Calea Confusion

You know what? Your criticism is very, very, very premature.  You need to get out of your 1960s old-school activist mode and realize that there are *many* more ways to organise, educate and mobilize people around an issue.  And though the political meme has limited utility, it may not be limited for the reason you feel it is.  And you know what as well? You need to step back and ask yourself why you are being so possessive of the tragedy, and how people are mobilizing around Trayvon Martin.  Do you think that, somehow, YOU have the answer and you should have been the one to call the shots?  Well, anti-racist work comes in various ways.  Why don’t you consider HOW the political meme could be put to anti-racist ends? Huh?  I’ll take this column as your “late night update”, and move right along.

What a surprise that a flamewar broke out on Twitter!  (Isn’t that its major function?)  Flame on!

This is a terrific analysis of the limits of social media w/r/t political action.  Nothing has illustrated this more clearly in the past few years than Arab Spring and the Occupy movement.  Social media was clearly key to communications and news freely traveling among the activists, but you have to put the bodies in the streets.  Bodies in the streets still get lots of old media coverage on the teevee and in newspapers, and that’s what seems to move the dial on public opinion.  One-click activism is unimportant because it requires no sacrifice or effort.

Well said.  Maybe there needs to be some simplification to get people in agreement and moving, but at some point there also needs to be some recognition of the complexities of the situation (none of which in any way excuse Zimmerman’s actions; leaving aside the question of his motives and misjudgments, even if the law allowed him to pursue Martin, he had a moral duty to take the course that would lead to the least danger for anyone involved, and in this case that meant alerting the police if he thought there was a problem and then stepping back and letting them do their jobs, which would still have put Martin in an unfair position, but probably would have left him alive).  

I haven’t been on facebook today, but the phrase that has been getting to me today in the news reports is people’s declaration that they want to “support Trayvon Martin.”  They can’t.  He’s dead. They can lend moral support to his family and friends, and put pressure on the authorities to make sure his killer is prosecuted, and try to figure out what changes in laws, attitudes, etc., etc. might prevent a similar incident in the future, but the bottom line is that nothing — including wearing the right “gear,” as you would to support an athletic team –  is going to bring the unique, irreplaceable person who died last month back.  That needs to be acknowledged, lest the feel-good aspects of protesting overcome the deadly seriousness, and the frightening intractability, of the issue. 

Welcome to Tenured Radical.

One distinction I would ask you to make would be between criticism and critique.  Nobody who protests racist violence, for any reason and in any fashion, is ever wrong to do so.  And I don’t think that I imply that internet mobilization in and of itself is wrong-headed.  My concern is the ease with which people can sign on (or in) to politics without ever having to do the further analysis — or create personal or structural changes — that might work to prevent violence in the future.  My concern is not whether empathy can lead to politics (it can) but rather the Facebooky “I feel….therefore I have taken political action.”  This, I think, is the derailing mechanism of the fetish.  It provokes reactive outrage, rather than a steady analysis that leads to coalition building and long-term change.

And I’m not a 1960s style organizer (I was a child in the 1960s), but why would you trash a group of people who accomplished so much?

Because at some point I linked my FB updates to twitter, and I’ve been too effen lazy to go back and change it.

That would be a great title for a book.

But see, my heart agrees with you — and my head does not.   These oppressions are not equal, and we don’t share them equally.  And although a blog comment is not a place to hold people to exact language, you write: “crazy people can get laws passed like Stand Your Ground….” They are not crazy people.  “They” are the gun lobby, and politicians who promote and mobilize white fear to help sell guns, and consolidate their power through the various industries that support violence (prisons) and the privatization of institutions that once promoted democracy (schools, universities.) And until we get it that these things are structural and rational, not a problem to which empathy is the ultimate answer, we can’t organize effectively against them.

Because just as no one can wear Treyvon’s hoodie, no one can walk in George Zimmerman’s shoes either.

There’s a difference between Lebron James donning a hoodie to make a statement and a bunch of white people doing the same thing, and there’s a difference between how Lebron James “feels” when doing so and how a bunch of white people feel.

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Zimmerman’s fatal attack on Martin was, like lynchings a century ago, aided and abetted by the police of Sanford, who had judged the shooting to be lawful

Claire,
     I am appalled at the lack of common sense  in the comment above.  Several investigations are ongoing in an attempt to understand what happened between these two guys.  There is certainly evidence that Zimmerman was under attack.  I don’t know if the full truth will ever be known but for you to equate this to a lynching without knowing the facts, is such a stretch that I feel badly for your students.  Do you insist that all your students mouth far left beliefs to get a passing grade?  Are your classes solely indoctrination or places of honest discussion, where different viewpoints are considered?   I read your prior note on your time as an undergraduate, and thought you were a probably a good teacher.  After the comment above, I wonder.

-Jonah

I think your alphabetical points are fair and worth making. It would be interesting to see a more detailed explication of how this case is “lodged in capitalism.” But the symbol of the hoodie does not preclude a deeper analysis. And so your cynicism about the movement is deeply misguided.

What scientific data do you have that the Trayvon meme generates only thoughtless complacency? In fact, symbols like the hoodie can facilitate an empathetic outrage, a new consciousness, a new solidarity. This solidarity in turn mobilizes disparate constituencies and lays the groundwork for future action. For many of us, moreover, this is an emotional, traumatic event, and wearing the symbolic hoodie is the best way for us to express our outrage. It has helped bring our narratives of racial abuse into the public sphere. This what we mean when we say that we are Trayvon Martin.

So, respectfully, perhaps it is you who is “fetishizing” the hoodie – investing it with a power and a purpose that is not there. Even your casual use of the term “fetish,” a term invented by paternalist colonizers to describe the religion of “primitive” people, makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Well, I guess you’ll have to keep on wondering how much my students suffer from my lack of common sense and tremble and the effort to recall my far left beliefs so that they can recite them properly. Or come sit in my classroom and find out.

Do you know anything about the history of lynching? I do, a lot actually, and the resemblances are remarkable, particularly in the way citizens have been empowered, and encouraged, to exert lethal force without any kind of due process. Another resemblance is the reluctance of the police to collect evidence or investigate until long after the fact: we know a great deal about that. Of course in the old days, when white people sometimes wore sheets to do this kind of thing, there were police under those white “hoodies.” That would be a difference.

Claire,
    Here are the facts as I understand them:

a)  Zimmerman called the police to alert them that he saw someone he regarded as suspicious – this is not something a person would do if he intended harm.
b)  Zimmerman was told by the police to wait for them and not follow the person  - Zimmerman apparently ignored that advice.
c) Zimmerman had a broken nose and grass stains on the *back* of his jacket, which would indicate at some point in the confrontation he was being hurt.

   This was a ‘meeting’ of two young men, with few or no witnesses  - equating this to a lynching is just hyperbole, which is standard MO from the left.  Why not let the investigations continue and see what they find before jumping to conclusions?   

    Your comment is a vanilla left-wing assessment, not something I would expect from the woman who wrote the prior blog about your college days, which I enjoyed,  or a professor of history.  I would hope your standards for deciding guilt would require significantly more evidence, not just a knee jerk piling on so typical in the left-wing media today (as does the right-wing media when the situation presents them the opportunity).

-Jonah

You are correct I’ve never studied the details of lynching as you have but a), b) and c) above are facts that have been in the media.  And, yes, the post was really about something else but I was surprised at how you jumped to a conclusion that seemed unwarranted by the facts.

Well, I see you can end the conversation by not allowing me to do a direct reply – amazing how these things work :-)   Oh, well, it is your blog so you should be able to have some control of the conversation.

Have a nice evening ……….

-Jonah

I put up a hoodie picture, not to ‘become’ Treyvon, but because I was highly offended by Geraldo saying that an article of clothing makes you a target. A piece of fabric should in no way lead you to be raped, murdered or beaten. I’m tired of the ‘He/she was asking for it.” argument. We have to stand up and proclaim that this line of thinking is not acceptable.

This is a fascinating inquiry into the limits of branding and memes as tools of social and political activism and about intercultural/interracial identification-related issues.   An important element in this story is that the march itself was organized by people of color–people from Take Back the Bronx and the OWS People of Color caucus–and with the backing of the Martin family, who spoke in the event.  Interestingly, there has been a lot of criticism against white-looking persons thought to be associated with OWS because they did not wear hoodies and kept on chanting and yelling against police brutality and Wall Street, essentially ignoring and disrespecting the march.  

In the end, reducing the Trayvon Martin tragedy to the hoodie signifier is problematic, like any form of iconic branding it erases–in and of itself–the specificity and complexity of the issue at hand.    But I do wonder if  the act of “donning the hoodie” inherently obscures these issues and if people are not a bit more self-conscious about this, especially in the hyper-performative world of the Interwebs.  Is wearing the hoodie necessarily an act that expresses “we are all Trayvon Martin”?  Also, I am not so sure about the argument that states that LeBron James can don it and a white person can’t.  In this increasingly multiracial social order things are more complicated, many of us have family members who are at high risk of going through similar experiences of  state-sponsored violence. 

The Carr piece arrives at the opposite conclusion from your own about the potential of the netroots…I’m not saying we have to accept the phenomenon uncritically. But armchair cynicism about a “false collective fantasy” helps no one.

And just because some white dudes applied racist terminology to other white dudes does not divest it of its connotations. If white folk get to deconstruct the hoodie, surely we can ask white folk to think harder about the unconscious implications of their terminology.

Thanks, by the way, for this productive exchange. Respect!

While I agree with your premise that memes aren’t effective in combatting societal evils, I have some bad news for you: Neither is writing logically and rationally.

We are all doomed.

I agree with Dr. Potter that we are not, and should not claim to be, Trayvon Martin. That in no way deters us from saying that we stand with his family and his community in solidarity. We are not Trayvon Martin, but we stand with and for Trayvon Martin. 

 ”interpretations you are making, and framing as facts, that I think are wrong-headed”

Claire, would you illustrate this distinction for us?  How are these points made by Jonah not facts?  Of what do you find these points to be interpretations?  I’m assuming you see them as interpretations of the real facts.  Would you tell us what the real facts are, if Jonah’s points are wrong headed?  I was under the same impression as Jonah about this.  How have we been wrong-headed?

”
 identify with Mr. Zimmerman? ” ?????

frayedcat,

   Where did you get that idea?   I only pointed out that equating this to lynching before the facts were known is unwarranted.  This is especially true since the facts that are known seem to imply that Zimmerman was defending himself.

This is a provocative analysis, and thanks for it.  Please do consider the power of the hoodie narrative in the lives of the poor and under-educated.  In my city, Hartford, CT, about 60% of the population (and I’m sure it’s lower for black and latino residents) have a high-school education.  Your analysis makes no sense to them what-so-ever (these are harsh words, I know, but let’s not play games and ignore the reality of illiteracy and lack of basic reading/analytic skills in poor neighborhoods).  What does make sense is a narrative the residents can relate to.  From that narrative, and the continuation and passing on of the narrative, a larger movement (and I’m convinced of this) will grow.  History reveals the power of the narrative in the Civil Rights movement.  It gives people something to grasp onto, to understand, to pass along (and that is key) and grow from.  Theoretical analysis does not.  There will be a rally in Hartford this weekend, featuring religious and community leaders (grass-roots).  I believe the narrative of the hoodie will increase turn-out, especially among those who would not be aware or otherwise motivated to attend.  Hopefully, this rally will increase the power of the narrative and begin to include an analysis of the type you so rightfully argue for.  But if we want action from the people on the ground – the marginalized in particular – a “simple” narrative is a start, and I think a pretty good one.

Thanks for posting this video: I love it. One of the things it raises for me is the need for addressing the question: What social media? And social media that does what? It seems to me that this video both addresses the specificity of what happened to Martin, but embeds it in the larger problem in an effective, accessible way.

I have mixed feelings about the hoodie meme. On the one hand, I think a lot of folks are posting pictures without giving it a lot of thought.  On the other hand, I find it encouraging that so many people have heard the story and at this moment, they are becoming aware of racial profiling when they hadn’t given it much thought before. Yes, they are coming to this realization very very late, but let’s not squander the opportunity to keep the public dialogue going.

@barnpolycarp: Good for you. There seems to be a trend among elite white people (purely anecdotal here, since I happen to know a lot of elite white people) of blaming Hispanics/Latinos as the main source of racism in American society. Of course, this is nothing new. Elite white people will blame everybody except themselves for social problems. The scapegoating of working-class white ethnic people goes back many decades.

Just to say:  this blog post says nothing about Zimmerman’s Latino heritage. So how is that scapegoating him for being Latino?
 

TR; Oh, please.

I said the anti-Hispanic stuff was purely anecdotal. It is. The history hasn’t been written yet…but it will be. The other things I discussed are not in doubt, at least not by any serious person. Here are a couple of examples, summarized from all accounts of the situations discussed that were not completely biased:

Elite white view of the Boston busing crisis: “Let’s blame all of this on the Irish white trash and their primitive racism. We were trying to do something nice for black people, but they screwed it up. Never mind that we all send our kids to private schools.”

Elite white view of Ocean Hill/Brownsville: “Let’s blame all of this on the Jewish white trash. Never mind that they just wanted to keep their jobs. Anyway, our Jewish friends agree with us, because they are just as elite as we are and moved out to the suburbs. They therefore never had to deal with the plight of Jews who didn’t have enough money to move. Long live the ultimate elite white person – John Lindsay!!”