Trayvon: How many dead
black kids does it take?
by damali
ayo
You can comment on this piece on Facebook.
Q: How many dead black kids does it take for our culture to screw in its
metaphoric light bulb and finally see the light?
A: I’m still waiting to find out.
Nine years ago I did an art piece called blacklight. It consisted of a
television screen running a loop of racist jokes I had pulled from the
internet. They were in Q and A form, and depending on your perspective, either
totally gruesome, or completely hilarious. On top of the television I placed a
light bulb that illuminated the word
USA.
People were appalled. How, why, and for what possible reason would I expose
innocent, un-racist people to a litany of racist material that might sow seeds
of prejudice within their pure, liberal minds? Clearly these jokes were things
of the past and I shouldn’t be putting them back into circulation. I wasn’t in
the habit of answering questions about my art at the time, but if I were, I
would have said that there’s nothing past-tense about any of this material. I
simply culled it from the internet and put it on display. We may not say this
stuff, but we believe it. The jokes are a mirror of who we are, right now. This
is not in the past, not in some other part of the country, not some evil
conservative group in white sheets or red ties. This is all of us, right now. We
are responsible for the state of things.
Today as I travel around the country giving a talk called “You Can Fix Racism!” I am sure I will be asked to comment
on the Trayvon Martin case. I don’t want to appear cynical or insensitive, but
there is a part of me that feels like asking, “Does anyone know how many other
black children suffered irreparable harm at the hands of our racist culture but
whose lives didn’t generate hourly headlines or go viral as temporary Facebook
profile photos of people wearing hoodies?” I expect this question to be met
with silence.
I first found out about the case in an article that called Trayvon a modern day
Emmett Till. This was a daring assertion, yet accurate in many ways. But it
begged the question: Does our culture require a murder and a media frenzy for
us to realize the harm that racism does?
Does it really take death and Facebook for us to notice?
There is injustice at our fingertips. Every time I visit a school, I meet young
people whose self-images and educations are permanently damaged by the racism
of their teachers, institutions, and classmates. When I worked in a women’s
prison I met many women serving time whose race and class were undeniable
factors in their ending up behind bars. As a life-coach, I counseled women who
suffer with debilitating PTSD from the trauma that racism has imposed on their
lives. I count myself among two of these groups.
Every day I watch our culture hover along in a comfort zone of racism. As long
as it doesn’t have concrete, provable, murderous consequences, and sometimes
even when it does, we are content to live with it, even when it is right in our
faces. On my way home in Los Angeles today I drove past two billboards
flanking me from either side of the street. To my left was and ad for a movie
called American Reunion. On the billboard were at least ten white people, and
no one else. These ads have been bugging me for weeks. It turns my stomach that
we can promote something in 2012 called “American Reunion” and have nothing but
white people in the photo. To my right, was an ad for a movie called Think Like
a Man. On this much smaller billboard were about seven black people and one
white guy.
I thought to myself, and people wonder why kids of color get shot. We can’t
even stand to be in the same movie together, let alone share the same
neighborhood, schools, food, culture, concerns, money or the idea of what it
means to be American.
As long as we fail to notice the every day, obvious indicators that our culture
is in dire straits, as long as we forget that we are responsible, it will
continue to take gruesome deaths for people to consider the possibility of
change, let alone enact it. Sadly, it seems, that even that may not be enough.
___
damali ayo is the author of Obamistan! Land without Racism: Your Guide to the
New America and How to Rent a Negro (both
Lawrence Hill Books). You can hire her to turn on your metaphoric light bulbs
at damaliayo.com
damali's 10-point practical guide to fixing racism can be found and downloaded
at: http://damaliayo.com/ICFI/ICFI%20home.html
PEACE.LOVE.HAPPINESS
