Growing up black in the US

S P SETH

When it comes to race relations, the US continues to have a terrible record. It is difficult to believe that a country, which professes to be the champion of human rights elsewhere in the world, continues to so shabbily treat its own Afro American citizens. A number of recent incidents of black deaths from police shooting and, worse still, the police officers responsible for such killings being let off, simply make no sense. Take the case of the 12-year old, Tamir Rice, who was playing with his toy gun in a park when shot dead by police. And the two officers involved in his shooting will not be charged, the prosecutor in the case dismissing the incident as a “perfect of storm of errors.” Well, it wasn’t for his parents. A Cleveland jury’s decision not to lay charges “devastated” his mother, Samaria Rice. She claimed that the prosecutor, Timothy McGinty, had “deliberately sabotaged the case”. Earlier, police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner had been let off without charges, which had caused massive protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York.

At the time of the Ferguson protests, Darryl Pinckney wrote in the New York Review of Books,  “America has always felt the necessity of keeping its black male population under control. Behind every failure to make the police accountable in such killings is an almost gloating confidence that the majority of white Americans support the idea that the police are the thin blue line between them and social chaos.” In other words, this is part of the social psyche of white America and the system is designed to uphold it, with prosecutors like McGinty making sure that it is not derailed. If the 12-year old Tamir Rice were a white kid playing with a toy gun, he would still be alive.

New York Times editorially commented that, “Tamir Rice of Cleveland would be alive today had he been a white 12-year old playing with a toy gun in just about any middle-class neighborhood in the country on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014.”  It goes on, “But Tamir, who was shot to death by a white police officer that day, had the misfortune of being black in a poor area of Cleveland, where the police have historically behaved as an occupying force that shoots first and ask questions later. To grow up black and male in such a place is to live a highly circumscribed life, hemmed in by forces that deny your humanity and conspire to kill you.”

This is not just the story of one black kid in Cleveland but it encapsulates the story of growing up black in America. Irrespective of your social class, now that there is a growing black middle class in America, it is still the colour of your skin that will be a determining factor in whether you will live or die or end up in prison when confronted by police or reported to police. The statistics are frightening. Constituting about 13 per cent of the US population, blacks represent over 50 per cent of its prison population. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), African Americans constitute 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated people, and have six times the incarceration rate of whites. Nearly one in three black males will end up in jail at some point or the other in their lives. Which will scar them for the rest of their lives in terms of employment prospects or any useful and productive role in society. And those who manage to escape jail or police shooting do it out of sheer luck, and not because of the customary precaution dinned into them by their parents about how to avoid a situation with the police. Because, no amount of preparation/precaution will prepare a black male for this because the color of his body has marked him out as a constant danger signal.

In a powerful book titled, Between The World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Afro American writer and a national correspondent of the Atlantic, has done an incisive reportage and analysis of what it means to be black in America. And this he seeks to do in the form of a letter to his adolescent son, which constitutes his book. First, he raises the question: why is race such an integral part of white America? Coates writes, “Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism--- the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them--- inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature… the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.”

The strongly embedded belief in the superiority of white America goes back to the days of slavery. And it was designed to enrich white America by treating blacks as commodities to be traded and exploited. Indeed, “ ‘ White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our [black] bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching) and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.” And it is this belief and its implementation over the centuries that made America rich. As Coates writes, “At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American roads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies---cotton—was America’s primary export…”

And after the Civil War, fought ostensibly to set blacks free from slavery, they were still in bondage in one form or the other. The narrative of Civil War was toned down or modified to accommodate southern states to let them continue with lynching and rounding up blacks, and to deprive them of their right to vote. And now more and more Republican governed states are enacting measures to make it difficult for blacks to vote, with white America increasingly worried about losing their preponderant control of the country. This fear was dramatically and disastrously enacted in the recent massacre of black parishioners attending a church service, where the white killer reportedly said that he was doing it because the blacks were raping white women and taking over the country.

And as long as this fear and the consequent need to dominate black lives with spectacular violence is part of white America’s psyche, the country’s Afro American citizens will continue their struggle to highlight that Black Lives Matter. And that struggle might not always remain peaceful.

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times.

A Muslim as president of France?

S P SETH

The day of the of the terrorist attack (January 7) on the satirical French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, a novel by a French author appeared with the title Soumission (Submission in English) that soon became a widely read and reviewed book. Its author Michel Houellebecq has written other novels too and is now well-established, inviting controversy. His latest novel, Submission, is particularly controversial because of its timing and the subject matter coinciding, with the Charlie Hebdo affair and a succession of other terrorist events, like the Paris carnage. Being a work of fiction, it boldly or foolishly, pictures a coalition in 2022 emerging out of a near political deadlock in France led by a Muslim party with its leader, Mohammed Ben Abbas, emerging as the country’s president and setting in motion the transformation of French society on traditional Islamic values. And this is all happening peacefully and without any real protests in France.  This fictional account is happening against the backdrop of the violence recently unleashed on France by terrorism. No wonder a novel talking about a peaceful transformation to a political order based on Islamic values was bound to raise hackles.

The novel explores two interrelated themes. The first suggests the progressive breakdown of French/Western societies where communal and familial connections are not working. Francois, the main character in the novel is a 44-year old academic at Sorbonne teaching literature whose life appears drained of any excitement or passion. He does his job routinely and has very little social and intellectual interaction at his work place. He is socially awkward and fails to develop any long-term relationship with women, though he manages to have sex with girl friends but they always move on. One girl, who is Jewish, that has shown some affection for him with potential to develop into a loving relationship has moved to Israel with her parents, because of the fear generated by political developments in France surrounding the success of the Muslim Fraternity party with Mohammed Ben Abbas later becoming the country’s president.

Francois’ sense of loneliness and hopelessness is thus expressed when he says: “There is no Israel for me.” He has no contact with his parents who are divorced and when he is informed by the relevant agency about his mother’s death and the need for arrangements on his part for her burial, he doesn’t respond. The authorities bury his mother in a pauper’s grave, as it might seem. He projects his own sense of loneliness and despair on to the larger French society where many, he imagines, live a life of loneliness like him without social connections and a purposeful life.

And the politics of the country is as sterile with main political parties, Socialists and Conservatives (UMP), going through the periodic charade of elections, governing the country by turn without any substantial change of policies and politics. Francois’ contempt for such ‘democracy’ is brutal when he says,” Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.” In a sense, France appears to have reached a dead end, both in terms of people’s individual lives and collectively.

It is precisely at this time and against this backdrop that the Muslim Fraternity party and its leader, Mohammed Ben Abbes, appear as a moderate political force to give the country a clear direction. And they seem like a breath of fresh air. As the novel proceeds towards its conclusion, it thus sums up (as a fictional account) the state of Europe’s decomposition. It says, “The facts were plain: Europe had reached a point of such putrid decomposition that it could no longer save itself, any more than fifth-century Rome could have done. This wave of new immigrants, with their traditional culture—of natural hierarchies, the submission of women and respect for elders—offered a historic opportunity for the moral and familial rearmament of Europe. These immigrants held out the hope of a new age for the old continent. Some were Christian; but there was no denying that the vast majority were Muslim.” Besides, Ben Abbas was planning to expand the political and cultural boundaries of Europe to include some African/Arab countries, but it was all meant to be a peaceful project.

Francois, the novel’s main character and narrator, who lost his academic job when Sorbonne became Islamic, gets his job back after converting to Islam at the persuasion of the new university president who is himself a convert. Francois (or the author Houellebecq, to the extent he is represented by the narrator of the novel) is very much impressed by the university president’s new life with more than one wife as he puts it, “…a forty-year old wife to do the cooking, a fifteen-year old wife for whatever else… No doubt he had one or two wives in between…” And for Francois this is an ideal society where he wouldn’t need to be looking for his sexual conquests. Like some of his colleagues he would have no difficulty in the department of wives that will be arranged for him and serve him in a submissive (hence the title, Submission) role. In this hierarchical society with structured roles, the woman submitted to man, with final submission to God from all.

In France’s new political world with a Muslim president, the economy is already looking up with unemployment down, as women leave work and given subsidies to raise more children. Which would also have the effect of reversing a decline in France’s population. At the same time, Arab money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar is flowing in to prop up things.

It all sounds very exciting and a neat solution for Europe’s rebirth under a charter of Islamic traditions and values. But it is too neat and hence not realistic. If anything, the right spectrum of European polity is feeding on Islamophobia. One reviewer in the London Review of Books called it “deeply reactionary [but], it is not Islamophobic.” Indeed, Houllebecq appears to have made a volte face on Islam which he had described before as “the most stupid, false and obscure of all religions… doomed just as surely as Christianity.” But in his novel, Submission, he appears to suggest that it might be the solution to the crisis overtaking French/European civilization. Even though the novel has generated great interest and controversy, one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is a fictional narrative and shouldn’t be taken as the pathway to France’s political transformation in 2022 and beyond.