if he can stay out late or cry about having his heart broken.  And he will certainly never, ever, walk down a rainy street wearing a hoodie and carrying a can of Arizona iced tea and a bag of Skittles because he is dead.

And he is dead because George Zimmerman shot him.  And he is dead because this society is ok with that. And he is dead because when an unnarmed black boy is gunned-down outside of his father's home our society starts combing through the kid's Twitter and Facebook to find a history of "violent tendencies," as if that changes the fact that he was condemned to death for being a "threat," for being black, for being who he is and breathing.  And he is dead because we care more about Lena Dunham's self-aggrandizing shit festival on HBO than we do about the institutionalized and state-sanctioned abuses and mass execution of our black and brown children.

Rodrigo Diaz is dead.  Jordan Davis is dead.  Trayvon Martin is dead.

These three names of the countless who are dead because we, as a society, sentenced them to death before they were even born.  Why don't we see that yet?

I believe that birthdays should be a celebration, or at the very least a remembrance or a reflection, upon the life of the cherished person.  I hope Trayvon's family is doing that where ever they are because we, as a society, so readily wash our hands of these lives lost as if we aren't all complicit.

I don't know what Alvaro will tell his son about Rodrigo Diaz.

I don't know what I will tell my son about Trayvon Martin.

All I know is that right now, for me, and for those of us who are them and who know them and who love them -- all I know is that this country is no place for young people of color.