http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW1ZDIXiuS4
Oscar Grant Shooting
http://youtu.be/S0P8TSP2YJU?t=1m2s
The commonalities between these two men is that 1) both were victims of racial prejudice, victim of civil rights violation, and police brutality, 2) both were widely media circulated: amateur videotape received widespread circulation and amateur video phone recordings widely circulated through youtube, the press, and other online video hosting websites; 3) and lastly, these men became symbols which resulted in demonstrations, followed by violent rioting that resulted in destruction of property, looting, and largely arrested demonstrators. The difference is that these incidents are almost ten years apart, King 1992 and Grant 2009.
This narrative is not new. Other largely media circulated deaths of Black men that brutalized or killed and were unjustly tried in court is not new, Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin. As W.E.B Du Bois states that Baldwin reiterates within his essay, The Fire Next Time, is that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line (378)", and this problem creates and recreates the "new" Negro. "And therefore when the country speaks of a "new" Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, which, in any case, it is quite incapable of assessing, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place, to the fact that it encounters him (again! again!) barring yet another door to its spiritual and social ease (370)." This is how these narratives keep repeating. The problem is not resolved, because the tactics are reused except in different forms and visages. In the choreopoem play, for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much, the repetition of the line, niggas are numbers, understands the same narrative that progression tries to erase, African slaves as chattle, numbers, those who were murdered by lynch mobs, numbers, those who have been wrongly imprisioned, beaten, and killed, numbers. Names, Till, King, Grant, Martin, the opposite of the multicultural lens, forages these names in order to recreate a history and build a narrative in which maybe one day there maybe a "new" Negro.
No comments:
Post a Comment