Another Mystery Model

Monday, June 8, 2020

Black Lives, White Privilege, Defunding Police, Systemic Racism

These are terrible times.
All the changes that we have been hoping for, all the meanness that has poisoned our lives: most of it has been led, and orchestrated, and perpetrated by white folk.  I'm not writing as a white person or a non-white person now; I'm just trying to be objective.  Most of the important leadership--both in the direction of progress, and in the direction of foolishness and wrongness--has been led by white folk.  It is as if only whites can do anything, accomplish anything, get any respect, stand for any office, be recognized as anything in our world.  It is not just that blacks get killed, often for nothing significant, for no serious offence.  In all my reading, I see the recognition everywhere that the entire system has been conceived to keep the balance of power in favor of whites.
Police forces were actually created to control blacks and former slaves.  A look at John Oliver's episode on The Police shows you memos, newspaper articles, laws, messages that make it clear that the whole intention of inventing police in the USA was to keep a foot on the heads of blacks who might be inspired to get a bit above themselves after the abolition of slavery.
Not all whites are aware of the original sin of the police forces across the country.  This, in turn, is an aspect of what black thinkers are calling White Privilege: the blissful ignorance of whites about the built-in handicaps against blacks in a society that has thus far been a white society.  This means that many whites, who we might call innocent, do not consider the de facto subjugation of blacks in US society as part of their background.  They have been oblivious to it, but suddenly now, in our generation, this fact has jumped forward into our consciousness.
This has happened in every generation, it seems.  And whites have succeeded, each time, to gradually forget it: for a while, everyone--whites and blacks alike--know that blacks can't get the same justice in a court of law as whites can.  But this is terrible knowledge, and it is human nature to try to forget it, and it is possible to forget it.
The police has been a pivotal agent in maintaining this systemic inequality.  This is why, in our present confluence of bizarre politics, imploding economics, catastrophic pandemics, disappearing health providers, and unbelievable death rates, and massive ignorance of basic science and hygiene, it is possible that something might happen to rock the police equation to the point at which something useful may happen.  Everyone, blacks, whites, hispanics, orientals, everyone, is looking at the police with disappointment.  Horror, anger, but also disappointment.

As an author, I too am guilty of only writing stories with a white point of view, with white protagonists, with white interests (classical music, etc), with practically no presence of black folk of any kind!  As such, I have no right to talk about blacks at all!  I hope any black folk reading this would not object to my use of the word 'black' in preference to 'African Americans', it seems that the latter is a clumsy euphemism, which I could bring myself to use if I was sure that it would be preferable to black folks.  I'm only too aware that often whites take it upon themselves to create what they think of as nice euphemisms on behalf of black folk.  In actual fact, it might just be another way for these white folk--however well-meaningly--to avoid their own discomfort!
I seem to have stopped discussing the politics of the day and moved on to Kay Hemlock Brown's fiction; I have little to say beyond what I have said already.  The number of blacks that I have made friends with have been few; not that I have consciously avoided mixing with blacks, but that my interests did not connect me up with a lot of blacks.  The few I did meet with were such that I was not even conscious of the fact that they were blacks.
There are a very few characters in my stories that are clearly black.  For no good reason, I'm going to talk about them.
In Music on The Galactic Voyager, Helen makes friends with a woman called Megan Barrows.  Megan is half black; her father Pete Barrows is black, and we meet him before we meet Megan.  As in all my stories (or most of them, anyway,) all the protagonists are people we would enjoy meeting, but Megan is particularly nice (for lack of a better word), and I'm proud to be her creator.  Now that I think of it, there were lots of people among the Dropouts who were black by implication, but I don't think that counts.
In Prisoner!, I introduce a couple of black healers, who are Maia's ardent supporters, and who conduct the heroes of the story to safety after a major military defeat.  They too are decent folk.
In Helen on the Run, I introduce a young student called Jerry, or Jerry the Alto!  I didn't make him obviously black, but in my mind, he was definitely black.
Finally--and this does not make any sense!--in my mind, the girl Jana, a Czech girl with whom Helen has an affair, has been becoming black, in my imagination.  Whenever she appears in a story, I imagine her being black, though of course there are no blacks in the Czech Republic, and certainly no Black Czechs who emigrate to the US in search of work.  Jana is a lovely person, but I have not included a lot of details about Jana in any of the books I published on Smashwords, because Helen's and Jana's relationship was at least half physical.

Kay

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