SOLSC5: Black Lives Matter on the Street Corner

From June into November 2020 in my upper Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights, there was a daily demonstration, prompted by the killing of George Floyd, to support Black lives. Anywhere from 12 to 25 people were at the corners of 111th and Broadway, with handmade or custom designed signs — “HONK IF YOU SUPPORT BLACK LIVES,” “RACISM IS A PANDEMIC TOO,” etc. — and so many appreciative honks from passing cars, trucks, and buses that some with small children needing to be put to sleep in buildings overlooking our corner complained.

            After the election, on the day Biden was declared the winner, there was a spontaneous gathering of a couple hundred people at the intersection where we had stood. But the daily demonstrators dissipated. However, a few of us knew the issue of Black lives and police accountability persisted, so we have continued to stand at our corner, for 15 minutes every Saturday, for the past almost year and a half. That’s where I was today, with three other women — there’ve been as many as nine, as few as two. The wind felt arctic, though the air temperature was over 40.

            We get honks, and sometimes disparaging comments from passersby. The latter are why we have to be out there.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 5 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

 

Poem a Day, #20 (across the sea)

Across the Sea

Two ships sail west across the Atlantic.

The first carries what the shipowners call "cargo," men, women, children stolen from their homes and turned into property, a notion propped up by the shipowners' religion.

The second carries passengers, many escapees from empires Russian, Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, men, women, children fleeing pogroms, poverty, hatred for their religion, hatred embedded in a religion descended from theirs.

The first ship carries "slaves," a word for people forcibly bought and sold, who some history books tell us had a better life in the United States than in their "primitive," "warlike" villages back home, who other history books tell us came from civilizations older than Europe's.

The second ship carries "immigrants," a word for people voluntarily leaving their homes to, as history books tell us, "seek a better life."

The people on the first ship have skin colors from brown to black. Their "owners," with their paler skin, assign them a different "race" to justify their "ownership" of these human beings.

The people on the second ship have skin colors from pale to tan. They have different religions, come from different countries, but the pale "natives" assign them many "races" to justify keeping them outside the privileges of those who came here earlier.

The passengers on the second ship are greeted in New York Harbor by a statue whose inscription welcomes the "tired," the "poor," the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

The statue does not welcome the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free on the first ship. The statue did not exist when their ship sailed into New York Harbor. When the ships ceased to sail west with their human "cargo," the people consigned to slavery continued to bear children, still called property by their "owners."

A great war ends the institution of slavery, but many of the people freed are kept enslaved by terror and their former owners' power and "tradition."

The children and grandchildren of the people on the second ship melt into the privilege of whiteness even if they do not acquire the privilege of wealth. The melting pot absorbs their culture and heritage and turns it into novelty.

The children and grandchildren of the people on the first ship, as people of color, are not allowed to melt into whiteness, although some do acquire the privilege of wealth.

Some unknown number whose lightness of skin does allow them to melt in, melt at the cost of losing their families of color and their heritage and culture.

Two ships sail west across the Atlantic, the skin color of their human cargoes imposing vastly different futures by forces beyond their control.

  http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_carriage.png

This feels a bit labored to me, like maybe it should be an essay rather than a poem. I don't know.

Slice of Life, #18

            Yesterday, through the wonders of the Internet, I watched about an hour of political commentary on Israeli TV, i24. I’d become interested in that country’s elections since Netanyahu used the U.S. Congress as a prop in his campaign, to divert Israeli voters from their economic problems and widening inequality.

            I don’t think often about being Jewish; I’m not religious, and while my parents tried to give me some Jewish culture, sending me to an after-school secular Yiddish shul, all I remember is what some of the letters look like. Periodically, I tried to understand the Middle East conflict, and sensed that settlements in land occupied after the 1967 war were not a good sign. In the 2000s I sometimes joined a Women in Black vigil in sympathy with the Jewish and Palestinian Women in Black and against the occupation.

            I’m not a Zionist either. My parents were leftists and not nationalist. The Jewish “homeland” my father told me about was Birobidzhan, an “autonomous region” the Soviets set aside for Jewish Communists in far eastern Siberia, bordering China. (Did the Russian Communists think they could solve their “Jewish problem” by getting all the Russian Jews to move as far away as possible?)

            Watching another country’s election is fascinating, especially when the system is so different from ours. The program on i24 had a woman host and four male pundits whose names didn’t register since I don’t really follow Israeli politics. Here’s what I learned from just that brief dip.

            1. Racism in Israel is complicated, not only Jews against Arabs but also Ashkenazi Jews (those from Europe) against Sephardim (those from the Middle East). Alas, it’s skin color again. Netanyahu blatantly appealed to the first kind when he said, on election day, that Arab Israelis were voting in hordes and his right wing was in danger. But some commentators thought Netanyahu’s opposition, Labor, with its Ashkenazi roots, had failed to be inclusive of Sephardim, and I find that very disquieting.

            2. Because Israel has a parliamentary system, there are multiple parties, 10 in fact. I was engrossed listening to the pundits add up the various possible combinations to form a coalition that the heads of the two parties with the most seats projected to win, but each far from a majority, would need. Would American politics be any less dysfunctional if there were separate parties for all the factions within our current Democrats and Republicans? Maybe, maybe not.