Our Global Spring: ArtsEtc Editor Linda M. Deane (right) and her children, Andy and Izora, march in Bridgetown June 13, 2020, for what matters. Since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers May 25, 2020, many worldwide have been protesting against social and economic injustice. Photo Copyright © 2020 by Sharon Hurley Hall.
THERE ISN'T MUCH that lures my son from his FIFA games and Call of Duty. Mealtimes, a real-life game of football, or training (when he went to training.) That’s pretty much it. Until May 25.
The day after the world watched George Floyd breathe his last breath, I stood in my kitchen talking with my children for more than an hour. Andy, my son, chose that moment to reveal that, during his five years as a student-athlete in the United States, he had three run-ins with the police. That’s pretty good going. He got off light. It could have been a lot more, but that is still three too many. One is too many.
In each instance, he was able to distract and disarm those cops with his British passport and his accent—a mash-up of Bajan and urban black-Brit. Andy also has a certain demeanour. He is cool-headed, cool-spoken and, generally, laid-back (except when playing FIFA or COD.) We joke in our house that if he was any more laid-back, he’d be horizontal. It remains a source of pleasant mystery to me that he was a multiple Missouri Valley 200-metre and 400-metre champion and Illinois State Male Athlete of the Year (2017-2018). Where did that drive come from?
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The first run-in occurred in his second year while he lived on campus. Picture it. Anderson Devonish, age 21, in his room blasting music. Knock-knock. Two police officers at the door investigating a complaint from the apartment opposite: reports of someone shining a red laser beam into a bedroom window. The police wanted to search my son’s room. Andy knew straight away the complaint was about the guy in the dorm room next to his (a white student who was not home at the time), but in a quick bit of risk assessment he chose not to rat out his neighbour; neither did he protest his innocence, feeling that to do so would have amped up the situation. He allowed the officers in. While one cop flipped his bedroom upside down to find nothing, the other flipped through his passport, his face betraying confusion at its contents and at its owner’s un-American blackness. They left. The next day, Andy let his neighbour know exactly what had gone down.
The second and third encounters involved traffic stops. On both occasions, Andy was the passenger, and the driver a black American friend and teammate. They were to and from a track meet or elsewhere on pleasure out of state. Among the reasons given for one of those stops was “too many car fresheners in the front windshield.”
“Mum,” he told me, “I found out it makes a huge difference who you’re with when these things happen.” His teammate, a smooth fast talker, was a cool head also, but that did not save him from being hauled out of the car and away to be interrogated by one cop while Andy remained in the passenger seat to, again, confound authorities with his speech pattern and travel documents (the latter unreadable, apparently, by police scanners). There were other friends and athletes in the back of the car, some with less calm or clear heads, the second time traffic cops stopped them. Andy’s foreign privilege and his driver-friend’s cool head helped keep a lid on the situation, too, but they shouldn’t have had to work that hard.
I listened to my son’s stories with hand over mouth, the air drying out my eyeballs, and immediately embarked on five years’ backdated worry. And real-time worry. It wasn’t that I’d never imagined he might have such misadventures, particularly after Trump came to power. Just before he left for the States in 2013, a year after Trayvon Martin’s killing, I expressed my fears and offered motherly advice in a very personal essay that, sad to say, is in no way dated seven years on. I’d given him “The Talk” and he’d been nonchalant: “Yeah, yeah, Mum...it’s cool. I’m good.” I’d derived an uneasy reassurance from that, telling myself that because he never mentioned any incidents of a racial nature or involving the police, he’d never had any. Truth is he just hadn’t wanted to alarm his parents over 2,500 miles away; he thought to protect us even as we sought to protect him.
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"The day after the world watched
George Floyd breathe his last breath,
I stood in my kitchen talking with my children"
I could relate.
There is so much I withheld from my own parents when I returned to live and work in England in the 1980s, and when I lived in the States. I never had any direct run-ins with the police, but I had plenty of encounters where I felt racially affronted or threatened.
What should I list? The times I was called nigger while going about my business? That’s no big deal! (Consider this vivid piece by multilingual author and blogger Sharon Hurley Hall in which she describes how it feels to be called the N-word in different languages.) Or how about that time on a coach from Birmingham to London: me, the only black passenger and a rowdy backseat of swastika’d, racial epithet-hurling neo-Nazis? Or the time a white work colleague announced she did not approve of quotas, and that I only got my PR job because of them? Then there’s the time I saw my good Jamaican friend Kathleen off at the bus stop after a visit: the bus came, she boarded, and a beer bottle went whizzing past my nose to smash against the window of the very seat she had taken. It had just been us and two white youths at that stop.
But all of that is your basic, run-of-the-mill, casual, everyday racism—weighty, yes, but tedious, almost, in the documenting; because it’s so commonplace. And there have been dubious and hurtful incidents here in Barbados—dubious because I’m not sure they happened because I’m black or because I’m black with locks; hurtful because some of the treatment I’ve received was meted out by fellow black Bajans. There are more such incidents—including the time in Malta, visiting for a friend’s wedding, when a man approached me gesticulating and demanding something. He assumed (I was later informed) that, because I was black, I was a prostitute. I've attempted to unpack that delightful last nugget in a #MeToo essay I’m still trying to write and which I fear I never will: ultimately, I believe I was a victim of racism, and not sexism, outside that Maltese waterfront hotel that day.
I eventually told my parents about these and other incidents, because...you do. But the experiences I held back from really sharing happened during my time as an exchange student in South Carolina—indeed, began my very first day there.
Again, picture it. August 1991. The USC faculty representative collected me and two other UK students from the airport and was giving us a guided tour through the capital Columbia en route to the university campus. We drove by the state house, and there, on the green, green lawns, was a Civil War re-enactment in full throe. Confederate flags and insignia all ’bout the place! Yes, y’all. A real Southern welcome! It’s still a scar on my consciousness, and I often conflate it with another incident later in the year when the Klan itself marched through the town. In writing this, I recall more minor details, like the Confederate flag on the neighbour’s front door in the international halls of residence where I lived. I witnessed and felt the hostility of white American students in the wake of the 1992 riots following the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers on brutality charges in the Rodney King case. And, bizarrely, there was the white student (English) who asked if she would be safe at a black church I had invited her to; and another, a French exchange student, again with the knock-knock at the door after spring break to grandly report that her trip by Greyhound bus, on which she’d been the sole white person, had passed uneventfully and even amicably. Oh, and there was the time I arrived at a Halloween party in the Carolina sticks to find white guests in blackface (they were depicting Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill). Yup, it was a colourful time.
More than once during my year abroad I asked myself, Linda, what the hell are you doing here—besides pursuing Year Two of a Comparative American Studies degree? At times I wanted to let my mother know what was going on. I know that, had she known, she would have been on the first flight out of Barbados on a rescue mission. I didn’t tell her these stories until a year or so after I graduated.
In my kitchen last week, then, I fully understood why I was only now finding out about my son’s experiences.
He graduated in 2018 and has been home since January this year. After he’d been back about six weeks and the sheen had worn off, I wondered and fretted at his presence: all he does, or seems to do, is eat, sleep and play video games, remember? But then coronavirus and lockdown struck. Botham Jean and Ahmaud Arbery were killed. Now George Floyd is dead, and America is ablaze in the summertime while a dangerous president does worse than nothing.
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I no longer question Andy’s extended homecoming. Instead, I give thanks for it every day. Give thanks he, as a young black man, is not in the United States. But I am also restless. As I write this, I recall my days of student activism. I marched and protested in England against the Gulf War (1990-1991), boycotted against apartheid, picketed the South African embassy in London, and marched in the United States after the aforementioned King beating. Ironically, even as I gather my children about me and give thanks the family is under one roof, here—I wish I was there. A piece of me, my spirit, is there. In America. Marching, protesting, placard in hand, supporting, lending voice.
I feel a need to show solidarity with victims’ families and protesters beyond the writing of articles and poems, beyond the signing of online petitions, beyond posting blank screens for #blackout Tuesday, beyond, even, joining protests here in Bim.
I think the real contribution is conversation. Honest communication, real talk, face-to-face with our children, families, friends, and foes—black and white—and ourselves about the inability to breathe, the knee on the neck and the different ways we, in turn, can take a knee. The conversations aren’t easy. I felt exhausted after Andy’s kitchen revelations, not least because I never imagined that, in 2020, I’d be having discussions with him that I was having in 1993 before he was born. It took energy, too, relating his experiences to a friend who is white and to a relative who is a policeman.
Not talking about race and racism, and how to end it, is a false move, however. We protect no one and change nothing by remaining silent. Worse, we become part of the problem.
I was moved by visual artist Corrie Scott’s outpouring on Facebook about George Floyd’s killing, by her heart-wrench of anger, sorrow, shame, and the guilt she feels as a white woman. In the piece, she says she cannot imagine what black mothers go through.
I was moved to write this blogpost by something else on FB, this time by poet and spoken word artist Dempstu “DJ” Simmons, Jr, who sparked a loud echo of response with the call “It’s about....”
I am moved to say: It’s about time no one has to be imagining what black mothers go through; it’s about time black sons and daughters breathed easy.
