going to the restroom after a nice lunch

17 April 2010
7:15pm

Dear Mr. Davies,
I am a regular diner at the Crossroads Cafeteria, and I have always been treated with respect by the staff. At least 3 times a week, I find it a great place to study and eat. I am writing to tell you of an incident--apparently not the first-- that has forever soured me about this cafeteria and Cal Dining.
At approximately 1220 today, I was walking to use the restroom. I had finished my meal, dropped off my dishes in the dish room, and, to avoid the Cal-Day crowd of students and visiting families amassing at the exit, opted to go out of the dish room the way I had come in since there were no people entering the dish room at that moment.
I was walking up the stairs on my way to the restroom when Mr. David Campos, one of the managers, walked speedily up the ramp adjacent to the stairs, confronted me on the stairs, and, without asking any questions, said that he had seen me enter the cafeteria illegally. He demanded that I go stand in line or else he was calling the police. He seemed so certain of what he (thought that he) had seen that at first I didn't even think he was talking to me. I have often seen Mr. Campos around the cafeteria and attempted to say hello to him, and initially didn't figure him for one who would treat me with any disrespect. Also, because of the noise and the commotion of my fellow diners, I had not actually heard his question (a witness I talked with later confirmed for me that Mr. Campos had said, "Sir, you have to stand in line or else leave."). Giving Mr. Campos the benefit of the doubt, I asked him to repeat what he was asking me. He then gestured to the door and told me to just leave or he was going to call the police. I tried to calm the situation by asking him if he had me confused with someone else. I told him that I was just trying to go to the restroom. I told him calmly that I had already eaten. Each time he interrupted me before I could explain to him that I was there entirely legally. I tried one more time to signal gently to him that I was just going to the restroom. He blocked my path, pulled out his phone, and began dialing. I assumed that he was indeed dialing the police.
Even if he was not actually calling the police, I realized that he was clearly trying to intimidate me out of the cafeteria. I was more or less paralyzed as to my options. How do you reason with an unreasonable person who wields his authority wildly-- who goes from zero to calling-the-police with blinding speed-- and all in front of families who are forming their first impressions of Cal Dining? To make such a scene out of an uncertain--and ultimately wrong-- accusation struck me as the work of an irrational person. At that moment, it dawned on me that I was one of very few African American diners. It seemed to me, based on similar treatment I have endured in other places, that Mr. Campos had singled me out to be treated like a criminal, refused to hear me out, and proceeded to initiate my contact with the criminal justice system, based on little, if any (and wholly incorrect) evidence, because of my race. This is what ultimately made me decide that I had to take action. If I had been able to reason with Mr. Campos, even after those initial accusations, you wouldn't be reading this complaint. In a matter of nanoseconds he had threatened me with arrest, and inside of 20 seconds, he had begun the process of trying to have me arrested. Inside of 20 seconds, I had gone from being someone who has never had a problem with this cafeteria to someone will never come here again without thinking of how I was humiliated in front of people I know and how I almost got arrested for taking the most direct route I could find to the restroom. I don't think this is any kind of way to treat anyone-- an employee, co-worker, intern, or customer.
What saved me from Mr. Campos' imaginative accusation was that I remembered that my card had been scanned when I entered. I assumed that even if the greeter didn't remember my face, I might at least be able to get some kind of receipt to prove that I had paid. I told him I would go ask the greeter to prove that she had scanned my card. I pulled out my wallet, flashed the card his direction, and then began to go toward the greeter whom I hoped would treat me with even a modicum more of respect than Mr. Campos had. Mr. Campos saw my card. He put his phone away as quickly as he had drawn it. He walked away without apologizing to me in any way.
I decided I was not about to be intimidated out of a cafeteria that has until now been one of my favorite places. After finally being allowed to use the restroom, I informed Michael Laux of the incident, and he said he would address the situation. He gave me his card. I don't know if you have heard about this from other students before, but I understand that this is not the first time this has happened with Mr. Campos. I am writing to you to ask why this kind of behavior is apparently being tolerated, to inform you of this incident, and to ask what action you intend to take to make sure this doesn't happen again. Is this the behavior of an individual, or is such behavior actually systemically tolerated or even encouraged? I am going to be at UC Berkeley for at least another 4 years. There are lots of places I could spend my money for good food and a place to do some of my schoolwork. I do not intend to eat at a place where I have to be worried about being treated like a criminal. I am certainly prepared to adjust my dining environments in accordance with this need, as would any self-respecting individual.
Mr. Davies, you need to understand that Mr. Campos was totally out of control and not professional in his handling of this incident in any way. I'm sure that your managers must have advised him before now that a professional would have approached a customer of whom he was suspicious while remaining aware that (a) he might be wrong and (b) there are other customers around. Accusations risk alienating not only the customer one accuses but all the customers who can hear-- especially when threats of calling the police are being thrown about wildly. A professional might also have asked if a suspicious customer could prove that she or he had entered legally. After such proof was provided, a professional would issue a sincere apology. Of course, everyone, even a professional, makes occasional mistakes. At the least, Mr. Campos’s professionalism should have impelled him to issue even a small apology. That Mr. Campos was unapologetic is very telling about the kind of conduct Cal Dining tolerates from its managers. Mr. Campos's behavior was less like that of a professional and more like that of a predator or a prison guard. He pounced without thinking about the consequences of his behavior. Indeed, I consider such behavior unacceptable but unsurprising in a prison guard, but unacceptable and very surprising in a Cal Dining cafeteria manager. I sincerely hope that you will take immediate action to address this apparently repetitive problem.
Respectfully yours

An email unsent to a friend

This is an email that has been sitting in my Drafts box for months now. I ended up not sending it in response to my friend because I didn't want to damage our friendship.

We are in the privileged position in academia to think about blackness as a site of ontological negation, whereas other black people do not do so or cannot afford to do so except in really candid moments. What dynamics does this privilege and this disparity, combined with the particular project of researching antiblackness, introduce into relationships? How do we deal with the conservative and analogizing impulses on which friendship is built? Self acceptance is both a refusal to radically challenge certain elements of the status quo in oneself AND also fundamentally necessary to forming any relationship with other people. Analogic impulses are essential to empathy, but, with whom can we identify absent these impulses? Black folks? There are very few of us in academia, and I venture to say that many are not into viewing themselves as fungible objects.

Anyway, I'm sharing this response to a friend-- a response I never sent. I thought it might be helpful to think through how the labor of thinking about blackness as a site of ontological negation threatens, deepens, frames, reverses, interrupts the personal politics of friendships, relationships, and family.

In response to:
XXXXXXXXXXXX@XXXXXXXXXXX.XXXXXX wrote:
> Please view and distribute widely.
> http://vimeo.com/3658572
>
>> I decided to forward this video. It is something all young people of today
>> should see. They have no idea what the past and the struggles of the past
>> were all about. Just watch this, please....it is so full of the truth!
>> Feel free to pass along to those you think can help us make a difference in
>> our community as well as could benefit from this.



Hey, my friend.
hmm...thought provoking video. Many reactions to it. Thank you for sharing it.

I'm not sure I'd show it to young people I used to teach in LA schools, however, because it still ends up blaming black people-- in this case, for not taking individual responsibility for being close enough to Jesus. That's not what I want my students to learn, and yet that is implicitly how it explains our present condition. It's what Pat Robertson did when he said that Haitians are dying by the tens of thousands because they "signed a pact to the devil" in order to win the Haitian Revolution in 1804. (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pat+robertson+on+haiti&search_type=&aq=f)

Also, as a historian, I'm bothered by its early use of images of dreadlocked Jesus as the way that Africans "always had their god." Christianity was one of the modes through which blacks were made to "hate their black souls" and aspire to be white. It writes African animist faiths and Islam wholly out of the picture (not that those faiths weren't/aren't antiblack). But Christianity has been/is particularly antiblack and has consciously and unconsciously encouraged us to be so as well by depicting Satan as a "Dark Lord," even as it has acknowledged the error of explicitly depicting Jesus as Aryan.

(Check this article out: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/health/16skin.html?pagewanted=all)

Finally, there's so much that is right about the analysis that this sets up. It's great that it critiques the ways blacks have adopted the various names (especially "nigger" and "nigga") we have been given and have accepted. Basketball and the hip-hop industry, and the crabs-in-a-barrel mentality in the classroom and even the critique of gross materialism-- these are all on point.

But its "Lord of Darkness" has his timeline wrong. Black use of the term "nigger" to refer to other blacks is not a new thing, nor is it wholly separate from our acceptance of the other names we have accepted (like Ricks) or from the ways we are continually remade as black when white people do what they do. In other words, the history this filmmaker asks us to teach our children says that in the beginning, there were Africans who were kings and queens, then there was slavery when white people abused black people who stood meekly by, and then, somewhere around Richard Pryor's time, whites stopped doing it and black people took over and started doing it to themselves. Blacks today, for this filmmaker, are simply damaged goods who are doing it to themselves and the damage has been done. It is not done. The damaging continues. This very video participates in that damaging.

In line with the neoliberal doctrines that take oppression out of context (history, politics, etc) and place it squarely on the shoulders of the individual (as if that was how the oppression got there in the first place), this video operates schizophrenically by at once acknowledging that America was the devil's idea (the BEST part of this video, near the beginning) and then saying that blacks' blaming of whites and environment is counterproductive. Huh?

While it's true that blame is not a sustainable strategy, it is also true that no black politics can begin without acknowledging frankly and painfully the ways that whiteness and blackness remain linked as a damaging relationship. That is, in fact, all that they are. What would whiteness be if blackness wasn't a position of degradation? Whiteness is not a culture by any definition I know. Conversely, what would blackness be if whiteness wasn't a position of value and life? Blacks have many cultures-- southern US, Haitian, French, Ethiopian, Ghanaian, etc.

It's a bit too forgiving of the ways white power and antiblackness continues to operate. What it should do is work to politicize the people it calls degraded. It's not doing that.

on the Position Harnessed to Death (PhD)

a white woman in alabama
a harvard phd
bio
logist
just killed three other phds
two of them black

was there a
"racist motive"?

i don'tpretendtoknow
i pretendidon'tknow

i learn this yesterday
where i am now?
i have washed ashore
a hotel vista
where crashing waves against mansion-topped bluffs
ease seamlessly with the soaring shrill of mcdonnell-douglas f14 fighter jets

an academic wine party where "borders"
can only mean ports, bridges, and fences
things negated when performed
no one speaks of borders to richmond california
precious few tell of the blacks of mexico


Does anybody in the academy want to hear my "black shit"
being piled higher and deeper in a dissertation?

Is a Ph.D. going to render me any safer from
the bullets that I magnetize anyway,
whether from a brotha who's watching me
get out my car
whose too-much interest hungering from somewhere behind his eyes
i somehow recognize, although i've never lived in poverty?
or the cop who pulls me over on my bike
on suspicion of
car theft?

i don't know

The Devil and Pat Robertson

"And you know, Kristi, something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it.

“They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know Napoleon the 3rd and whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the Devil.

“They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.'

“True story.

“And so the Devil said, 'Okay, it's a deal.’

“And, uh, they kicked the French out, you know, with Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

“But ever since they have been cursed by, by one thing after another, desperately poor.

“That island of Hispaniola is one island. It’s cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti on the other side is the Dominican Republican.

“Dominican Republic is, is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, etcetera.“Haiti is in desperate poverty.

“Same island.

“They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God and out of this tragedy I’m optimistic something good may come. But right now we’re helping the suffering people and the suffering is unimaginable.”

The televangelist Pat Robertson is quoted above from a segment of the 700 Club.

Robertson is certainly correct about one thing “…the suffering is unimaginable.” There are some estimates that the death toll could reach 500,000 in this historically marginalized society. If ever there was an example for the need of a broad education Robertson’s comments and those of Rush Limbaugh provide ample evidence. (Please see the links below for their respective comments)

There are so many things incorrect with what Robertson says that it’s not worth the effort to correct the historical record. It is in fact the rhetoric of a cursed race and people that I’m particularly interested in. Sometimes it is not the historical record that I think we should be concerned with because at times those errors can be revised but the underpinning ideologies that construct the narrative, I believe can be much more harmful.

I’m sorry if this gets a little long winded but I feel that Robertson’s comments raise some foundational questions that continue to haunt discussions around race and social justice.

As Robertson has framed it the people of Haiti had committed a fundamental wrong by making a deal with the devil to end their enslavement. And deal with the devil to end the bedevilment of their lives as slaves; I think I would make that deal as well. Now the desire to end your social death seems to me to be so compelling that I don’t understand the critique. The devil of slavery seems pretty damn bad. Taxation without representation was enough to make the former British citizens that colonized America go to war with their former brethren, but slaves’ fighting to end their slavery has to be part of a demonic plan. Robertson exemplifies a problem that continues to affect the collective thinking of the Western world and that it that all are not entitled to the very same social conditions that are taken for granted across advanced industrial nations.

Haiti has remained impoverished ever since the former slaves did what Jefferson and Washington saw as a requirement of subjecthood. They fought to be free and because they were former slaves and remained slaves in the eyes of the United States founders they were not deemed suitable to be free. The most rudimentary research on US foreign policy toward Haiti will reveal and long lasting unwillingness to bring Haiti and their democratically elected leaders into the “family” of nations.

In one sense the Haitians have been cursed, but, for having the audacity to get free. Robertson and Limbaugh make me tired and like Fannie Lou Hamer said “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

No peace to those who call the Haitian’s cursed, when in fact they are the ones pronouncing the curse. No peace to Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh when they sneer at the death of thousands.

Pat Robinson source:http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/01/pat-robertson-blames-earthquake-on-pact-haitians-made-with-satan.html

Rush Limbaugh’s transcript:http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_011310/content/01125106.guest.html

The Biological Question: Medical Science Puzzles Over Impact of Antiblackness on Health

The health care debate is raising a number of questions around race and health-- and biopower/necropower. Many of the assumptions underwriting formations of health and social entitlement programs are founded in a kind of social scientific antiblackness with which we are all too familiar. The same antiblack affect underwrites the irrational crack-versus-powder cocaine disparity, the opposition to federal means-tested transfer policies (like AFDC), and, if we go back far enough, the initial shaping of the federal New Deal entitlement programs-- especially by powerful southern Congressional leaders-- to exclude agricultural and domestic workers, job classifications in which blacks were concentrated.

Also, over the last few decades, biological and genetic arguments have been on the rise to explain "social problems" like student achievement.

Because of a recent conversation with a friend, I have been thinking a bit lately about the relationship between "the biological" and "the social." What is the appeal of such biological and social scientific explanations to discourses on race? Can the sway of "scientific" explanations be attributed to their power to explain and predict effectively? To the extent to which they tap into a certain set of affective structures widely held in civil and political society? What else might explain the adoption of, say, Prof. John D'Iulio's superpredator theory that continues to underwrite laws concerning the incarceration of juveniles? What crisis is induced, if any, when theories like superpredator theory are proven to be bunk?

Here is another breakdown of the explanatory power of both social sciences and medical sciences. Why would college-educated black American women have higher likelihood of low-birth-weight babies than both white high school dropout women (a control for socioeconomic status explanations so popular in the social sciences) AND African immigrant women (a control for the genetic explanations so popular in the medical sciences)?



Source: Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?
http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/resources_video.php?res_id=210 (accessed 8/11/09)

I'm curious about what the waxing influence of genetic and biological explanations in scientific and even humanistic discourse bodes for black bodies and blackened spaces.

First, we should remember Fanon's admonition that it is pointless to seek out what Blackness signifies (as the Negritudists had done then, as the Afrocentrists, cultural nationalists, and canon formationists do now). Attempting to do so is an attempt to engage in what Wilderson calls "the ruse of analogy"-- an analogy with whiteness. And that just won't do for blackness.

By way of illustration, in mathematical terms blackness/Africanness wouldn't be a zero or a negative term on a graph in which whiteness/europeanness was a positive term. (If it was such, Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic would work for Blacks because negation would be conceivable.) Instead, Blackness is a null set. We recall from math that even zero has a place on the graph; here we should think of a baseball player who has been at bat once and struck out during that time at bat-- her/his batting average would be 0. A null set (written as a zero with a crossbar over it) is the absence of positionality on the graph altogether-- as though the baseball player had never even been at bat to begin with.

This is the often-overlooked radical meaning of Fanon's statement:

For not only must the black man [sic] be black; he [sic] must be black in relation to the white man [sic]. Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man [sic] has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man [sic] (BSWM 110).

In the curious way that social realities reflect back onto math, we should take note that without the concept of the null set, mathematics as we know it would be impossible. The null set in relation to mathematics, like the death-bound subject (to quote janMohamed)-- the black-- in relation to modernity, is a condition of possibility, existing as absence so that Presence may have coherent meaning. "No one knows yet who [the Negro] is," Fanon tells us (BSWM 139). Even the Negro him/herself.

Among those whose psyches are most destabilized by the unknowability of blackness are white folks. In this sense, one could read the scientific tendencies to chart blackness as hegemonic moves to make blackness signify something. The sciences become the final arbiter in chains of signification-- the Name of the Father, what Christianity may once have been.

A Very Touching Story

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=4371874

And my reply, posted on the ESPN site:

Enjoyed this immensely. Cried. Thanks for sharing. Let's not let the narrative suture us into the safe sense that "It is enough to have good friends and a resilient spirit" individually and that massive social transformation does not need to take place. These kids were already positioned by an unethical violence that is so essential, it preceded Dartanyon's birth and Leroy's accident. That most people will forgo a structural explanation for the violence that positioned them in hypersegregated Cleveland ghettoes, schools with 40% graduation rates, near industrial train tracks, and in places where preventable birth disorders (unlike Leber's) go unchecked in the first place will cause them to romanticize what these kids have had to overcome instead of changing this society fundamentally so that more kids don't have to overcome an unethical state of nonbeing. "An edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring," said MLK, and the same is true of a social edifice that placed these kids in zones of death where, by intelligence and toughness-- but also a lot of LUCK-- they survived where others (of perhaps the same intelligence, toughness, and resilience) did not. Neither stories like this, nor the election of a black president, nor yet another Skip Gates miniseries will absolve America of its reliance on the death of black and blackened bodies in zones like that where millions of other Dartanyons and Leroys "live."

The affective connections to black suffering are deadly. With all the overcoming that blacks must do, you would think that a little Hegelian-type recognition would be in the offing. But previous experience suggests, and the best readings of western culture also suggest, that black suffering is actually a source of affective enjoyment among whites, other nonblacks, and (as my own tears suggest) blacks ourselves! Krin Gabbard illustrates this point to some degree in his book Black Magic, in the chapter on all of the "magical Negro" stories that occurred around the turn of the millennium.

"We Don't Even Have A Country": James Baldwin's documentary Take This Hammer

Thank you, to the source on this!

This is James Baldwin illustrating the concept of the (no)space of the black: that San Francisco is no different from Birmingham for the black.

https://diva.sfsu.edu/bundles/187041

And just think, this was in the relatively "hopeful" days before crack. Look at how clean the streets of Hunter's Point/Bayview are! And these brothas standing around looking all baaad while they smoke,...what,...WEED?