Not My Noose
When I saw the headline, “Noose Found on Office Door of Black Professor at Columbia U,” I assumed it was my door and wondered why the campus police had not bothered to inform me. A few weeks ago on I had written about the Jena 6 case that began with a noose hung by white high school students in Louisiana and was proud that I had evidently ruffled some racist feathers.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t me they tried to menace but an African-American Professor at Columbia’s Teacher’s College. A noose was also recently hung in front of the black student center at the University of Maryland and one was found in a black cadet’s bag at the Coast Guard academy in New London, Connecticut.
I wasn’t the only one who had thought the noose had my name on it. Before the professor was identified as Madonna Constantine several worried friends called to see if I was o.k.
O.K. ?
I’m a writer. I need my words to effect people. I was perversely disappointed that it wasn’t me who had flushed out the cowardly creep. And although I have not yet met my colleague, Professor Constantine, I feel protective of any person menaced in any way.
This message is for you, deranged knot-maker: You threaten that prof, you threaten me and all of my
friends.
See, a noose is an oddly powerful symbol, much more than a mere prank. A noose is a much more charged symbol than, let’s say, a Confederate flag, because the noose not only represents white racism but a very explicit threat to publicly and violently murder you.
That is what Reed Walters, the supremely biased white district attorney in Jena still fails to understand. Sadly, Donald Washington, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, a black man, could not understand it either and failed to press charges against the boys who hung that symbol in Jena. I wonder if those boys, who were largely unpunished for their actions, are proud to have set off this latest noose craze.
I grew up in the Midwest first, and then the Northeast and have lived in the South and in the West. There are no people on the planet more friendly than Southerners and Midwesterners. However many white Southerners today act more invested in what happened to them in the 1860s, than the liberation of black Southerners in the 1960s. Unlike most Germans who seem to feel the burden of guilt for their country’s atrocities, many white American Southerners seem to see themselves more as victims of northern federal oppression and condescension than descendants and beneficiaries of some of the most vicious and effective terrorists the world has ever seen.
That said, the only times that I personally have been menaced because of the color of my skin have been in and around my hometown of Hamden, Connecticut, by some of the Irish and Italian-American kids who were my neighbors.
Though they never said that they wanted to hang me from a tree or cut off my testicles, they did suggest that I return back to Africa, chasing me out off their block as if they expected me to run all the way there.
Life is unquestionably better now for my kids, just as racism was so much worse for my parents’ generation than for me. As both a student and a prime beneficiary of the Civil Rights Movement I had often lamented the fact that I had been born too late to be a freedom rider or a Panther. For a brief moment, when I thought that that noose had been for me, I had been transported back to the time of my heroes: Malcolm, Martin and the freedom riders.
I just wrote this line in my first play and what happened on campus the other day makes me think that there might actually be some truth to it: “History isn’t just what’s written in a book. History is the river we stand in.” May the ugliness of that noose remind us of the beauty of the fight for justice.
Comments
I empathize...only you get the noose and I get the "illegal immigrant, who's taking all of the much sought after toilet cleaning, grape picking jobs" slur. It doesn't matter that my family is American by virtue of having had their state of NM annexed into the US. We're Mexican and by golly we should all swim our asses back to Mexico. I guess I should just be grateful that my swim would be much shorter than yours. And the beat goes on.....
I choose to rise above it and I'm sure you will too. Succeed in spite of them.
Posted by: Javacat | October 16, 2007 09:42 PM
I just listened to you on News and Notes. I was most touched by the idea that the Black folk of our generation (I was born in 1968) had "missed" the movement. You write in your blog that you were born too late. It seems that too many of us feel that we are not a continuation of the movement for complete liberation and stuggle for humanity. We have not missed anyting. It flows through our veigns and IS a part of our psyche. I remember reading about our people's enslavement as a child and feeling the pain. Not once have I lamented that I "missed" that time. Your own words stated it best, "History isn’t just what’s written in a book. History is the river we stand in." We are all still in that river. Standing. Not drowning.
Posted by: Beya T. Pasha | October 20, 2007 06:06 PM
Trey, you probably don't remember me, but you were my mentor several years ago(2000)when I was a participant in the SVW screenwriting workshops. I just came across your web site and it's been great to catch up on all of your writing news and to read your blog entries.
I recently took a position with a local school where I tutor 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students in reading and math. I love the kids and it's one of those jobs where I can hardly wait to get work in the morning. What does all of this have to with your "Not My Noose" blog entry? Please bear with me...
I grew up in a white working class family and still live in a rural area of Pennsylvania where the population was all but entirely white--but at home, my mother created a very different place for us. She was actively involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement and civil rights movement. She participated in a program called Experiment in International Living which brought Yomi, a Nigerian engineering student, to our house where he lived between semesters and during the summers he attended Lehigh University. Her dear friends included an East Indian man, Simon Samuel, a gifted child psychologist, who gave me my first guitar and championed everything I did in school.
My most vivid pre-civil rights memory is from a family vacation we took to Washington DC in the early 1960s. I was on the mall at the water fountains near the old Smithsonian castle. There were two fountains, signs above each. One read "Whites Only", the other "Colored". I remember being puzzled by them and standing there deciding which fountain to use. I chose the one with the "Colored" sign because I thought it meant the fountain had colored water. After I took my drink (of course, discovering that wasn't the case), an elderly black woman sitting on a bench nearby came up to me, touched my cheek, and said, "Bless you child." My mom explained it to me afterwards, but I still didn't really understand the gravity of racism until my adolescence.
My siblings and I knew nothing about the silent, deep, potentially violent bigotry that surrounded us in the oasis my mother created for us until Yomi came to live with us.
After his arrival, my mother (a hairdresser by trade) lost business in her shop from customers who made comments like, "aren't you worried about your daughter with HIM in the house?" My brother was threatened at school and was taunted as one of those "n----- lovers" and other threats came over the phone about shooting at our house if we didn't make Yomi leave. We stood fast and eventually things quieted down to a few taunts when we were out shopping or having dinner--all those are nothing compared to the worst of racism endured by so many and the loss of life that tragically and senselessly continues to this day.
Fast forward to my new job at the school. The student body is very different, very diverse now. When I looked out on the sea of faces in the cafeteria on my first day, I thought in my perennial optimism and recurring naivete (that I like to think springs from my hopeful nature), that this incarnation of the school meant an undoing of what I experienced as a child. Surely, I thought, this means meant that racism had a declined from what it was when I was child.
My wake up call came when I was talking to a 10 year boy after school about his love of sports. He said he went out for football, wrestling, and baseball. When I asked about basketball, he said, "Well...mostly the black kids play that and they swear too much, so I don't even try out for it."
I said, "Don't any of the kids who play football and wrestle swear?"
He said, "Ooops, you know that.." Then he just smiled and walked away. The hopes I had when I began working there sank in that moment and I realized that the legacy of the racism I knew as a child was quite alive and being passed on despite of the diversity of the student body.
No matter what, I continue to hope that things will get better and that all of the "nooses" in all of their ugly forms will one day disappear. My mom believed that and I hope to find a way that I can pass that on somehow to these kids.
Posted by: Stephany Gormley | November 27, 2007 11:58 AM
very interesting, but I don't agree with you
Idetrorce
Posted by: Idetrorce | December 16, 2007 01:20 AM