Dogs and Shoes

Fear Will Not Protect Us, But Empathy Might

A couple of weeks ago, Questlove wrote a piece about his feelings in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict. It was mostly focused on the pain he’s felt as a person who, in being black and big, is constantly thought by white people to be a physical threat. He tells one particular story to illustrate the point: in an elevator in his high-end, high-security Manhattan apartment building, he was alone with a white woman, and she wouldn’t tell him what button to push for her floor—because, he realized as he stepped out of the elevator, she was likely afraid of him. In the context of his piece, it was a powerful and moving story.

A few days ago, Kim Foster wrote a post challenging the gender dynamics in Questlove’s story. Her piece was grounded in racist thinking (which she doesn’t seem to have recognized when she wrote it). To her credit, after a number of people called her out, most notably Jamilah Lemieux of Ebony, Foster updated her post with a recant. I would have liked to see Foster explore her own thinking a little more. But admitting public mistakes is hard, and I appreciate that she did it quickly and graciously.

Before we put this episode behind us, I want to revisit the argument Foster was making, because I think it bears examination. I’m also going suggest another way we can look at the elevator story.

Fear Will Not Protect Us

Part of Foster’s point was that women need to protect themselves from sexual assault and must be able to do so unapologetically:

I imagine a young woman reading the exchange that happened between Questlove and the woman in the elevator, taking it in and, not wanting to be racist, shifting how she reacts to men in public. Maybe she smiles more, acts less freaked out when alone in an elevator with a strange man, maybe she walks down that dark isolated street and doesn’t worry that someone is walking behind her, or lets down her guard and tries to let the man know she isn’t intimidated, that she doesn’t find him scary. Maybe she lets concern for others — offending that stranger, appearing racist, or sexist — over-ride her instincts to take care of herself.

Later she adds: “It is dangerous for us to teach our children not to protect themselves…or ignore someone.”

I agree to my core that women should not have to justify our unsmiling silence in public places. And I believe we have to speak out about it continually if we are to ever hope for peace on the streets. But we cannot conflate fear and unfriendliness with protection from sexual violence. Indeed, the way women act won’t protect us at all. Not what we wear, not what we drink, not whether we refuse to smile. We are no less likely to be raped if we don’t smile at a man in an elevator than if we do. Put another way: smiling is not asking for it, and it will not make us less safe. Fear is not a shield.

We need other ways of protecting ourselves.

Oppression Olympics vs Empathy Olympics

As others have explained in response to Foster, white women’s safety, purity and rights have for centuries been used to justify brutality against men of color. Emmett Till is an archetype, not an anomaly. George Zimmerman was acquitted by a jury that was 5/6ths white women in part because the defense took a number of steps to demonstrate that Zimmerman was a defender of the neighborhood’s white women against black intruders. While Zimmerman’s attorneys were able to successfully argue that his record of abusing female partners was irrelevant, our national narratives about the need to protect white women against black men are so ingrained in our culture, they were barely noticed as an admissible underpinning of the case.

When you engage in Oppression Olympics and pit one group’s travails against another’s, you not only diminish the very real experiences of other people who are suffering, but you also miss the chance to make connections between the bigger forces that oppress us: Zimmerman operates in a world that lets him—even encourages him to—assault women and kill black boys.

What if, instead of medaling in Oppression Olympics, we tried to become contenders in Empathy Olympics? What if we put some true effort into trying to understand the validity of each other's emotions? On the elevator with the black man and the white woman, how does the ride go differently? In responding to Foster’s piece, @deluxvixens tweeted, “what @KimFosterNYC said about having to ‘be nice, placate, share’ is stuff that Black women have to do to be safe around many white women.” What if white women used our basic human empathy (to say nothing of our trained-as-women empathy) to feel the weight of that observation, recognize our roles in it and work to change the dynamic?

Jamelle Bouie wrote earlier this year about the time he sold a used tv to a friend who lived three blocks away. He’s black, and because he was afraid that cops might automatically assume he was a criminal if he was walking down the street carrying a large, late-model tv at night, he asked the white, female buyer to walk with him. He tells the story to point out that were he a white guy, it would probably never have had to occur to him to have that fear. Not to appropriate for my own purposes the story, which he shared as a counter-example of privilege, but it’s worth noting that it also serves as a point of familiarity for untold women of all colors who also feel unsafe walking three blocks alone in their own neighborhoods.

That parallel experience of threat is not coincidental, and the millions harmed by the dynamic of fear are nearly all women and people of color. If we can see the connections between our experiences, we can gain greater empathy for each other, which might help us work together to understand who is served by a system of pervasive fear, how we each perpetuate it, and how we can combat it. We can be effective in creating social change only when our approaches are intersectional.

Empathy After the Zimmerman Verdict

Foster’s piece would have been problematic at any moment in history to date. After all, there really never is a good time to: make white women’s experiences the center of discussion while all but ignoring the experiences of women of color; pit white women against black men; and co-opt people of color’s pain to advance a white person’s agenda. But those actions are especially hurtful coming right after a white man who killed a black child was found not-guilty by a jury that was 5/6ths white. Not to mention that that verdict came just after the Supreme Court dismantled the Voting Right Act, which will make it appreciably harder to vote for millions of people of color in this country. Oh, and by the way, jury pools are drawn from the rolls of registered voters.

If you’re white and you’ve been have paying close attention since the Zimmerman verdict--not just to Questlove, but to a torrent of stories and tweets and and tv segments and videos and press conferences—it’s stunningly clear that people of color are feeling an intense, personal pain right now that we white folks can’t quite experience. It’s awing, really.

I appreciate that submissions to sites like WeAreNotTrayvonMartin help white people recognize our privilege. But this outpouring of pain calls for more; it calls for new depths of empathy and serious inquiry into where that can take us together.

Fear will not protect us. Indeed empathy that lets us work together for change may be the only thing that ultimately does.

PS. White folks, if you’re wondering how to improve your empathy for people of color starting right this minute, check out this post.

Thanks to Johanna Foster (no relation to Kim) for talking through many of these issues—and more—together this week. 

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A note on comments: I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness.  

What's Race Got to Do with It?

Over the weekend, something rare happened: Tony and I saw a movie we both liked a lot, "20 Feet from Stardom." A documentary about rock backup singers, it features almost entirely women of color, ranging in age from 20-something to at least 70-something. If you can't find enough--or any--movies celebrating middle- and upper-middle-class black women, go see this one today. But go with your eyes open.

The movie comprises interviews with accomplished backup singers, uber-famous solo artists, producers and music historians. It focuses in particular on Darlene Love, Merry Clayton--both of whom I realized I'd been listening to my entire life and had never known--Lisa Fischer and Judith Hill, along with Claudia Lennear and Tata Vega. A formidable lineup, all of whom have or had ambitions of becoming solo artists. 

These women are astonishing singers and terrific performers with top-flight music-industry connections. So why no breakout successes among them? The movie opens with Bruce Springsteen talking about what it means to shift from a backup singer to a solo star. "That walk to the front [of the stage] is, is complicated," he says, explaining the ego and narcissism needed. I don't doubt that's true, and a number of other people in the film weigh in with similar observations about the monster drive and particular personality required to break out. The movie implies--and in some cases, people in it state directly--that these women could really sing, but they just didn't have what it takes. Or maybe, as Sting suggests during it, they weren't lucky enough.

You could come away thinking the filmmakers are simply shining a light on some extraordinary women while showing us the inevitable disappointments of backup singing.

But just beneath the surface of "20 Feet from Stardom" lurks a question the movie doesn't ask: what role did race play in shaping the backup singers' careers? The U.S. music industry--in which white people were, until recently, the primary producers and distributors--has a long history of repackaging music made by black people to sell in paler versions for white people, without giving credit or payment to its originators. 

Given that backdrop--and the facts that in this movie nearly all the solo artists interviewed are white men and nearly all the backup singers women of color, the one former female backup singer who is now a big star is white (Sheryl Crow), there are no black female solo successes featured, and much of the action takes place during a period of racial upheaval in the U.S.--it's curious that race is mentioned just in passing. And although there's an extended look at the way Phil Spector used Darlene Love and her group, The Blossoms, to record hit songs uncredited for The Crystals (both groups were black), his actions aren't shown as part of a fraught legacy. 

Instead, "20 Feet" creates its drama in large part by relying on one of our favorite American narratives: the personal achievement or failure of individuals. In this telling, Phil Spector wasn't part of a systematic mistreatment of women and people of color in the music industry; he was a solo villain. Darlene Love wasn't subject to those systematic forces; she just didn't want success quite badly enough, and so she had to spend time--after voicing huge hits for other artists--working as a housecleaner. (She later returned to music, when she decided she really did want it after all, and she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. Her bio on their site ends with the quote, "'I never pushed to be a star,' she told writer David Hinckley in 1992. 'I didn’t want to. I had my home, my family. Session work let you do the music and leave.'” This is dead opposite the way she describes her career aspirations in "20 Feet.")

I don't know exactly what role race played in the careers of backup singers like Love and Clayton. But I very much wanted the movie to ask. As a documentary that explores a number of themes, it could have folded in race as one of the threads. Indeed, its multi-part structure gives it particularly good opportunity to look at race as one of many factors that affected its subjects' careers. 

So why doesn't the movie address race directly? It's possible the filmmakers simply weren't aware of the issue. But that's unlikely. Director Morgan Neville has made dozens of films about musicians and the music business; he could hardly have failed to encounter discussions of racism in the industry. Even if he had, it's difficult to imagine that among the dozens of people he interviewed for "20 Feet," nobody mentioned it. More likely is that he and his producers (who are also white) didn't perceive race as a compelling force in the women's stories, or, more cynically, they didn't perceive it as an element that would help sell "20 Feet." There are other possibilities, of course (for instance, questioning race could have undermined the narratives of personal ambition). But no matter how you look at it, they left out a conversation about race. 

What difference does it make when we can't or don't talk about race?

In late May, Tony and I went to see an exhibit at the Getty Museum, "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940 - 1990," which describes itself as "an engaging view of the region's diverse urban landscape." Fifty years is a lot to cover, but it's a meticulously presented show, opening with a series of beautifully animated infographics examining things like the development of the road system, water usage, and the radically changing racial and ethnic demographics of the county (in 1940 it was fairly diverse; by 1990, awesomely so). The exhibit then goes on to tell its story through historical photographs, film clips*, books, pamphlets, models and quotes. 

You could come away thinking the museum is simply shining a light on the some extraordinary aspects of L.A.'s development in the 20th century.

Except that in five sections (Car Culture, Urban Networks, Engines of Innovation, Community Magnets and Residential Fabric), it fails to mention race again after that intriguing first wall, save once. In the final room, in a panel on planned communities, the exhibit notes, "Restrictive housing covenants, ruled unconstitutional in 1953, prevented minority groups from purchasing property in many new neighborhoods." A book displayed nearby says the post-war Aliso Village development was intended as a racially integrated project, and it shows a black couple. That's it. That's the entire treatment of race in the exhibit.

Even the segment on Dodger Stadium, which describes the struggle of Chavez Ravine homeowners to retain their properties after the city sold the land under them to the team, manages not to mention that the area was predominantly Spanish-speaking. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the photographs, films and illustrations show almost nothing but white people, and the politicians, planners, architects and businesspeople are all white (and nearly all men, at that). 

In a way, it's easy to miss the deracination, because a lot of the images are of buildings and highways. Indeed, I wonder if the curators themselves were aware of the particular angle they chose. But either way, for a show that focuses quite a bit on the way people lived, I found my breath quietly taken away as I realized that it is, in fact, an exhibit about a white L.A.--though it sets up a different story.

So again: what difference does it make?

The trial of George Zimmerman is being held right now. As a reminder, he's the white neighborhood watch leader who shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in Florida last year. Both the killing and the trial itself are riven with racial overtones (to say nothing of racism). Yet the judge has sharply limited discussions of race and has barred the term "racial profiling" from the proceedings. She believes race is such an overloaded topic, so prejudicial in conversation, she's chosen to excise it as an explicit part of discussion in the trial. In other words, an aspect of the episode that may be central, that may have led to Martin's death, cannot even be mentioned in court. You could come away from the trial thinking that Zimmerman behaved in nothing less than a reasonable way. 

Truth in our legal system, not to mention safety for our black and brown teenagers, may rest in our ability to discuss race in an open and informed way. So what would it take to make it a less charged, more approachable topic? What if more of us better understood the roles race has played in U.S. history? What if our movies and museums that investigate our histories didn't sidestep race? Could they help us be more comfortable with issues of race in our society today? Could they help us be more conversant? Let's go with: hell, yes.

Here's a bit of hope to round this out. Over the weekend, Tony and my parents and I went to the Brooklyn Museum, and among the exhibits we saw was a small show about American quilts held in the museum's collection. Although there's a rich tradition of quilting in black American communities, the exhibit includes almost all Anglo-European pieces. So the curators talk about why that's the case(!), both at the beginning and end of the exhibit. I've resisted the urge to copy-edit:

The Brooklyn Museum's collection largely originates from and reflects Anglo-European traditions of making and collecting. However, contemporary scholarship confirms that enslaved Africans and, later, African American domestic workers and seamstresses would have labored on quilts attributed to white households. 

Museum collections evolve over time, revealing the priorities and prejudices of their time and place. Reflecting the acquisition history of the of the Brooklyn Museum's collections in general and the Decorative Arts collection in particular, both of which initially privileged Anglo-European culture and patrimony, quilts were collected based on their ability to serve as superlative examples from this dominant lineage. Since the 1980s, significant work has been done by scholars and practitioners to make visible the remarkable and historically important quilt-making traditions that flourished alongside those here but are not yet well represented within the Museum's collection.

This, folks, is how you take a small step to acknowledge and talk about race, and I admit that this is a small step indeed. But it makes a difference. It opens our eyes. 

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 * Both "20 Feet" and "Overdrive" include film clips from the Prelinger Archives, an amazing collection through which you--yes, you--can access films, too.

A note on comments: I’m interested in a good conversation on this topic, and I welcome opinionated comments on this post. Seeing, however, as the internet tends to draw vile comments on sex and race, I should mention that I will edit or delete hateful and phobic comments, personal attacks on me or other commenters, off-topic threads (including assholic comments on this comments policy) and things that strike me as trolling. If you dislike that approach, comment on any of the 80 billion other sites that welcome diversity of obnoxiousness.