A visceral exhaustion

Tamir Rice’s mother, Samaria, said after the grand jury’s decision in the slaying of her 12-year-old son that she was “mad as hell”. Pictures of the young boy smiling happily circulated for the months that followed, but little was done to assuage a grieving mother’s anguish. After Trump’s election win, writer and professor Junot Díaz offered some much needed advice on the heels of one of the country’s most disheartening November nights: radical hope is needed to survive the new administration.   

From the inception of the US, to today’s nuanced systemic and legislative issues, nothing could have prepared the freedom fighters, boycotters, protestors, or activists of the past for the challenges besetting them, but they managed to persevere. The issue rarely highlighted amidst today’s swarm of division and racism though is the palpable exhaustion stemming from fighting such bigotry and supremacy on a daily basis.

 As a high school teacher, the stress of such issues permeates my life from the linoleum laced hallways, all the way down to the desks my kids occupy several hours a day. They come with their questions, their uncertainties. They come with all manner of concerns and wonder whether or not Mr. Michel can soften the severity of those things out of all our control. The exhaustion felt at my level, at the grass roots, the level where teacher associations and on-campus organizations work doubly hard to combat systems of oppression, the fatigue experienced is crippling.

What amplifies the difficulty that comes with speaking out against confederate monuments or the way mass incarceration systemically disempowers communities of color, is gaining enough support. In order to have someone on our side, someone willing to say “perhaps Black Lives Matter is a good thing”, the language one uses must appeal to the masses—that is to say, it must be framed in the “common sense”. Bryan Proffitt of Durham’s Association of Educators led leadership training alongside Lisa McCool-Grime where they both relayed this message of framing conversations in that way. In order for there to be a general consensus legitimate enough to enact change, it must be easily accepted by a wide audience, making your task as a social activist, I found, to be increasingly challenging. 

These conversations take time—the conversations where you earnestly discuss police brutality and how it disproportionately targets poor Black and Brown community members, those take time. Additional time is needed in framing an argument digestible enough for someone on the fence about systemic racism with regard to community policing, thus exhausting your options and whatever energy you thought you were reserving for the real fight. So a compromise ensues; it no longer works to say “Black Lives Matter”, but rather “All Lives Matter”, thus deviating from the issue of systemic racism entirely.

What becomes overwhelmingly clear is that, somehow, there still needs to be more than just empirical evidence in the form of something suitable to the reality of, say, confederate monument supporters or gun rights lobbyists. Tamir Rice’s body was not evidence enough. Charlottesville’s neo-Nazi and white supremacist resurgence was not evidence enough. Athlete’s being demeaned and threatened by owners and coaches exercising slave owner mentalities is still not a clear indicator as to why we kneel. Somehow, in a country fraught with advancements that would stun the mind of any founding father, we are still wholly unwilling to accept that there resides in our foundation deep seeded prejudice, discrimination, and supremacy, even when major systems and institutions blatantly conduct themselves like 19th century auction blocks. Compromising the language necessary to promote progressive discourse is an act of systemic oppression, whether you think so or not. If oppression is truly a phenomenon steeped in the experiential, then the plight of Black and Brown communities will continue to be a thing beyond those unwilling to acknowledge it. 

Jamal Michel is a Duke graduate and an English teacher at Northern High School. His column runs on alternate Fridays.