At My Great Grandmother’s Wake

Our family was sold to a circus. A murder which later occurred in Iowa, while the circus was touring, left my family in state custody as witnesses. And so, that whole side of my family was freed from slavery because the circus had to move on and Iowa was a free state. Bureaucracy for the win.

Throughout my childhood, incidents like this informed my understanding of race relations in the U.S. throughout history and in the present. I learned about the fate of the Black Star Line, Rosewood, Black Wall St., Move, The Us Organization, and others while kids with simpler lives were making the most of those few precious years where they played music on MTV.

While I learned about the tragedy that is U.S. hypocrisy and fear, I also learned was resistance looked like — from John Brown to Detroit Red. I learned the successes and the failures by heart. Now, in this age of information, access, and possibility, resistance has been reinterpreted. The battlefield that has been chosen, language.

Now, were the interest at hand one of becoming better communicators, or closing divides, or developing a practical taxonomy for movement building, those would be worthwhile pursuits. However, the thrust of the contemporary activist seems to be a mere pantomime of double speak enforcement. Our vanguard would have us cut terms like ‘tipping point’ from our speech because they’ve been used previously in racial charged ways. The argument that ‘tipping point’ is a racist phrase is flimsy at best. What’s more, the outcome of that argument and its initial motivation are beyond unimportant.

Lines of thinking like this contribute to the valorization of victimhood — which is an actually destructive pattern. It isn't healthy to live in a protected bubble, free of all possible language which might give us feelings.

Let’s take the phrase ‘sold down the river’, which I am only now learning that anyone didn't find to be transparent in origin. Is the case being made that the phrase should be stricken from use, that it is a racist epithet, and that its use contributes to some problem or another? Near as I can tell, the phrase is generally used appropriately. It doesn't imply that something acceptable has been done.

As long as selling someone down river is generally considered to be unkind and extreme, the phrase belongs in discourse. The actions of slavery weren’t special. They were normal, shitty, human things done en masse and with state approval. It is imperative that we not distance ourselves from these realities. These were normal people, no different from any of us fundamentally.

There’s a similar issue with the tearing down of statues. I believe that more attention should be placed on what is being done with them once they are removed from their pedestals. Were we to melt them down or put them someplace out of sight we’d be practicing a rejection of reality — something that groups with progressive interests fall prey to all too often. Removing them from pedestals of nobility, absolutely, but let us not ignore our reality, which includes our past. There are very public places where those statues belong and superior ways of displaying them. Think about those memorial chunks of the Berlin Wall.

I’m a black man. That's not an identity; it’s a circumstance. I recognize that there is a reality to the thing. Sure, the reality of race is artificial; it is manufactured. What in the environment of civilization isn’t? Houses are artificial; as are streets, power grids, everything we use is made up (and can be remade).

So, I’m not offended by the notion of calling a spade a spade. It means to accept reality, and to recognize that — once we’ve committed to it — the product of our imaginations is also reality.

cheers,
Deacon Rodda