We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (7 page)

The idea quickly went viral. Hundreds of other students on dozens of other campuses set up their own blogs and began organizing activist work around them. In time, discussions over microaggressions had spread from the campuses into the mainstream, and the American Dialect Society declared the word itself one of the “most useful” words of 2015.
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The language of microaggressions gave students of the “post-racial” moment a way to talk about the gap between society’s regular celebrations of diversity and its continuing inequality.

With the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, a generation that had grown up during an era of rising resegregation and inequality could see how the microaggressions they experienced in often elite collegiate spaces connected to a broader context of racial inequity. What’s more, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook helped them not only to make their local struggles visible, but to recognize that they fit into a larger national narrative of rising anger over inequity. Social media and the Internet accelerated generational learning and mobilization. They had the tools, language, infrastructure, and the belly-fire to respond to what felt like a deteriorating situation. And then Mizzou happened.

In 2008, Jonathan Butler came to the University of Missouri from North Omaha, Nebraska. He had been raised in a family of ministers and lawyers, who were deeply active in the life of the city’s Black community. As a teenager he had been engaged in prison ministry. He believed in what he called the idea of “sacrificing yourself for the betterment of others.” When he got to Mizzou, he said he felt “culture shock.”

He was one of two Black men in his dorm. He and his friend Joseph found themselves talking to each other about being bullied in their engineering classes and called racial slurs as they walked across campus. The week before the presidential elections, Obama came to campus to rally students and all seemed well. Yet Butler also felt tensions developing. Some white students seemed to feel threatened by the prospect of a Black president.

On the night of the election, Joseph went home to Chicago to be with his family for the historic moment. Butler was the only Black male in his dorm. He hid in his room watching the news. When they called it for Obama, he ran into the hallway and began celebrating. No one else was there to join him. But three white men at the end of the hall came over and angrily confronted him. “They had already been drinking, you could smell it from their breaths,” Butler recalled. “They came and they attacked me.” He took several punches before another friend pulled him out of the hallway and back into his room. Later, the
n
-word was scrawled on his dorm-room door.

Over Butler’s next seven years at Mizzou, the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center was vandalized with cotton balls during Black History Month; a swastika was drawn in ashes on a residence hall wall; and the swimmer Sasha Menu Courey committed suicide after the school failed to address her claims that she had been sexually assaulted. Butler saw a university that did not take Black student concerns seriously. He told Greg E. Hill of the
Minority Trailblazers
podcast, “No one wants to believe us. No one wants to listen to us when we’re at diversity forums. No one wants to listen to us when we’re having one-on-one conversations with faculty, staff, and administrators. No one wants to listen to us when we’re sending emails.”
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Butler added, “Everyone wants Black students to be respectable and ‘civilized’ and go through the ‘proper channels.’ But here [with Sasha Menu Courey] you have a prime example of someone who went through the ‘proper channels,’ went through an extremely traumatic incident, and then you still don’t have them being valued as their own human life.”

When Ferguson happened, Butler and other students frequently traveled the two hours from campus to join the protests. Many also took part in the nonviolent direct action trainings. Three Black queer students formed MU for Michael Brown, the precursor to #ConcernedStudent1950, an organization that they named for the year the first Black student was accepted into the university. The group became the primary engine for the feverish campus organizing that began in the fall of 2015.

The Mizzou demonstrations brought together a number of strands of protest, including concerns about sexual assault, grad student health-care cuts, Islamophobia on campus, and restrictions against student use of Planned Parenthood. But they accelerated with campus climate issues. At the outset of the 2015–16 school year, student body president Peyton Head was taunted with racial slurs in the street. The Legion of Black Collegians’ homecoming rally was interrupted by another student yelling slurs. And when university president Tim Wolfe ignored student protesters at a homecoming parade, #ConcernedStudent1950 issued a list of demands starting with Wolfe’s removal and continuing with “inclusion curriculum,” increases in Black faculty and staff, and resources for the mental health and social justice centers.

After a second swastika—this time made of feces—was drawn on a residence hall wall, and Wolfe continued to voice his ignorance of campus climate concerns, Butler signed a Do Not Resuscitate order and began his hunger strike. During the week that followed, Black students escalated their protests by opening an encampment on Carnahan Quad, encountering increased racial harassment in person and death threats online.

A group of students confronted Wolfe as he left a meeting. One asked him to define “systematic oppression.” His answer was not just insensitive, it seemed anti-intellectual: “Systematic oppression is because you don’t believe you have the equal opportunity for success.” Students peppered him with more questions: “Did you just blame us for systematic oppression, Tim Wolfe? Did you just blame Black students?” Wolfe turned and quickly walked away. When the Mizzou football team joined the protests via a Twitter photo—threatening a boycott that had the potential to cost the school $1 million per game—Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin resigned.
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Not long afterward, more than fifty-five years to the day that the first Black student was admitted to the University of Missouri, the campus established the Office for Civil Rights and Title IX to centralize the investigation of discrimination complaints. That delayed and still inadequate action, the imperial obfuscation and denial, the need to dramatically increase the stakes—these were some of the strategies of denial that students had been trying to call attention to all along.

For Jonathan Butler, that point had been worth the final sacrifice. “The contemporary Black Lives movement moment that we are in right now wasn’t founded by any individuals. It was founded by the lives of Trayvon Martin, by the lives of Mike Brown, by Rekia Boyd, and so many others. It really showed me you just can’t play around with it. This is serious, this is systemic, and we have to fight it at all costs.”

Youth movements are always fueled by a combustible mix of pain, defiance, imagination, inexperience, commitment, and risk. The most successful of them turn what look to elders like insurmountable liabilities into virtues. The most moral of them open up new ways to see how we can live better together.

Resegregation happens through design and through apathy. It also grows through our blindness—whether willed, imperceivable, or fixed through the best of our intentions—to the deep connections between us all. Silence over resegregation has led us to this historical moment. The young may not speak in the language we are accustomed to hearing. We may think them sometimes too imprecise or cavalier in their rage. But if we miss their point—for which they have been willing to sacrifice everything—we will undoubtedly be hearing it again from the next generation.

THE ODDS

ON CULTURAL EQUITY

When the Academy Awards came around in the second year of #OscarsSoWhite, I decided I would support Spike and Jada’s boycott—my little twenty-first-century version of honoring the picket line, engaging by disengaging. But in this era of converging media, there is no escaping Big Cultural Events. When my friend Kai texted me, I could no longer ignore the damn thing. “Yikes,” she wrote. “Jose sparked a POC fight on Twitter about anti-Blackness.”

Jose was our friend Jose Antonio Vargas, the indefatigable undocumented Pinoy activist who at that moment was one of the main targets of a brilliant and viciously funny Black Twitter hashtag #NotYourMule.

As Chris Rock worked through his opening monologue, Jose had tweeted, “When will @chrisrock bring up Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American actors and opportunity?” Others, it turned out, were wondering the same thing. Ming-Na Wen tweeted, “Chris Rock hasn’t once brought up other minorities who have worse odds at the #Oscars.” Black writer and activist Mikki Kendall replied, “Someone tell me not to do a #NotYourMule tag about the expectation that Black people take all the risk to advance representation in media.”
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Kendall had summoned Zora Neale Hurston—the patron saint of Black Twitter, the respectability-politics-exploding writer-fighter who knew her way around an incisive diss. In
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, Hurston’s character Nanny declares, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” Kendall’s hashtag set the feeds flying—tweets about Black solidarity for POC, POC anti-Black racism, Peter Liang, it was all on the table.

In its 2016 nominations, the Academy ignored what might be called the Black Lives renaissance—the broad, urgent work of Black actors, directors, and others who were telling some of the most important stories of our time. It was the second year in a row that April Reign’s #OscarsSoWhite hashtag mobilized audience fury at the blatant omissions.

In response, Academy head Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the first woman of color ever to hold the position, pushed her board to pass a plan “doubling the membership of women and diverse members of the Academy by 2020.”
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The actors’ branch alone was 88 percent white. Even the Academy’s language of change was awkward and out of touch, directed largely at convincing its “non-diverse” members. Here was another American institution, led by a Black woman, whose leadership and membership remained unrepresentative of and unresponsive to a constituency that had changed. The story sounded Clinton Sparks familiar.

In fact, it reminded Jose of a 2014
Hollywood Reporter
cover essay written by Chris Rock, packaged under the headline
IT’S A WHITE INDUSTRY. IT JUST IS.
In it, Rock wrote personally and passionately about his efforts to create opportunities for other Black actors and artists in a closed studio system. Jose had been particularly struck by two paragraphs.

“But forget whether Hollywood is black enough,” Rock wrote. “A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough?” He continued:

You’re in L.A., you’ve got to
try
not to hire Mexicans. It’s the most liberal town in the world, and there’s a part of it that’s kind of racist—not racist like “F—you, nigger” racist, but just an acceptance that there’s a slave state in L.A. There’s this acceptance that Mexicans are going to take care of white people in L.A. that doesn’t exist anywhere else.…

You’re telling me no Mexicans are qualified to do anything at a studio? Really? Nothing but mop up? What are the odds that that’s true? The odds are, because people are people, that there’s probably a Mexican David Geffen mopping up for somebody’s company right now.
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Jose had been so moved that he and his team produced a powerful video, “I, Too,” for his EmergingUS platform that they debuted the day of the Oscars. It seemed to have been inspired by Coca-Cola’s 2014 Super Bowl ad, “America the Beautiful.” But in his piece there was no cynical ploy to sell sugar water. Instead the video offered beautiful images of Latinos in Los Angeles—a parking lot flagger, a taquería food worker, a seamstress, a deliveryman, an elderly worker on a bus, a young mother and her child—all set to the sound of a man reciting in Spanish Langston Hughes’s famous poem “Yo también canto América.”

Jose later recalled, “When Rock started his monologue, I thought maybe he’d repeat a line or two from his essay.” So he tweeted his question. But as the night and the feeds rolled on, he realized that Kendall and others were likely reading something else into it—a misplaced anger about Rock’s omission, or, worse, an aggrandizing “what about me” ethnic solipsism, an expression of non-Black POC entitlement. As Kendall put it, “Solidarity doesn’t look like Black people taking the risks & everyone else reaping the rewards.”
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If Twitter’s brevity does nuance no favors, its velocity can reveal complexity very quickly. When #OscarsSoWhite gave way to #NotYourMule, the discussion branched from the whiteness of Hollywood to the relative invisibility of different communities of color. But both hashtags also reminded non-Black people of color of the central role Black protest and creative expression has played in moving us all toward cultural equity. After all, “I, Too” had reappropriated Langston Hughes. For years, Black directors, producers, and writers had been the champions of opportunities for other non-whites. Jose knew all of this very well. By the next day, the conversation had moved beyond whiteness and invisibility to the stakes in the struggle for equity. It is the continuing strangeness and difficulty of race that all of these conversations have to happen at the same time.

But we must begin somewhere. So let us start with the whiteness of Hollywood. American popular culture, by its nature, trades on optimism. It wants spectacle with its trauma. It wants its laughs, its happy endings. This is the legacy of a national culture birthed in the twin narratives of cowboys-and-Indians and blackface minstrelsy.

It may also be true that we have entered into a new golden age of representation. Many of our biggest icons are people of color. Our pop landscape appears desegregated. Take television. For about a decade, from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, networks featured shows that centered on Black lives, from the groundbreaking
Cosby Show
to
Living Single
. But by the turn of the millennium, shows like
Girlfriends
and
George Lopez
were the exception. Cable picked up the slack, making stars of Dave Chappelle and Tyler Perry, and telling important stories on shows such as
The Wire
and
The Shield
. On the networks, characters of color had come to appear mostly in big ensemble shows, giving emergency rooms and criminal courts their verisimilitude of diversity. These were images of a “post-racial” America, mostly featuring middle-class people of color who were just like middle-class white people, except for the color of their skin.