Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  In 1999, the year the NYPD gunned Amadou down, Bill Clinton was the president of the United States. In 2004 George W. Bush was the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And by 2017, the White House was occupied by a man who described the country Amadou Diallo called home as a “shithole country.” In Trump’s America, the language of immigration focuses on Brown Spanish-speaking bodies.

  Immigrant. The word carries currency. Loaded. Weighed down by a politics of emotionality. Fear reigns and rules. It shrouds policy and reaches into these borders of manufactured fear where the walls are thick with America’s rewritten history of immigration, featuring the accents of bigotry and unapologetic open political warfare turning small screens of news shows into horror movies where caged children are vilified and their proponent, America’s forty-fifth president, is deified.

  Trump leads a Republican Party where politicians invoke floods tossing the sons and daughters of Mexico onto America’s shores. The police believed Amadou was a serial rapist. The language of trigger-happy police officers in 1999 would be shared by a president in 2016, when he called border-trampling Mexicans “rapists.”

  The four police officers who killed Amadou were all acquitted on February 25, 2000. This act would become a pattern, one that would lead to a hashtag, sparking a nationwide and global movement. Amadou’s embattled corpse would become bloody fertile ground for later chants of “Black lives matter!” His life mattered, his accent did not.

  The Bronx, where Amadou was killed, is the borough that birthed hip-hop. In its corners you hear accents from Caribbean islands that feel like hugs from home and are a welcome respite from a belonging-free political America where immigrants are fodder to be dashed and demonized for political capital.

  Those forty-one shots did not have an accent. They were immune to journeys, language, culture, and custom. They did not know Kadi’s path, her worry for her firstborn, or the dreams Amadou carried from his home in Liberia. There are nations and grandmas and uncles whose immigrant dreams collide with the American Dream for which they were neither considered nor included. Amadou’s Blackness merged into the narrative of African American men as sexual predators and threats, criminalizing his body and justifying the brutality of each of those forty-one shots.

  The Nigerian-British singer Sade sang on her track “Immigrant” from her 2000 album Lovers Rock,

  He didn’t know what it was to be Black….

  ’Til they gave him the change, but didn’t wanna touch his hand

  Amadou’s brutal killing was a lesson in Blackness for African immigrants.

  Our accents will not protect us. Not from police brutality. Our accents are remixed to the beat of America’s racism. They can identify us and a corner of this continent so many have left or fled but call and claim as home. They can be a balm from the reality that is the United States in 2019 and a president for whom speaking the word immigrant constitutes political point-scoring.

  In African nations, education was an elevator to status. It required you to put your head down and keep it there in order to ascend. That legacy of colonialism fed an illusion of inclusion, a path where your African exceptionalism, your difference from American-grown Blackness, would guarantee a different outcome. Some believed they would thrive. Unlike them. That meant some African immigrants taste their difference as sweeter, marking them immune to the racism for which they might sometimes blame Black Americans—not simply for challenging or enduring but actually for attracting. The “you” and “them” by African Americans meant sharpened tongues, ugly names—African booty-scratchers—communicating neither desire nor claim to any corner of this continent.

  Immigration in the United States today thrives and flounders due to a politics of emotionality. Immigrants are not born of sixteen-year-old mothers with journeys and dreams and futures. Not one of the forty-one shots recognized the love of Amadou’s mother, nor the space of Blackness that he occupied. Not one bullet came wrapped in an Ivy League education. Police encounters do not litigate our peculiar and particular Blacknesses. We—African Americans and immigrants of African nations and of island nations—do that. The back-and-forth between the Blackness born and raised in, shaped by, and rejected in America and that of journeying African immigrants was—and continues to be—a landscape of simmering tensions that sometimes explode. Those tensions serve to separate, when what is necessary now are creative collectives and coalitions. There is no comfort from the emotional litigation of our Blacknesses. Confusion yes. Clarity no. This is what a legacy of untreated trauma looks like. What is required is emotional justice.

  We have to reimagine a Blackness that is not marked as singular based on the brutality of bullets and America’s limitations. We must expand it to honor our accents, cultures, and customs as we navigate rocky paths to build creative coalitions and continue to a freedom where our peculiar and particular Blackness can be and breathe.

  Amadou’s future was choked out of him with each of the forty-one bullets. His bones are buried where his extended family resides, on his mother’s land, in Hollande Bourou in the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea. His blood still stains the streets of the Bronx. He breathed New York City air as an African immigrant. His death taught us that, in the United States, his breath was Black.

  2004–2009

  HURRICANE KATRINA

  Deborah Douglas

  On a middle-school field trip to Tennessee’s Reelfoot Lake in 1978, a classmate almost made me disappear. We were just up the road from my new home of Covington, a Delta town where Blow Pops were made, thick and swirly vowels rolled off people’s tongues, and a bronze Confederate statue greeted visitors at the square. At eleven years old, I was a Chicago-born Detroiter, new and working to fit in, calibrating my ear to accents without sharp angles and other ways of being. I wondered, for example, why the school instantly segregated by race as soon as the first period bell rang. White kids went to higher-level classes, and Black kids went somewhere else. I don’t know exactly where because, well, I went with the white kids.

  On this occasion, I noticed a group of white students from English huddled together when one of them, a short fella I’ll call J., came over. A new friend perhaps? J. proceeded to announce, “Heretell, you think you something.” He said it in a dusty drawl, like suuuuumthin.

  I was perplexed. Was that a question or a statement? Was I supposed to answer? Well, I’ve always been told I’m a child of God. My activist Detroit teachers, fresh from the revolution, always told me to raise my hand and speak up, which I did. Maybe I was something, I didn’t know. Who said such a thing, and why would it matter? In my heart, I knew J.’s trouble was he thought I was something. Whatever light of intellect, curiosity, and hope emanated from me and Black girls like me needed to be dispatched. This is what I call “depresencing.” He was chosen to do it because apparently some people are born to be seen and others are meant to recede, useful only to validate white supremacy.

  On that fall day at a place born when the river ran backward, this would not be the first time I would be asked to shrink and be a little less…there. The Black women and girls impacted by Hurricane Katrina, which landed near New Orleans on August 29, 2005, know a great deal about a lack of regard that renders their lived experiences invisible.

  The idea of Black women and girls being fully present, inhabiting space and exercising their powers of wit, talent, and dexterity, would be a recurring theme. A lexicon has grown to address the tension between who Black women truly are and aspire to be, and the validatory bit part they are repeatedly asked to play, if any at all. Scholars Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “intersectionality” and Moya Bailey’s “misogynoir” provide a level of validation and language that feels good to not feel, well, crazy.

  The devastating weather event that was Hurricane Katrina can best be described as what historian Barbara Ransby calls the “gendered nature of the disaster.”

  The category-four hurr
icane made landfall near New Orleans and proceeded to unleash destruction that ravaged the Gulf Coast, including Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. The levee system that had protected New Orleans from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne was overwhelmed. About 1.2 million people heeded Mayor Ray Nagin’s order to evacuate. Most of the city flooded.

  Many residents didn’t leave because they could not or would not, or they sought shelter at the New Orleans Convention Center or the Louisiana Superdome. While many possess the privilege of picking up and leaving without much thought, studies show (and folks will tell you) that low-income residents, minorities, the elderly, and the disabled are less likely to evacuate. In New Orleans, impoverished residents didn’t have the money, the cars, or the network to relocate. Their homes and communities bore the brunt of the devastation.

  Media reports showed desperate people on rooftops begging to be rescued from their flooded communities. Survivors languished at the Superdome and convention center without food, water, and proper sanitary conditions. Residents were further dispossessed when they were referred to as “refugees” rather than “evacuees,” a point made by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, among others.

  Hurricane Katrina is easily a metaphor for America’s attitude toward Black women: rejected, neglected, and never protected. But Black women’s persistence and their insistence on survival and restoration are a metaphor for their attitude toward America.

  FEMA chief Michael Brown is the poster boy for the way established power approached this natural and man-made disaster. When George W. Bush showered him with praise, saying “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” nobody thought like that.

  The vacationing Bush embodied this mindset in his own slow response. On his way back to the White House on August 31, he flew over New Orleans, surveying the damage. He didn’t land to take stock of the situation because he said it would draw on law enforcement resources. Failure to engage at a most human level hit a nerve, as New Orleans was a majority-Black city where more than a quarter lived in poverty.

  When former first lady Barbara Bush broke her characteristic public silence, she diminished the humanity of survivors. In discussing evacuees in Texas, she told the radio program Marketplace, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,” she said, “so this is working very well for them.”

  Except it wasn’t working, especially for Black women, many of whom were heads of their households. More women than men lived in poverty before Katrina. Women are prone to gender-based violence when they are vulnerable. The disaster response was simply humiliating. In a 2006 article, Ransby recounted that a middle-aged Black woman on CNN who was “dirty, desperate and crying…looked into the camera and said to the viewers, ‘We do not live like this.’ She repeated it over and over again.”

  City leaders who banked on remaking a demographically different kind of city did Black women no favors, either. They failed to include in recovery planning the Black women who lived in “the Bricks,” the Big Four public housing complexes. Public housing was demolished and replaced with mixed-income developments.

  The city lost more than half of its population after the hurricane, falling to 230,172 residents in 2006 from 484,674, according to the Data Center. In the metro area, many of these lost residents were African American women and girls, whose numbers dropped to 37 percent from 47 percent, according to a 2010 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Poverty levels fell, but that doesn’t prove poverty dropped for Black girls and women who lived there before Katrina.

  The disaster response that stranded thousands or made people feel occupied more than protected by police and military failed to take into account the Black women’s work of holding themselves together. These women were doing what author and commentator Avis Jones-DeWeever described as easing “the hunger and thirst of babies and toddlers left in their care in the sweltering heat and the inhumane conditions associated with post-disaster survival.” In the wake of the storm, women, Black and white, cared for the elderly and infirm, “yet, women’s service and suffering were all but invisible as are their continuing struggles to this day.”

  The lexicon must make room for white patriarchy’s specific way of disregarding the humanity of Black women in literal physical spaces like New Orleans during and after Katrina, and in the narratives and policy making that either created a pathway home or left them stranded. Every step of the Katrina response “depresenced” Black women, forced them to bear the weight of natural disaster while carrying the cellular memory of trauma one can imagine will pass through bloodlines like so many others.

  Unlike erasure, which requires one’s presence to be recognized so it can be obliterated, depresencing never acknowledges presence at all. When deployed, people just look right through Black women as if they weren’t there.

  As violent and silent as depresencing is, there’s an antidote. The response to Hurricane Katrina was not the first time the U.S. government abandoned Black women, and it would not be the last. Black women resisted by showing up in the story of their lives, by loving, learning, and leading—despite the systemic barriers and humiliations designed to make them small enough to practically disappear. But Black women did not disappear, and they will not disappear because we know something established power does not: we are something.

  2009–2014

  THE SHELBY RULING

  Karine Jean-Pierre

  “Every time I vote,” Oprah Winfrey said on a 2004 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show dedicated to voting, “I cast my vote for Otis Moss, Sr., who walked eighteen miles in one day to have the chance to do it. That’s why I vote.”

  Oprah invokes the story of Otis Moss, Sr., frequently when she talks about voting. It’s a story she heard in her twenties from his son, Cleveland’s Rev. Otis Moss, and one she says she’ll never forget. It’s one I’ll never forget, either.

  Otis Moss, Sr., grew up without the right to vote. His family were sharecroppers in the racist Jim Crow era, in a “democracy” that still denied millions of Black and Brown people the right to vote. But one day that changed. The Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, thanks to the civil rights movement, and for the first time ever, Otis by law had the right to vote. And on the day of the first-ever election where he could actually cast a ballot, where he could actually have his voice counted, he put on his best suit and walked six miles to the nearest polling station. He didn’t have any other form of transportation. But when he got to the polling station and tried to cast his vote, the people working there told him he couldn’t vote at that polling station. He had to go to another one.

  Still in his best suit, Otis walked another five or six miles to that other polling station. But by the time he got there, the people working there told him it was too late, the polls had closed. He walked home, another six miles, defeated. In total, Otis Moss, Sr., walked eighteen miles that day, all for the chance to vote. All for the chance to exercise a right that was legally his.

  Otis Moss, Sr., died before the next election. In all his years, not once did he get to vote. Not once did the United States of America, a supposed democracy that depends on free and fair elections, allow him to vote. Not once.

  That story, a story of Jim Crow and how laws may change but may not change everything, that’s the story Oprah takes with her when she votes. I want to quickly tell you another story, a story of a man not unlike Otis Moss, Sr.

  Eddie Lee Holloway, Jr., was a fifty-eight-year-old Black man who moved to Wisconsin from Illinois. He was ready to vote: he had his expired Illinois photo ID, his birth certificate, and his Social Security card, so he could get the Wisconsin ID he needed to vote. But when he went to the DMV in Milwaukee, they rejected his application. It turned out that on his birth certificate, due to a clerical error, his name was written as “Eddie Junior Holloway,” not “Eddie Holloway Junior.”

  Eddie didn’t give up, ho
wever. He made seven more trips to different agencies and offices to try to get his paperwork together, all so he could vote. Like Otis, he was determined. He spent over $200 trying to get everything in order. But even after all these attempts, he still wasn’t able to get the identification he needed to be able to vote in Wisconsin. Eventually, Eddie was so dejected he moved back to Illinois. He was never able to vote in Wisconsin.

  Both Eddie and Otis were denied the right to vote even though the law said they were entitled to it. Both men were victims of a centuries-long effort in the United States to deny Black people the right to vote. But Eddie, unlike Otis, wasn’t a sharecropper living under Jim Crow. Eddie was a Black man trying to vote in Wisconsin in the 2016 presidential election. Not in 1946. Not in 1956. In 2016. Since Otis’s attempt to vote, the United States has sent people to the moon, created electric cars, launched the Internet, and elected the first Black president. But if, like Eddie, you’re voting as a Black or Brown person, it can sometimes feel like nothing has changed at all.

  Eddie was one of hundreds of thousands of predominantly Black and Brown victims that year of a new voter ID law in Wisconsin that, according to one study, successfully suppressed 200,000 votes in 2016. Donald Trump won the state by 22,748 votes.

  When I reflect on these two stories, I think of how much more similar they are than different. I think of the fact that, a half century later, Black people in this country are still struggling for the right to vote. I think of the fact that white supremacy and voter suppression, though they look different today, are still very much alive—and flourishing.

  In 2013 I was in New York City working in city politics when the Shelby County v. Holder decision came down, bringing down with it crucial parts of the Voting Rights Act. I had only recently left the Obama administration. Barack Obama had cobbled together a mighty coalition of people young and old, Black and white. The diversity of the coalition that backed him demonstrated the future he sought, one where people of all backgrounds would come together and push our great nation forward. The power of that thought, the audacity of his imagination to dream of what a better, more inclusive country might look like, frightened many who saw their lives dependent on the continuation of a racial hierarchy.