Carrie Lamanna

practicing the art of resistance writing

Colorado State, Come Get Your White People

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Some of you know that I live in Fort Collins, Colorado, but only those of you who are bored enough to read my C.V. know that I worked at Colorado State University for seven years. When we first moved here in 2007, none of our family and friends knew where Fort Collins was. Then “Ballon Boy” hit the news and our new town became famous for a ridiculous prank. Now my adopted hometown is in the news again, but this time it’s because CSU is joining the ranks of places where people of color are unwelcome.

Two weeks ago two brothers drove up to Fort Collins to participate in a campus tour of CSU, a school they described as their “dream school.” They saved their money for the trip, registered online for the tour, and borrowed the family’s only car for the trip. The only thing they did wrong, was arrive late for the tour. Oh yeah, and not be white.

So even if you don’t know the story, you can probably guess what happens next. Someone calls the cops. And of course that someone is a white woman. What possible excuse could she have for calling the cops on two kids who showed up late to a campus tour? She said they made her “nervous” (not a reason to call the cops, by the way), and her call to campus police tells us everything we need to know about why:

Hi … I am with my son doing a campus tour … There are two young men that joined our tour that weren’t a part of our tour. They’re not, definitely not a part of the tour. And their behavior is just really odd, and I’ve never called, ever, about anybody, but they joined our tour. They won’t give their names and when I asked them what they were wanting to study, like everything they’re saying isn’t … they were lying the whole time.

The odd behavior she refers to is that the brothers are quiet and one of them keeps his hands in his pockets. That’s it. If that’s odd behavior for college age students, then I should have called the cops on at least one student in every damn class I ever taught. But it’s not their behavior that gets the cops involved. It’s that they refused to answer the nice white lady’s questions. These young men didn’t think they needed to justify their existence to her, and because of that they get pulled off the tour and questioned by the police while she goes on her merry way with those “creepy [brown] kids” safely out of view. (Yes, she actually called them creepy.) She even admits her call is not justified:

It’s probably nothing. I’m probably being completely paranoid with just everything that’s happened …

I can’t be certain what she means by “everything that’s happened,” but it’s a pretty safe bet she’s referring to America’s epidemic of mass shootings. However, her racism is blocking one key fact about those shootings from taking hold in her brain: they are overwhelming committed by white men, and these two young men are Native American. But of course, she doesn’t know they are Native American, just that they aren’t white. When the 911 dispatcher asks her to describe the brothers she says

I think they’re Hispanic, I believe. One of them for sure. He said he’s from Mexico.

No lady, they’re from NEW Mexico. The state that borders Colorado to the south. Not Mexico, but the land we stole from Mexico and the indigenous people that lived there long before you and your army of police arrived to make this whole region a whitopia.

What’s infuriating and frightening about this incident is how common it is. There are so many examples of white people calling the police on Black and Brown people that I can’t keep track of them all. People have been harassed while shopping for prom or for a vintage 70s outfit, while barbecuing in a public park, napping in their college dorm, moving into their apartment, moving out of their AirB&B, golfing, working out, and of course while sitting in a Starbucks. And this isn’t even half of the incidents in the news in the last few weeks. I’ve been trying to write this post for days, but every time I open up my computer to work on it there’s a new story of white fuckery I have to take in.

Of course, CSU issued an apology/statement after the harassment these two prospective students received. And honestly, it’s better than most, but the bar is low. University President Tony Frank is clear that the brothers did nothing wrong and that CSU is a place that values diversity.

Two young men, through no fault of their own, wound up frightened and humiliated because another campus visitor was concerned about their clothes and overall demeanor, which appears to have simply been shyness. The very idea that someone – anyone – might “look” like they don’t belong on a CSU Admissions tour is anathema. People of all races, gender identities, orientations, cultures, religions, heritages, and appearances belong here. As long as you want to earn a great education surrounded by people with the same goal who come from every part of our state, our country, and our world, then you belong here. And if you’re uncomfortable with a diverse and inclusive academic environment, then you probably have a better fit elsewhere.

The problem with Frank’s statement on the incident is that it puts all the focus on the the Native American men who did nothing wrong and makes it their job to help the university improve campus procedures to more clearly identify tour participants. What about the white woman who called the police in the first place? Is anyone talking with her? Is anyone from the university calling her in so she can learn why what she did is racist and life threatening to people of color? The way to prevent things like this from happening again is not better tour procedures like making participants wear lanyards (something emphasized in Frank’s statement). The way to keep white people from calling the cops is to make them less racist.

In his statement, Frank says to prospective students and their families, “if you’re uncomfortable with a diverse and inclusive academic environment, then you probably have a better fit elsewhere.” So the message is “It’s OK to be racist as long as you don’t do it here,” and its implication is that the people of Colorado State are immune from racism as long as they can keep the racists off their property. It shoud go without saying that this is not the message we should be getting from an educational institution that claims to value diversity. Colorado State, it’s time to get your white people and start doing the hard work of antiracism education.

President Frank, you have a Vice President for Diversity, whose office runs dozens of programs, and countless faculty members researching and teaching diversity and antiracism. Use these resources to start educating all prospective and current white students. Call them in and tell them that preventing racism is their responsibility. In the meantime, you can send Megan Izen’s guidelines on when to call the police to that white woman CSU is shielding from public scrutiny. Here’s a pocket checklist she can carry with her to remind her of the rules:

Should I call the cops?

  1. Is my or someone else’s life in imminent danger?
  2. One more time, am I absolutely certain that the situation is life threatening?
  3. If the people that are involved were white, would I still call the police?
  4. Is there anyone else I can call or any other resources available to address the situation?

So in short, “If there is gushing blood or flames, dial 911. But don’t default to the police if you are just uncomfortable.”

President Frank, CSU has the resources and the power to promote real and lasting change, but only if it has the courage to call out racism when it happens and call in white people who need a course of study in white privilege. You end your letter by asking the CSU community “to be a little kinder, a little better, to work a little harder at seeing each other’s point of view, and to use our voice. Not always to agree, but always to defend each other and to oppose hate,” but that’s not even close to enough. This is not about the CSU community being kinder or opposed to hate (because who will disagree with kindness and opposition to hate). This is about creating programs that work to dismantle the white privilege you claim to be working on in your own self. This is about being an educational institution of courage and conviction.

James Baldwin quote: It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Writing Ethics for Monstrous Times

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Black and white photo of an angel hiding her face with her hands taken from belowMy writing practice has gone off the rails and getting back on track has been an enormous struggle. I am tired, and angry, and sad. Every day I wake up, look at my phone and greet the day’s tragedy or injustice. A bombing. A shooting. Another sexual predator exposed. Another assault on our democracy by Congress and this monstrous presidency. It’s exhausting. And I’m white, straight, cisgendered, and middle class and thus reasonably sheltered from the fallout. I’m one of the lucky ones.

Each day I try to write something meaningful, but most of the time I fail. My hard drive is littered with abandoned words. Once clear thoughts lost in a cloud of data. It feels more urgent than ever to write something, anything, in support of the resistance, but the news stories and the emotions they bring fly at me so fast that some days all I can manage to do is duck my head and scream “fuck you” into the void.

The demands of daily life are even more annoying than usual because I am more annoyed than usual. I find myself cursing at the piles of dirty laundry as I walk past them on the way to the kitchen in the morning. Once there I am greeted by my children’s shrieking. I haven’t even had a sip of coffee and they are talking over one another without stopping in a fierce battle for my attention. As I am prying their hands off the hem of my pajama top, my husband looks up from the newspaper (somehow he is able to read through all this chaos) to remind me that today is the Thanksgiving party at our son’s preschool, so I need to be there at 11:00. Feel my my chest tighten against my attempted cleansing breath as I silently wonder when I will ever have the time and mental space to write again. Every woman I know who struggles to jam writing into the cracks between a full time job and parenting has these moments. I am not special. I am so ordinary I start to feel meaningless.

Maybe all this is why I found Claire Dederer’s essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” so frustrating. I read the first two-thirds of the essay with great interest. She was grappling with an important question we are left with every time a man whose movies or writing or music we love is outed as a sexual predator. Dederer does this by examining her own previous love of Woody Allen films, a love soured by his predatory behavior towards his step daughter, and now wife, Soon-Yi. She seems genuinely angry at the men who tell her she has to view Allen’s films on their aesthetic value alone. She rejects her literary training that says the artist’s life has no bearing on his work.

Then the essay takes an unexpected turn and attempts to equate the monstrous behavior of men like Allen, Weinstein, Polanski, and Louis C.K. with the “monstrous selfishness” female artists have to display in order to finish their work. After telling us about a fellow writer and friend whose husband accuses her of abandoning him and the children to finish her latest short story, Dederer writes

My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That’s not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant. It might sound as though I’m conflating two things—male predators and female finishers—in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.

I expected what follows that paragraph to be an analysis of how our culture allows men a monstrous dominance and control over women—a dominance that ruins lives. I expected Dederer to point out that their monstrousness is protected and encouraged, while women are unjustly punished and called monsters for desiring any artistic creation of our own. We are monsters for spending our energy on ourselves instead of on the nurturing of husbands and children. We are monstrous for subverting male dominance instead of being subservient to it.

That would have been a satisfying ending to the essay, but instead she avoids the analysis and ends by saying we are no closer to answering the essay’s central question than we were when we started. In fact, she ends by emphasizing that maybe anyone who makes art is a monster to some degree. Think about that for a moment. Dederer ends an essay about what to do with the art left behind by monstrous men, like Roman Polanski who raped a 13 year old girl, with a flip philosophical observation that maybe we are all monsters. That maybe missing your kid’s piano recital to finish an essay is in the same moral category as raping children. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

It may seem like a cute literary party game to wonder if all art, all ambition, requires some level of monstrousness, but the stakes are too high to sit back and pretend that such philosophical musing is anything but patriarchal ideology hiding behind a thin veil of logic. The brave women outing sexual harassment and abuse by monstrous men are exposing that the world is, and always has been, a dangerous place for women. To turn the essay on women and say, “Well, maybe you’re monstrous too” is irresponsible writing and the height of gas lighting. This is the same sort of privileged writing on display in Richard Fausset’s NYT article about the well mannered Nazi next door in Ohio. Fausset claims his objective was to show how “normal” white supremacists can seem, but, as so many have pointed out, he failed because he did not then show how such monstrous racism, while it may be common (just like predatory sexual behavior), it is most definitely not normal—not something we should accept as part of a spectrum of human behavior or belief.

Behavior that is a threat to others must be thrown into relief because if everything is monstrous, then nothing is truly outside the bounds of acceptability. The violence and hatred that are the tools of white supremacist patriarchy require not the false logic of philosophical questions and detached journalism, but the white hot light of a cultural analysis that exposes its monstrousness for all to see.

Writing in traumatic times: Thoughts after one week in Trump’s America

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Ursula Le Guin’s viral quote from her speech at the 2014 National Book Awards has become the mantra for the writing group I belong to:

We will need writers who can remember freedom.

For many Americans, last Wednesday morning felt like the end of freedom. I know it felt that way for me. I tried to go about my daily routine. I took the kids to school, checked in with my clients, put the dishes away, brushed my teeth, but I did it all with a sense that there had been a fundamental shift in what it meant to be an American—that daily life was now just a thin veneer covering over a great rift valley. I cried a lot. When I finally sat down at my computer to work, I found myself on Facebook because that is where my friends were. We were all there compulsively reading and sharing every article we could find that might offer a way to make sense of Trump’s victory. And we kept asking one another the same question: What do we do now? In the days that followed, as the tears subsided and we turned toward collective action—rallies, protests, petitions, donations to progressive organizations—I kept going back to Le Guin’s quote and the advice my writing group leader gave the group the morning after the election:

We have to write through this.

Because there is no other way. Writing helps us make sense of a traumatic world. I began by reading the words of others. Then I wrote some of my own. I wrote angry screeds I didn’t share with anyone. I wrote comments on like-minded friends posts to work through my feelings and lend support. I read more articles. Then I began responding to comments on my posts that came from Trump supporters. If their comment indicated a desire for dialogue, I responded. If someone was hostile, I asked them to step off because, well, that guy who told me if I didn’t like Trump I was unAmerican and could get the hell out, well, fuck that guy. As I told him, every day of this presidential campaign I have been wearing my grandfather’s World War II Navy dog tags. I wear them to remind myself that he went to war to fight against the kind of fascist hate that Donald Trump represents. This is why our internment of Japanese Americans during the war is so painful for our nation to confront. It exposes our hypocrisy. At the exact moment we were fighting hate and xenophobia abroad we practiced it at home because we allowed our fears to rule our national policies.

My grandfather's World War two dog tags

Wearing his name around my neck also reminds me of a story he told me when I was young. My grandfather was the child of Italian immigrants. They were poor, and he went to work in the coal mines of Western Pennsylvania at age 13 to help provide for the family and worked there all his life. When he was an adult worker his mine hired a new foreman, a man from England. During this foreman’s first role call of his new workers, he called out my grandfather’s name. When he answered the foreman looked him up and down and said “Lamanna, huh? I hope your papers are in order.” To this my grandfather replied, “I was born here. I hope your papers are in order!” He was lucky he wasn’t fired on the spot. But the foreman knew the solidarity between the miners as workers was greater than their allegiance to their individual ethnic backgrounds. The Appalachian miners who had long roots in that region of the country were not going to abandon the immigrant miners and side with the bigoted foreman. I am not arguing that there were no bigots or xenophobes in that group. There were likely many. I’m arguing there is power in solidarity. Power when we recognize that when one of us is threatened, all of us are threatened. Whites who voted for Trump gave into their racism (because we all have it), their xenophobia, their fears, and abandoned their fellow Americans.

So no, I won’t get the hell out. Just because my family’s whiteness and citizenship is no longer questioned—because I had the privilege of assimilating, a privilege not extended to non-white, non-Christian immigrants, a privilege never extended to African Americans whose roots in America go back as far as any white person’s, a privilege Native Americans extended to white settlers who then betrayed that trust by systematically stripping indigenous communities of their rights and humanity—I will not use it as an escape route. I will not abandon those who are directly threatened by Trump’s America. I will stand with them in any way they ask me to. It is time for those of us who want to be white allies to start listening to the oppressed in this country. They must be our leaders in this fight.

Here are some things I am doing right now to get started.

Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

Dear White Reader, here is your weekend Beyoncé reading list

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Disclaimer

This wasn’t the post I planned to write this week. I was sick with the flu for half of January, and trying to catch up ever since. I wanted to write about how illness can impact one’s writing process. But because I feel compelled to write when I am angry and troubled about an issue—sometimes against my rational mind’s better judgement—I put that post away for later, and started writing what you see here.

I may not be the right person to make this argument. There are people out there with much bigger followings (really, if you have an online following at all you are ahead of me) whose blog posts could have a greater impact. But I’m writing anyway and here’s why: I know my friends and family will read this because I wrote it and they love me, and I know many of them would not read a post about race and racism if it were written by a stranger. If I only reach that small group, it will be worth it.

The Problem With Us White People

My Facebook news feed this week was filled with stories about two things:

  1. Bernie v. Hillary
  2. Beyoncé’s “Formation” video and Super Bowl half time performance

The fact that the political dialogue in my feed is mostly respectful I take as a sign I have chosen my Facebook hive mind well. The fact that my mostly white friends were sharing positive articles about Beyoncé overwhelmingly written by Black* people is a sign I have chosen a group of awesome antiracist allies as part of my friend group. But the fact that it is my white friends doing this reminds me that out of my 256 Facebook friends only seven of them are Black.

Seven. I counted.

This concerns me greatly because it’s evidence of how deeply segregated we are as a nation (myself included), and this segregation contributes to the ignorant conversations white America is having right now about Beyoncé, and overall about #blacklivesmatter, police brutality, affirmative action, and institutional racism.

Put simply, the vast majority of us (i.e., white people) don’t know what we’re talking about. Our knowledge of Black culture and the Black experience begins and ends with the entertainment industry, and when a Black entertainer reminds us they are Black we lose our minds. All white America can talk about after the Super Bowl halftime show is Beyoncé’s Blackness. Bruno Mars is Black too, but dear white reader, did you think about that at all this week? Probably not because he sang that song you like, danced with Coldplay, and left the field. I wish I were surprised so many white people freaked out started waving their racist arms in the air after the halftime show, but I’m not. That sort of reaction is typical.

What does surprise me is the white people who have said they didn’t notice the political message Beyoncé was sending. Some think it wasn’t there at all, that Beyoncé wouldn’t do something like that. Really? A dance troop of Black women in all-black military style outfits, wearing berets, sporting afros, getting into a giant X formation on the field, and you didn’t notice? That is serious ignorance of Black history or some serious denial. Probably both. I’m willing to bet the majority of white Beyoncé fans do not want to be reminded of her Blackness—they just want her to keep singing about all the single ladies. Being one of her fans as a white person is only easy and safe if we can erase her race from our consciousness.

Now, if you are a dyed in the wool Giuliani-loving #alllivesmatter supporter, and are planning a road trip to the upcoming anti-Beyoncé rally in front of the New York NFL offices, then nothing I say here is likely to change your mind. But, if you are confused by the video or don’t understand why Black people might be angry or don’t see the need for the Black Lives Matter movement because we are all post-racial now, then I hope you will read some of the articles below and reconsider your opinions.

The first time I watched “Formation” I recognized its rhetorical power. Sinking a New Orleans police car in the flood waters, police in riot gear surrendering to a black child—these messages are hard to miss. But I also knew there was a lot a was missing because I am not the primary audience. Beyoncé is not asking me to get in formation, to take action. That message is directed at Black women. She is asking me to STFU and listen. and read. and learn. So that’s what I did all week. And now I’m offering my reading list to you, dear white reader.

Note: If you read everything here, that is not license to claim you now understand Black America and are entitled to speak for and about Black people. As a white person, you will never be qualified to do that. Doing the work of reading and listening means you have a framework from which to ask questions and listen further. I hope you will STFU and join me in the quiet space necessary to create understanding.

Your Weekend Reading List

If you haven’t watched “Formation,” do that first. And if you somehow missed the Super Bowl halftime show you should do that too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Hgh7sPDLM

Next, read these articles that break down the lyrics and imagery in the video. The first three use humor, so you get a warm up before moving on to the heavy stuff. And follow the links in the articles, especially the ones in Zandria Robinson’s article—it’s crucial you know who Messy Mya is. After reading you might want to watch the video again.

Then read this message to racist white people written by fellow white person Melissa Hillman. She says everything I want to say, but way better.

Then watch Jessica Williams tell white people to STFU about Beyoncé because The Daily Show is where white people go when they want to get a privilege check, and because Jessica Williams is amazing.

Then read Awesomely Luvvie’s breakdown of why loving Blackness is more important than hurting white feelings and why you don’t get to say shit like white power and “all lives matter” because Black people use Black power and Black lives matter.

And after all that, if you want to read something that critiques Beyoncé to “get the other side of the story,” don’t listen to Giuliani and the other racist baiting asshats on Fox news. Try reading a critique written by an African American who is not questioning #blacklivesmatter but whether Beyonce is the spokesperson the movement needs. Here are three for you.

Ignorance, allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. James Baldwin

* My reasons for capitalizing Black and not white are similar to those of Melissa Hillman, but also include a desire to emphasize the centrality of Black people to these conversations: “No, capitalizing “Black” does not reveal a secret plot for racial superiority. Capitalizing the word “Black” in reference to people is a linguistic thing. “White people” has a squidgy definition and refers to a hodgepodge of people from varied ethnic groups, all of which are capitalized, such as “Celtic people” or “Swedish people.” “Black” as shorthand for “The people of the African Diaspora living in the United States” is rightly capitalized as “Black people” in the same way we say “French people.” “African American” is linguistically and historically troubled because “Africa” is a continent with thousands of disparate cultures, and the people we label as such were forcibly separated from most aspects of their cultures of origin when they got to the US, creating an entirely new, coherent culture best described as “Black.” Of course, the word as an ethnic descriptor has other applications (“Black people in Germany,” for example), but this is the one I’m using in the article. Not all linguists agree, but that’s my position.”

© 2017 by Carrie Lamanna Writing, LLC

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