The Unknown Brown
I am a reluctant writer. My interests are food, fantasy and history; which as I discussed with a friend, would make an interesting blog for about an audience of one. Politics pushes me to write, but I am disillusioned with the media’s current call-and-response dynamic that engaging with the Trump-era news cycle requires. By all appearances, keeping up looks exhausting.
I know the topics I favor, but in trying to find my voice I am forced to look deeper and think about why and what about me draws me to those interests. Food, gardening and hosting is because I like to nurture, to grow and develop and enjoy the reaction of delivering satisfaction to others. Fantasy, whether it’s high Tolkien lore, comics or movies helps to mythologize the world, easy moral explainers and blueprints on how to live a good life. I obsessively read fantasy novels and comics in my formative years and played out being the hero, seizing the mythic sword, slaying the villain.
In reality, history is the ultimate explainer of how we got here. A knowledge or care of history, and other people’s history is the ultimate test of thoughtfulness. The Universe’s eyes didn’t open the day I was born to coincide with mine, and the winding coincidental and often miraculous path fate dictates, placed every person on this planet in the version of themselves they currently occupy.
This history can be writ large or small. The small are the stories I like to share about myself to others. Know me, and you know that I met my wife because a friend reached out to me and invited me to a UMD football tailgate when I was going through a particularly difficult period in my life. I was avoiding socializing and I was persistently ignoring his repeated phone calls while at Rugby practice off-campus. On my way home he ambushed me at the main interchange in College Park, and after demanding I leave for the tailgate with him, I asked him what he was even doing out here on the street? His explanation was, “I knew you were ignoring my calls, and either you were going to leave practice and go on to campus or you were going to walk home, so I stood here on a bench waiting for you to walk by so I knew I wouldn’t miss you.”
I went to the game, met my future wife (as a side note, he had invited her as a date and I clearly sabotaged that) and twelve years later here I am writing on my laptop during my shelter-in-place “office time” while her and my two daughters garden outside and prepare to watch the Space-X rocket launch this evening. If anything had gone different, I changed paths or ran into the wrong person or even my friend’s persistence to help me had wavered, this moment, my marriage, my children, would be vapor; boats passing in the night miles apart.
The large with a capital-H History can help you understand the visceral bombardment the world can present to us at any moment. My head has been spinning for weeks, like most, due to the pandemic, but also by trying to reckon with the hideous idea that even during a period of general lock-down, a lock-down that could “solve” school shootings (no open schools to target), chip away at global warming (less cars polluting), that the unrelenting churn of the state and societies victimizing and killing of black people can continue unperturbed.
Oddly, my brain calls back to a previous Trump era scandal, seemingly eons ago now, when he characterized Haiti, El Salvador and Africa as “shithole countries”. How could he? I thought at the time. I had to assume his ignorance is absolute, and I couldn’t expect him to know much about Haiti, the first country in Latin America to win it’s independence. The first and only successful slave revolt in the history of the world, period. First America, then Haiti. With America doing it’s best to suppress the free-thinking, independence-minded movement in Haiti and instead choosing to back the slave masters as they worried the “revolutionary spirit” would spread to American slaves soon after.
And this treatment of Haiti continued unperturbed by the world’s changing sentiment and liberalized thinking towards slavery. The world and France didn’t recognize the Haitian republic until they paid them back for the “stolen property” of the slaves they lost for the transgression of transmogrifying themselves, through war, into free people. And that it took decades after that for the USA to recognize them, and to do so, and then shortly after invade and seize the gold in their federal reserves to haul back to Citibank (yes that Citibank) for the debt they accrued trying to pay France for their own bodies.
And America is a country that builds statues of confederate traitors, and Haiti a country that builds statues of unknown slaves (Le Marron Inconnu —The Unknown Brown) because, in Haiti, slaves are soldiers.
“Shithole Countries”… some history.
The past few most recent chapters of American racism and brutality towards black people have had the same jarring disharmony with history. Anyone with the lights turned on upstairs can watch the Ahmed Aubrey video and blink and see what a video of a lynching must have looked and sounded like during the reign of white terror during the early nineteenth century. Or listened to Amanda Coopers feigned vocal affect and insistence on an “African American man” having threatened her and have wondered how the world would be different if we had a video of Emmett Till’s accuser when she reported him to the authorities.
Or watched a cop crush a now-dead black man’s throat under his knee and not need a historical comparison to judge it against.
As a white person in America, and as part of my own personal edifying, I can tell small stories of whimsy that explain how I got here, how I met my wife, how I chose my major or fell into my career path. What I can’t do is tell a story where I am a chance encounter, a turn down the wrong street, a conversation with the wrong person or cop away from acceptable obliteration. What a privilege this is.
This reality of “serendipitous whiteness” is not in the dustbin of History, and as James Baldwin famously wrote, I don’t think we can claim, like he has for his people, that we are a people of “unassailable and monumental dignity” as long as we are “in effect still trapped in a history which [we] do not understand and until [we] understand it, [we]cannot be released from it.”