Priscilla Ward's Microaggression World

Happy 2016 my Esteemed Readers! If you are reading me here you must be a good an intelligent people! Let's hope 2016 will be a great year.

I think it's fair to say that 2015 wasn't boring if nothing else. I think the Year of Trump about says it.

Now I have great hope that 2016 will end with the election of Hillary Clinton.

Anyway I came across this piece by Priscilla Ward in Salon that apparently won some kind of award from Salon as the the best personal essay of the year. It certainly at least summed up a major cultural current in 2015 America-the rise of Black Lives Matter and the anger that has fueled it.

"I’m tired of suppressing myself to get along with white people. I pocket my black rage, and swap "hey girl" for hello. But in making others comfortable, I'm making myself sick."
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/31/im_tired_of_suppressing_myself_to_get_along_with_white_people_2/

I have to say, I don't see many black folks 'suppressing their rage' these days. Not that I'm saying that all black folks are in a constant state of militancy but the ones who are get all the attention and it seems to never stop. Everyday they already sound pretty 'rageful' but then they announce like her 'That's it, now it's time to really get mad at white people!'

So in her mind saying hello has made her sick. This sounds very much like the stories we here at the college campuses where young students are obsessed with more than just political correctness but emphatic correctness-a new term coined to describe where the focus is not any longer on not offending someone else but in being terribly offended yourself.

This sensibility has showed itself not just on matters of race but of gender. Indeed, these days, even gender studies professors themselves are constantly finding themselves in trouble for saying something that someone else becomes deeply offended by.

http://www.thenation.com/article/this-professor-was-fired-for-saying-fuck-no-in-class/

As I've remarked, college sure doesn't sound like much fun.

We remember the story where a Yale professor was basically fired for an innocuous email.

What stands out in this Priscilla Ward piece is how trivial her complaints are and how according to her they absolutely destroyed her. This is just not like the racism of old. She was living in an apartment with two white roommates and an Asian and was just mortified that she tried discussing Ferguson with one of them and he had little idea of what had happened. But to hear her tell it, this makes it Jim Crow 2015.

"I met my new roommates on Craigslist. Two white, one Chinese. Together we represented Portland, Florida, China and (with me) D.C., and as we moved into our apartment in Bed-Stuy last fall, I was excited for the potential of cross-cultural exchange."

"We had a get-to-know you powwow on the rooftop. We talked about ourselves, what brought us to New York. It was a warm evening in September, a couple of weeks after Michael Brown was shot, and somewhere in the mix I brought up Ferguson, hoping to spark a “conscious conversation.” Then it happened. The nightmarish response."

“What’s happening in Ferguson?” one of my white roommates asked. “I heard some kid got shot or something like that.”

"The words clamored in my ears. How could he not know? Weren’t his Twitter, Instagram and Facebook feeds flooded with opinions and hashtags? I’m sure he meant nothing by his statement. We’re all ill-informed from time to time. But as I stood there, awkwardly not saying a word — while hundreds of words ran through my head — it was a reminder of how much I would have to suppress in order to get along with my white male roommates in our tiny four-bedroom apartment. This place I would call my home for a year."

This sounds exactly like how the students on campuses sound. This is what Jerelyn Luther said as she fumed 'This is supposed to be our home, You're disgusting.'

http://heavy.com/news/2015/11/jerelyn-luther-yale-shrieking-girl-halloween-email-safe-space-student-who-yelled-at-professor-youtube-video-nicholas-christakis-costume/

Ms. Ward thinks of it her her home but what about her roommates? Why are they required to say exactly what she wants to here on a case that is a matter of opinion? This has nothing to do with what you think went down in Ferguson, Missouri-which was definitely disconcerting, thought some of the claims have been wrong and misleading.

http://heavy.com/news/2015/11/jerelyn-luther-yale-shrieking-girl-halloween-email-safe-space-student-who-yelled-at-professor-youtube-video-nicholas-christakis-costume/

But for Ward, for this roommate of hers to simply either not know much about what happened there or not want to discuss it with her makes him in her mind little more than a Klansman.

She claims to want to gain from different cultures but she seems to be full of contempt for what she sees as white culture.

"I started to worry about all the other things I might have to explain: My hair, the food I eat, why I like Miles Davis, Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye. Maybe I should have considered it a teaching opportunity. But I wasn’t feeling generous. I was all twisted up inside, ablaze over racial dynamics and anxious what other minefields my roommate might stumble upon. I hoped he wouldn’t say something really ignorant, causing me to just snap and go off on an angry rant. Then I’d have to make my living situation salvageable by pocketing my black rage, putting on my best smile and telling him, it’s all love."

Just because some guy isn't keeping up with the news doesn't mean that you can't like Miles Davis or Marvin Gaye.

"I wanted my home to be a refuge, a place where I could be wretched when I wanted, walk around in my bonnet, fry chicken and sing real loud to Aretha Franklin’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Suppressing my blackness every day is exhausting. Back at Essence, we used “sister girl language,” but since then, I’d faced tougher environments. I briefly worked at a (now-defunct) women’s fashion website, where I was one of the only black people. I would pitch ideas that mattered to me, like how to do natural hair, only to see them ignored, shuffled to the side or diluted like apple juice in order to be made palatable to mainstream “whiteness.”

But how can you force everyone to want to see your wretchedness?

" was tired of catering to everyone else’s comforts. How much of my day-to-day experiences as a black woman do I have to filter? I replace “hey girl” with boring hellos. I eat my leftover fried chicken outside the office. In order to have some common point of identifiable communication, I pretend to care about Taylor Swift, or white movie stars on their I’ve-lost-count remarriages and those other white pop stars I could not care less about. “Oh yeah, she’s cute,” I tell them. “Yeah, that’s cool.”

She seems to have such contempt for all things white why even bother associating with them at all? Her answer seems to be to lecture them on their own racism to raise their consciousness.

"In December, when the Eric Garner verdict came out, I became loaded down with more emotional baggage than I could conceal. I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t care if I wasn’t mixing with others. I found my little black planet at work. I went over to my black boss and talked real low and real brief about how disturbing this all was. I grabbed one of my home girls I work with. We took to the streets to protest right outside my job. I hoped no one would see me and think something misguided.

Walking home that night, I unleashed all my tears. I wanted to reach out and hug a black man. Before I arrived at my apartment, I dried off my face as though nothing happened. My white male roommate asked me about the protest; I gave him a non-detailed response. I said something like, “I’m really upset, but it was a good way for me to get those feelings out.” I couldn’t handle revealing too much; I wanted to avoid a loaded conversation. I took a deep breath and exhaled, closed my bedroom door, picked up the phone, and spoke in whispers about how racist these non-indictments were to my parents, and to my socially conscious white and black friends."

So at least that roommate tried to ask her how it went-she wasn't having it.

So she seems to know a few 'good white folks' but then she says this:

"I know this needs to change. I understand that for my own growth, and in order to forge honest relationships with white people I meet — whether it’s my roommates, or my co-workers, or anyone else — I need to reveal myself more. I need to start sharing about my history and my culture and how it plays out in my everyday life as an African American woman. I don’t want this rage to fester into bitterness, or infect the very close white friendships I already have. I don’t want to ignore my rage, but I don’t want to be controlled by it either. Concealing my emotions has made me feel like a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off."

So she is blaming these socially conscious white friends who I guess talk about how bad white people are all day for this other clueless white male who didn't know about Ferguson?

It's ironic when we're trying to teach white folks not to stereotype all black folks for the actios of one but yet she thinks she may do this with white folks.

"Things are calm right now at the apartment. I don’t bring up these sorts of conversations. I don’t talk about what happens every 28 hours — a black person is killed. My white male roommate and I, we just don’t go there. It makes things easier. Instead, our conversations shuffle between our day-to-day experiences at work, dating and the nuances of the city. I keep those “forbidden” conversations behind closed doors, and even when I’m alone I speak in code. I don’t say “white.” I use “they” instead."

"But I want to stop tiptoeing around race. My blackness is not a secret I have to keep. I want to be able to publicly express my honest admiration for being black, outside of my little black planet. I don’t want to feel marginalized, like I can’t speak hard truths about myself. Having honest and challenging conversations with people of another race will hopefully disrupt other people’s ignorance. But it will also help me. I need to stop with my mental temper tantrums. I want to get free."

So if she could just 'break it down' to these white folks how terrible they're people are she'd feel better. But how would they feel? That doesn't matter, all that matters is how she feels. She can't feel good unless she 'raises the consciousness of everyone she comes in contact with.'

When you think of Martin Luther King's dream of whites and blacks in society with each other I don't know that this is what he envisioned.

What made MLK's movement so compelling was that it sort of was the change it wanted to see-it's organization had whites and blacks marching together. Ok, so then later on black militants decided that was too accommodative to white folks. They didn't want to be about making the white man feel good. But this leaves black civil rights as being the interest only of black folks.

But to insist on constant racial consciousness raising like Ms. Ward does may be liberating for her but it also is not at all fun for those who have to listen to it. Yet it seems to be the only conversations she thinks are pure enough to have when speaking with white folks.