The Baggage

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I turned off the tv a few moments after President Obama concluded his remarks on the results of the Ferguson grand jury finding on the death of Michael Brown. CNN was breaking to their live coverage of the “anticipated violence” that indeed St. Louis police, federal and state troopers were all sent in to quell.

We heard about this three hours before. They knew — the press and the police — what the decision was going to be. And they were prepared for it. The commentators were hinting at it all along.

A voyeuristic circus of coverage followed Ferguson’s protestors, documenting a community in agony. This was no longer news. It was social and cultural pornography. “See? This is what THEY do.” Violent. Angry. No respect for property.

That was when I turned off the television.

This is another specimen of the over-worn demonization of African Americans made fresh for the 21st century. That demonization is now compartmentalized and packaged diabolically by politicians and other opportunists hungry for the next land grab of neglected neighborhoods ripe for gentrification.

It’s in the building of a national network of cheap manufacturing labor in prisons populated by laws that assuredly target the poor. It’s in the established “knowledge segregation” of public schools in poor neighborhoods that are given the short end of the funding stick. It’s in the words of Rudy Guiliani who said even yesterday, that “only blacks kill other blacks.”

The causes for why this violence in Ferguson Missouri, in Oakland California, in New York City is never examined. It is shunted aside for the sensationalism of tear gas and riot gear. The news and its pundits and spokespeople no longer give answers or even clues. And the ones that do are quickly moved over for the next news distraction, glossing over history if it pays any attention to it at all.

There was a popular meme going around in the 1990s that people of color, and most especially African Americans, were still carrying around “the baggage” of centuries of white oppression. That racism is a thing of the past. That we need to be in the present to understand and appreciate the strides we as a nation have made in just the last 100 years.

I was confronted with that meme a few years ago when a mostly white audience from Stanford looked at our work with incarcerated women and asked why we seemed so angry at white people. “Why do you need to carry this baggage?” they asked.

Maybe, perhaps, we are angry that that baggage was never asked for in the first place. It was given for us to hold and we have been forced to take the blame for it whenever the dominant culture needed us to do so. And there has been nothing learned from that incessant exercise of offloading responsibility for our anger. The responsibility has been forgotten, and even the forgetting righteously justified. All we learned as of today is that people with privilege and power have continuous bouts of convenient amnesia.

But there is a cause and an effect. Forgetting that the baggage exists does not excuse anyone from the fact that it was still left for us to hold. But this does not excuse the fact that human beings were treated as property, and still, in effect, are. It remains in that grand jury sentiment of no charges against Darren Wilson. It remains in the bodies of dead black sons like Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant. And it was all never our baggage to begin with.

Earlier yesterday in a diary on Daily Kos, the always brilliant Tim Wise said:“That so much of white America cannot see the shapes made out so clearly by most of black America cannot be a mere coincidence, nor is it likely an inherent defect in our vision. Rather, it is a socially constructed astigmatism that blinds so many to the way in which black folks often experience law enforcement.”

The price has been paid by so many lives taken by forces that do not care to understand or even begin to empathize with those who have paid it. And those forces have the backing of a deeply flawed rationale that is not only embedded in law, but in the national psyche. This is what is meant when we say there is an infrastructural racism that must be dismantled in this country before we can ever begin to build bridges to cross the racial divide. It’s an infrastructure of the mind and in the heart. And that baggage must be offloaded not by some, but by all of us.

This entry was posted in Fe-911 on by .

About Fe Bongolan

Planet Waves writer Fe Bongolan lives in Oakland, California. Her column, "Fe-911," has been featured on Planet Waves since 2008. As an actor and dramaturge, Fe is a core member of Cultural Odyssey's "The Medea Project -- Theater for Incarcerated Women," producing work that empowers the voices of all women in trouble, from ex-offenders, women with HIV-AIDS, to young girls and women at risk. A Planet Waves fan from almost the beginning of Eric's astrology career, Fe is a public sector employee who describes herself as a "mystical public servant." When it comes to art, culture and politics, she loves reading between the lines.

24 thoughts on “The Baggage”

  2. aWord

    Thanks, Fe. As a women with white skin who was raised in the dark skinned neighborhoods of Detroit, I like to think that I have some sense of what’s going on (not to be what I am not, just to have a conscious level of empathy and awareness). The absurdity of this “decision” is profound. I’ll stop there. Thanks for all you’ve said.

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  4. Amy Elliott

    It really infuriates me how selfish and ignorant people can be sometimes, rather than consider there might be a reason for the anger. The Ferguson decision is simply outrageous. How blinkered do you have to be in order to not see that?

    Thanks for sharing, Fe. A deeply moving article.

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    1. Felirene Bongolan Post author

      Amy:

      The Blinkering is the problem, the result is pitting one side against the other and it is a very old game, practiced world wide. The attempt to trivialize and cartoon sectors of our society is an old game as well, trying to quash any sense of dignity and aspiration by economics, the dearth of opportunities to bridge the class divide, and to even demonize and discredit the one symbol of the power of African American aspiration — a black President. It’s all out there in this Uranus Pluto square. A tougher row to hoe than before. Not insurmountable, but tougher.

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  5. Barbara Koehler

    I share your sense of rage Fe, you have elegantly and with admirable control reduced into a few paragraphs a human flaw in which the U.S. – albeit less unconsciously than 5 decades ago – still arrogantly maintains (in some quarters) it doesn’t exhibit. It fills me with rage too and admittedly I have loathed, despised, hated and been repulsed by individuals who so ignorantly flaunt this flaw, some of whom are people who have been heart-breakingly close.

    Over the years, like you and your troupe, I’ve learned to suppress outright contempt for these folks in order to maintain civility (and keep my job!) but I believe it is in part thanks to Neptune’s entry into Aquarius that the hostility between those who identified with the Blacks and those who championed the supremacy of the Whites became more equal.

    I’ve often referred back to the May 2000 Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in my comments as it symbolizes a point in socialization processes affording a new start (all conjunctions are new starts). I’ve never once, in my recollection, noted that Neptune in that chart was conjunct the U.S south node at 6+ Aquarius, which is also conjunct the U.S. Pholus at 6+ Aquarius. Pholus is famous for popping the cork out of a wine bottle that ultimately caused death and destruction, a story we are all familiar with here at PW.

    Less than a year before the 2000 Jupiter-Saturn cycle began there was another grand cross in August 1999, that time in fixed signs, and a few weeks before that there was a lunar eclipse at 4 Aquarius 58, very near the U.S south node conjunct U.S. Pholus. That lunar eclipse was conjunct Neptune, squared by Mars in Scorpio opposite Jupiter in Taurus. When that solar eclipse is set in Washington DC, the ascendant is trine the U.S. Sibly Chiron. I have a feeling that was when the cork started coming out of the forbidden wine bottle.

    Our recent grand cross in cardinal signs would be considered by many as even more powerful than the one in 1999, but in neither case was Neptune overtly involved. Yet his influence is almost tactile, then as now, as he wears down the boundaries between people, causes, countries and blurs things that seemed so clear before. As you take to the “stage” your presentations DO penetrate the minds of even those who can’t see what’s happening around them or why. You are doing the work of Neptune, eroding ever so slowly the defunct definitions of White and Black. As transiting Neptune moves through the U.S. natal chart’s 3rd house of communication, some of it’s influence is seen in the faux TV news we once took for truth, but many of us, more so than in 1999, see through that illusion.

    This upcoming year will see transiting Neptune reach a square with the U.S. natal Uranus at 8+ Gemini. That’s the same degree where Pluto and Neptune made their last conjunction in 1891, and also where the last Saturn-Neptune cycle of 1989 gave us Pholus at 8+ Gemini. But that’s another story we can explore around the Spring Equinox. Keep the faith my friend, it will happen.
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  6. Barbara Koehler

    P.S For what it’s worth, the town of Ferguson has it’s natal Moon (The People) at 23 Leo. Transiting Jupiter is now – and will station at – 22+ Leo, go through it’s retrograde period and reach 23 Leo in July, 2015, and go on to oppose the U.S. Moon by the end of the month. That will be the same time transiting Uranus reaches the U.S. Chiron degree, and the transiting nodes will square the U.S Jupiter, among a gazillion other things.
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  7. Amanda Painter

    Some interesting thoughts shared by Marianne Williamson on FB:

    AMERICA IS A LONG GAME

    The problem was always bigger than any one particular case, trial or lack thereof. If Darren Wilson had been indicted, the larger problem would not have been all fixed. And the fact that he wasn’t indicted isn’t going to stop the process of political awakening by which millions of Americans are standing up at last to the institutionalized racism, militarization of police forces and incarceration-for-profit that has black men feeling too often at a disadvantage should they wish to … oh, I don’t know…walk down the street.

    The President asked protesters of the Ferguson decision to be peaceful and non-violent, which is understandable. But a system that incarcerates on average one out of every three African-American men, keeps 500,000 non-violent drug offenders locked up, is fraught with police brutality, and has the largest mass incarceration rate in the world, has a lot of nerve telling those who complain about this to be peaceful and non-violent. The system itself is laced with violence. The polite kind.

    The Michael Brown grand jury decision is a shock to many, but should be a surprise to no one. Our criminal justice system gets it right sometimes and gets it wrong sometimes. But when it comes to African American men, the statistical trend towards getting it wrong is simply wrong.

    The American experiment has never been perfect; it’s a process. America is a long game. It is as perfect or as imperfect as the people who foster and protect it in each generation. We’re a country that’s gotten it wrong many times before, but we’re a country that over time does tend to make things right. And our challenge now is clear. Let’s not be the first generation to wimp out on the job of making right in America something that’s so clearly wrong.

    In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Justice in America isn’t magically bequeathed from one generation to the next; no written document can guarantee it always. Justice has to be vigilantly defended and expanded, the longing for it alive in the hearts of committed citizens year after year. And that’s what’s happening today, as people all over America are making it clear that the issue of a skewed criminal justice system will not go away. This is not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. And it’s why I stood applauding those who marched up Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles last night, protesting not necessarily one grand jury decision but rather an legal system now reeking with the stench of entrenched injustice.

    Darren Wilson will not stand trial, but our criminal justice system absolutely must. The jury is the American people and the trial has only just begun. May justice be done, in this and in all things. And may it be done through us.

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  8. Lizzy

    Thanks for this, Fe – and for the link to the Charles Blow piece,, that I’ve only had time for a quick glance for now. Obama’s immigration law is a huge thing,. It gives me hope (very faint hope) that he might finally face this one too, before he leaves the stage.

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  9. Amy Elliott

    Just read the Charles Blow article ( http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/opinion/charles-blow-bigger-than-immigration.html?referrer= )

    It is, of course, quite brilliant, but i can honestly say nothing in response other than to most heartily look forward to the waking, as Judith puts it, of the sleepwalkers.

    One of my little daydreams is that one day everyone will just become unable to lie. Then instead of their carefully-crafted objections to the President, those pundits would just have to say, ‘sorry but I don’t like him because I am a regressive racist pile of poo’.

    Oh well, I can dream.

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