Author: Troy L. Wiggins

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Opinion The Last Word

The Long Way

CREDIT: Edward Olive | Dreamstime

I’m going to take the long way around to my point here, so please bear with me:

When I was younger, my parents were really, really hard on me.

Find any black person of an age with me, they’ll tell you the same thing. Their parents valued excellence in everything they did. They were held to a high standard for academic and social performance, and if they did not achieve like their parents knew they needed to achieve, they would face consequences.

The reasoning for this was simple enough: The world that their children were about to enter would be hypercritical, emotionally violent, and unforgiving. Their work, effort, and labor would be undervalued and dismissed. In the worst-case scenario, they would end up a victim of violence with no real chance at justice.

Edward Olive | Dreamstime

Most folks know this as the whole “twice as good” mantra that was once standard kitchen table conversation between black parents and their children and that has now become part of public empathizing in the wake of the police state’s brutalization of black children and communities.

I had no excuses. I showed my hand early by excelling academically and following the rules laid down by power structures, which my parents appreciated but did not accept as my best. Of course, I could do better, they reasoned, because only an unrealistic standard of perfection would keep me from being lynched, tear-gassed, executed, or put in jail. So they pushed me further, harder, with methods that would seem inhumane to outsiders not familiar with the intricacies of black parenting and the nuanced position that comes with being responsible for a black child whose life holds so little value to the rest of the world.

I am not making excuses for my parents or for any other black parents out there. Many of our parents’ strategies for keeping us safe traumatized us, created deep insecurities in us, and made us mentally unhealthy in ways that we are still trying to unravel. But for so many of us, this was how they ensured that they loved us and that they wanted us to be safe. And those of us who are able to appreciate our parents’ efforts do so, because we realize on an existential level that these structures we live in are designed to disenfranchise and destroy us and that our parents were using the resources and methods they had available to save our souls.

Like I said, I’m taking the long way around to my point, but I’m getting there.

Our country, and yes, our city is at a tipping point. Nationally, the publicizing of the grand racist political experiment has been a success. Racists and Nazis feel emboldened to demonstrate their commitment to ethno-nationalism and genocide on a massive level, and the recently woke resistance isn’t always the best breakwater in which to stand in the face of this fundamental, sweeping tide of hatred. We’re creeping up on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, a big black mark on our city’s legacy, and our city seems content to continue devoting more of our community resources to those groups that we consider inherently more deserving of our political goodwill and policy assistance, widening the gaps in achievement and possibility for disenfranchised Memphians.

I am often accused of being overly critical of our city, of the systems at play here, of the political and economic actors who traffic in discrimination and marginalization in order to pad their pockets and secure their power. But my criticism comes from love for this city that has nurtured me and allowed me to create myself within its bounds. I am talking of the Agape love that Dr. King himself envisioned and championed for deep and lasting community change. This is the kind of love that allows us to look honestly at our community and recognize how it fails at being equitable and democratic. To people who benefit from these deep divisions, this push for love-based systemization of equity is threatening, feels discriminatory. But that’s how we know that our cause is the right one. If people who traditionally hold power are comfortable with our opposing actions, we need to rethink our strategy.

Our community is at a crux. The forces of hatred are emboldened. Public interest and development are in the hands of people who do not always have the community’s day-to-day concerns at heart. Disenfranchised and marginalized Memphians are yet crying out for justice and are showing a dedication to achieving it by any means necessary. This is not the time for half-measures, nor half-stepping. This is the time for our community and our leaders to be revolutionary in their policies, actions, and thoughts. This is the time to make existing power structures and the people that benefit from them quiver in their boots. Our city and this country are poised for dramatic change, and it will be the people themselves who determine our direction. We must be hard on ourselves, on our leaders, and exacting in our vision of justice if we want to prevent our communities from being hollowed out by the parties of hatred.

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphis writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis, and The Memphis Flyer.

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Opinion The Last Word

Howdy, Neighbor!

I can see your little beady eyes through the blinds, neighbor. I was minding my own business, walking down the street and listening to my podcast — ironically, the episode is about the complexity of gentrification, the fact that there aren’t always clear-cut reasons for why urban displacement happens the way it does outside of those forces we already know are at play.

Why are you watching me so closely? Is it because my body and my skin make me a walking violation of the unspoken rules here? Are you worried that I’m going to rob you? Don’t. You don’t have anything I want. I love my life. I don’t want to have what you have or be a part of you or drive your car or eat your food. And I’m certainly not going to jeopardize my future over you and your insecurities.

But I’m irritated. Despite my innate status as a habitual line-stepper, I do follow the rules. Obsessively, even. I have created my own internal taxonomy of the unwritten rules, research spearheaded by my decades of necessary study of how you move through the world and the hateful current you leave in your wake. I clean up my trash; I leash my dogs; I don’t make too much noise. I am loud sometimes sure, but that’s just how I am sometimes. You’ll be all right. I hold the door and smile and stand up straight and don’t walk toward you too fast and jingle my keys or cough when it’s dark outside so that you know I’m coming and don’t accidentally call the police to have me arrested for the crime of breathing too close to where you’ve decided you want to be. All of this in 2017, a time when I’m more than justified in cursing you out for slights old and new. But I’m trying to be nice, stupid me.

And what’s really screwed up is that I don’t have time to worry about you. I have to worry about my city being the “bankruptcy capital of the U.S.” I have to worry about the Tennessee Historical Commission blocking us from removing the honorable racist general and his horse from our public parks. I have to wonder how my little brother is getting home from work and whether or not my dog can go another week without a bath and whether I’ve wasted $30 because I didn’t freeze the three pounds of catfish still sitting on the bottom shelf of my refrigerator. I have to worry about whether or not Amazon or “public improvement projects” or any number of contentious developments are going to once again extract labor and time and pain from poor people here and use it to pad their pockets. I have a lot of worries, you see.

You’d think that black neighborhoods were cesspools of savagery, with broken-down cars and untended yards and robberies — all reasons why they deserve to be kept in disinvestment purgatory. But the folks in my previous neighborhood were calm and kind. They let my dogs run in their yard and pulled my trash can to the street if I forgot and let me borrow their jumper cables. They gave me spare change when I needed it and brought me back bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos from the corner store even when I didn’t ask them to. The way they looked at the space that we shared included me, saw me and my family for what I was in truth, not for what I represented based on their silly biases and lack of empathy.

You’re not good at sharing, which is what you’re supposed to do in spaces like this. You’re not good at sharing because you’ve been centered in everything since the beginning of this grand experiment, and this centering, all this attention paid to you is so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness and in our operation that you feel truly justified in the disgusting ways that you behave toward me in this space that we’ve both paid for access to. I don’t have room to be a bad neighbor, which sucks, because if I could I’d invite my thuggish rapper friends over and I’d pay them to jump up and down and spit fire verses over those dank beats y’all like to play in your Prius. But this would be in the middle of our shared street, and all of the other black people over here would dance around the glow of my rapper friends’ gold chains like it was a bonfire and we were casting a dark magic spell to banish you from our space.

But I’m not a bad neighbor, so I won’t do that. Instead I’ll continue to find joy in being better than you and making you so uncomfortable that you’d rather disappear than chance a meeting with me in the hallway. Oh, and my address has finally been confirmed on NextDoor.com, so be careful, because I’m lurking. The next time you make a frantic post about how scared you are because there are strange black men walking down the street like crazed gorillas, I’m gonna spam your posts with that picture where somebody photoshopped buttholes over Donald Trump’s eyeballs and mouth. In the meantime, I’m going to get to work on having my rapper friends come over to our part of town. It’s gonna take us a while to get this dark magic spell cast, and I want to make sure it’s done just right.
Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphis writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis, and The Memphis Flyer.

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Opinion The Last Word

Rooting Interest

CREDIT: Mike Blake | Reuters

A couple of Sundays ago, visionary writer, producer, and actress Issa Rae gave a red carpet interview at the 69th annual Primetime Emmy Awards. After a few minutes of routine celebrity banter, the interviewer asked Issa which stars she was rooting for to win the night. Issa answered with the brilliance and honesty that is a staple of her brand: “I’m rooting for everybody black. I am.”

Of course, that portion of the statement can be taken on its face, as in “I’m rooting for all of the historically excluded and underpaid black talent and staff to actually win something during this annual celebration of whiteness and white media,” and if one were to read her statement in that way, they wouldn’t be wrong. The post-“rooting for everybody black”-content economy is full of black writers agreeing that, yes, every time there is a black person in any sort of public competition and their opposition is whiteness, we are all casting our lots with the black contestants. But Issa Rae has consistently proven that she is a genius, and in her unapologetic expression of that statement during this heavily televised event, she gave black people young and old the freedom to plumb the depths of a long-held ideology that stretches well beyond the red carpet. If “rooting for everybody black” is personal, then, to quote radical feminists, it is also a deeply political act.

I am often accused of hating white people in this space. While individual white people have done a lot to me personally for me to justifiably dislike them, I don’t hate them. Honestly, I have better things to do with my time and energy than hate white people, like learning to speak Chinese or figuring out quantum entanglement. If there’s anything I hate, it’s white supremacy, the system that unfairly elevates white people and prioritizes their concerns and policies to the great detriment of my own ancestors and friends. And yes, while I do hate white supremacy, I love black people more. And I especially love black Memphians, having had the bulk of my positive formative experiences with them. I love black people here so much that, to borrow Rae’s phrase, I’m rooting for everybody black — everybody black in Memphis, in particular.

Mike Blake | Reuters

Issa Rae

Black Memphians should be winning; statistically, halls of power and paths to access should be swollen with black Memphians in leadership and administrative roles. Our governmental systems should be working to prioritize our concerns, concerns that intersect with those of most other marginalized groups in this city. We should not be locked out of the jobs that pay the highest wages. We should be considered at every phase of public planning that this city undertakes. We should not be this city’s footnote.

But we all know that these things are not the current state of affairs for black Memphians. We need supporters too. We need people to root for us, to make noise and rouse some rabble on our behalf, both publicly and privately.

Rooting for black Memphians is not some abstract concept. If you root for black people, you want them to win, and this is something that could totally be applied politically and systemically in real time. Issa Rae’s example is perfect. Rae is a showrunner and creator who, herself, is a black business. She’s employed black actors throughout the course of her career, many of them following her across her projects. She’s enabled black production staff to gain valuable experience at their positions, which sets them up for success further down the line. For you or me, rooting for black Memphians looks like this: creating opportunities for them to have the same economic, political, and social experiences and successes that have been historically denied. This means doing your part to create access to these experiences.

I do my best to support not only black success in a theoretical sense, but also in real time. I try to patronize black businesses. I sometimes de-prioritize my own comfort to put myself in the way of something that might harm a black person who doesn’t have the same privileges that I have. I strongly dislike talking on the phone, but I still call my elected officials when they are doing things that harm black Memphians. I advocate for causes that will positively affect black lives and have difficult conversations with people in my spheres of influence about bias, assumption, and prejudice.

We’ve long been told that it’s taboo, or even racist, to try and stack the odds in black people’s favor, both in Memphis and across the country. But as our city rockets toward its future, those Memphians who face the largest risk of being left in progress’ wake — or worse, exploited in the name of progress — need us to advocate for them more than ever.

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphis writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis, and The Memphis Flyer.

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Opinion The Last Word

Memphis: A Tale of Two Cities

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

My paternal great-grandmother abandoned rural Mississippi in the 1960s in order to escape her husband, an abusive man who decided early in their marriage that he wanted a farmhand instead of a wife. My great-grandmother — affectionately called “Granny” by her great-grandchildren — survived assaults from men who wanted to claim her body, a wage-slavery system that wanted to claim her soul, and a concentrated dose of white supremacy that had no qualms about making a feast out of her bones as well.

In her old age, my Granny’s favorite pastime was riding around the city to visit shopping malls and department stores, but she couldn’t drive, so when one of her children or grandchildren was too busy to serve as chauffeur, we rode the bus. During the face-meltingly hot Memphis summers of the early 1990s, I was frequently her co-pilot and traveling companion. One of my fondest memories of her was a summertime bus ride where we rumbled past the Sears Crosstown tower on Cleveland, which by then had been long abandoned. As we passed the building, Granny looked up at it, cursed (she only cursed when she was mad), and sighed.

My Granny had given most of her life to affluent white Memphians who visited our house whenever they wished to slip silver dollars from behind our ears like stale magic, praising my Granny for her hardworking nature and her homespun wisdom even as they worked her to her grave. Her sigh that day as we passed Sears Crosstown wasn’t wistful. She did not long for bygone days, and she was not lamenting lost fondness; my Granny had lived through so much pain at the hands of men, white-folks, and crushing poverty that she rarely ever seemed fond of anything other than her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Justin Fox Burks

Crosstown

I carried her memory and her history with me more than 10 years after that bus ride when I crossed Cleveland and stepped into the brand new Crosstown Concourse. I was there to witness firsthand the realization of a project purported to bring new life into central Memphis. New life, of course, because the old ones are less meaningful in the face of developments like this one.

I can’t lie, the Crosstown Concourse is a nice building. The idea of a “vertical urban village” is a concept out of my futurist fantasies, and the Crosstown Concourse looks the part. The updated construction has managed to retain the massive look and feel of the building from my childhood while also making the new space feel fresh and modern. The public servant in me is impressed by the convergence of commercial and civic interests into a single public-use space.

But Memphis is full of disrespected dead, and their spirits still cry out for justice. On the afternoon of Saturday, August 12th, our city was at the crux of an interesting convergence: Less than three miles from the celebration of Crosstown’s shining beacon, hundreds of protesters (many of whom are descendants of the slaves that kept Memphis living in high cotton) decided to use their bodies and lives to demand that our elected representatives stand on the correct side of history and remove hateful edifices from our taxpayer-funded parks. While the people who Memphis prioritizes bobbed their heads to performances from some of our most brilliant black artists, immigrant Memphians marched to defend themselves and their families from forces that threaten to rupture their families and destroy their livelihoods.

We are living in a literal tale of two cities.

I want to know: How can I be excited about the Crosstown Concourse when the grocery store inside of it is explicitly not marketed to the disenfranchised residents of Klondike and Smokey City? How can I be excited about the Crosstown Concourse when there are thousands of unemployed and underemployed Memphians in a two-mile radius of its doors? How can I be excited about the Crosstown Concourse when entire swaths of the city remain blighted and infested with vermin and waste? How can I be excited about the Crosstown Concourse when white supremacy, the system that makes Memphis great (for white residents) is still deeply ingrained in every facet of our city’s operation, from the police to the politics to the food and employment deserts, and is still killing people in whatever way it deems best — just like it killed my Granny?

Just last week, I was visiting South Memphis, talking to residents in an area infamous for having lead soil contamination readings higher than 1,700 parts per million (the federal standard for lead soil contamination is 400 parts per million). One woman caught my eye — her resemblance to my Granny struck me so deeply that it nearly brought tears to my eyes.

She was hurt and disgusted. Everyone in Memphis seemed to be on the receiving end of such great developments. Her neighborhood had changed too, with new housing and freshly constructed green space, but she was still not impressed. Where were the opportunities for her children and grandchildren to escape the chains of poverty that had held her in place for generations? Where were the nearby jobs? The adequately funded schools? There isn’t a full-service grocery story within three miles of her house. Those seem to be very basic requests, and I thought that Memphis was in the business of being brilliant at those. At one point during our conversation, she sighed and shook her head. For a moment, I was back on that bus with my Granny, my 10-year-old self finally understanding the weight of her sigh.

Time and again, our city’s leadership proves to folks like me that it does not care about our poor black grannies, our immigrant friends and family, or anyone else who dares to speak up and demand that all of the edifices to hate and white supremacy — mounted or not — be removed from this place where we’ve planted our roots. In the face of all these past memories and current pain, tell me: Why should I, or any Memphians like me, be excited about these future developments?

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphis writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis, and The Memphis Flyer.

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Opinion The Last Word

Letter to My City

There are dead and dying black people everywhere.

I haven’t logged on to Facebook in two weeks, partly because people talk too damn much, partly because I don’t want to watch endlessly looped videos of black and brown people’s slaughter and share sadface emojis because I don’t have any more meaningful words about their deaths.

Words are data-mined and used in targeted ads: Quality proofreading services, Marvel’s Defenders series, black and brown people vomiting blood from gunshot wounds in 4k resolution on your screen — aren’t these new phones amazing? Look at that quality; you can see each individual shudder in that death rattle. Check out these suggested videos. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Cry.

I love Memphis, but does Memphis love me?

Last night, I was driving home from dinner in my mom’s car. My neighborhood is belted by extreme affluence on one end and extreme poverty on the other. I live squarely in the middle, in the liminal space, which is lowkey my existence because I’m the kind of millennial that people aren’t talking about when they talk about millennials. Charleena Lyles was a millennial, too. I wonder if her love of avocado toast is to blame for our failing economy. I wonder how many degrees of separation there are between avocado toast and her murder. There are dead and dying black people everywhere.

I was driving my mom’s car last night to get dinner for my family. My route is always the same when I’m heading west toward home: turn on the rich people’s street to get to the street designated for the not-rich black people, most of whom are dying from incarceration, from poverty, from generations of advancing bare centimeters and you all should be grateful, we could just wall off your part of the neighborhood and leave you in Memphadishu, dude, but I’m cool, bro, so here, have a swig of my 201 Hoplar what do you mean you don’t like IPAs? I don’t even know who Duanna Johnson is, dude. Forget it, we’re building the wall, don’t say we never tried to give you anything.

The rich people’s street on my side of the ‘hood has 24-hour security patrols. The rich people’s street on the other side of the ‘hood has 24 hour security patrols and those police blue eyes in the sky that are possibly the blue eyes of the precogs rifling through our black minds for prethoughtcrimes against the white supremacist order, the better to justify our murders. Data-driven probable cause, but all the artificial intelligence is racist.

My route is always the same. I turn on the rich people’s street to get to my street. As I am sitting in the lane to turn on the rich people’s street, a blue eye — a blue life? — pulls up short, creeps behind me as I am sitting in my mom’s car, a bag of food in my wife’s lap. The other blue eye winks from across the street, as if to say to the blue life behind me, “Do what you gotta do. Fear for your life if you need to.”

Thankfully, my child hasn’t been born, so they won’t have to see my black life taken by this blue life. All I’ve done is buy dinner. I have guacamole in the bag. How many avocadoes is my black life worth? I contemplate having my wife turn on Facebook Live — if I go, I’m going out in 4k. But we’re working-class blacks and we can’t afford 4k tech on a writer’s salary, so I don’t bother. I haven’t committed a crime, but neither did Philando or Sandra or Tamir or Darrius or eight-year-old Aiyana or Laquan or anyone else on this charnel house list that started, really, in 1619. There are dead and dying black people everywhere. Listen to the high definition sound quality of those rattling chains.

That winking blue eye followed me through my dreams. On my way to work, I pass two signs: “I <3 Memphis” and “Memphis Loves Everybody.” Let’s do the math: One of those is true; the other is bullshit. Memphis don’t love me. Memphis loves those other millennials, the ones who think quality avocado toast goes well with craft IPAs. Memphis don’t love me. Memphis glares at me suspiciously in its tourist sandals while I’m going to pick up my slices from Memphis Pizza Cafe, even though I’ve been going there since I was 16 and the millennials Memphis loves just got here last year. Memphis loves grit and grind. Memphis loves urban displacement, platitudes, preserving historic standards, saving the Greensward. Memphis loves being number 3 on the Best New Mid-Sized Cities for Millennial Homebuyers list. Memphis loves progress as long as it comes with a shaggy surfer haircut, a pantsuit, a startup with a Grizzlies blue-and-gold material UI logo, a digital rendering of a pistol, and an insensitive ironic slogan because that’s the new Memphis, man. Memphis loves not loving me and people like me.

I finally log on to Facebook. People are still talking. Dana Loesch is in an NRA ad calling for people to take up arms and defend America in its noble struggle against its oppressed. City, county, and state politicians are still debating whether it’s more economically viable to smother us slowly or to bleed us out with a single bullet. The Commercial Appeal is “exploring” Memphis’ problem with gun violence. A blue life creeps by, armed and armored in the same kind of van that Freddie Gray was killed in. Memphis loves Everybody. There are dead and dying black people all over this city. I love Memphis.

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphis writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis, and The Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

On the Moon

CREDIT: Creative Commons | Adam Turner

I can’t pay no doctor bill.

(but Whitey’s on the moon)

Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.

(while Whitey’s on the moon)

The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night.

(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)

No hot water, no toilets, no lights.

(but Whitey’s on the moon)

— “Whitey on the Moon,” Gil Scott-Heron, 1970

Imagine pledging allegiance to a nation that would rather you not exist, would gladly deny you the rights that you have earned for yourself 20 times over. Imagine being forced to watch from your hovels and tenements as the machine of progress trampled over any hope you had of an equitable future. Imagine being a citizen of a country or state or city that prioritized the feelings of some of its citizens over the realities of its majority. Imagine living in a “land of the free” that elected a national leader whose driving purpose seems to be to strip away the limited freedoms that exist for people unlike him and his family, all while fattening his pockets off the blood of the land. Imagine that this “land of the free” replicates these types of leaders at almost every level.

Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 poem “Whitey on the Moon” was a symbolic questioning of American achievement in the face of the social crises listed above. At the time he wrote this poem, our country’s goal was to win the Space Race, in part to establish our military supremacy and deflect any threats against our nation’s greatness. We funneled billions of taxpayer dollars, thousands of hours of labor, and tons of resources toward low-orbit supremacy, an undertaking that ran side-by-side with anti-racist, anti-poverty social movements. Civil rights movement leaders and poor black people alike wondered how America could devote so much time and effort to sending astronauts to space but not make any attempt to do right by oppressed populations.

Well, the answer is simple. Whitey’s always been on the moon.

When I say this, I don’t mean that American whites are actually on the moon. I mean that they are detached from earthly reality, and every bit of progress or protest by nonwhites shoves them further into space, where logic doesn’t exist. This is especially true now, when the halls of power are populated by white men who feel comfortable pandering to the most bigoted of populations and creating policy that reflects their oppressive beliefs. For too long in America, too many white Americans have believed that white people are the vanguards of progress, technological information, culture, and freedom. Only the moon-addled can look at our world and continue to think like this.

Creative Commons | Adam Turner

Gil Scott-Heron

The number of white nationalist hate groups has spiked since November. The vast majority of hate crimes are now perpetrated against non-whites, immigrants, religious minorities, and members of the LGBT community. Every day it seems like there’s a video of a Muslim woman going to do her grocery shopping and being accosted by a soccer mom with the rage-flames of xenophobia in her eyes. People of color are being murdered by random, racist whites every other day in extremely violent ways. Bystanders and good samaritans are being slashed and stabbed by white men who armor themselves in the flag and see themselves as defenders of white American ideals. Corporations — many of them led by moon-addled white folks and enabled by white politicians — make it their policy to destroy access to wealth from workers, to keep them laboring and sick and fearful.

Other groups in this country — the groups who are often on the receiving end of white folks’ moon-borne oppression — are made to feel like they are the problem with American culture. If they didn’t practice their heathen religions, if they didn’t have those weird cultural traditions, if they would just be white, then these problems with oppression wouldn’t exist and everyone would be free.

What really sucks about this condition of white moon-blindness is that you’re always prepared for it, but it can still catch you unawares even though it is innocuous, and any white person can simply decide to let it rip, leaving you either stuck wishing you had said the right thing, facing the judgmental stares of your peers, or even, sometimes, dead. And with one of the mooniest white men in the United States currently occupying the position of president, every moon-wild bigot in the country — and even some moon-wild non-bigots — will be in rare form. They’ll be invading your neighborhoods and communities, getting you arrested and moving their friends into your grandparents’ homes. They’ll be following you around, yelling racial slurs at you, and then trying to kill you when you fight back. They’ll be casually offensive toward you or pass laws to disenfranchise you or consume your culture until there’s nothing left, but you’ll be sure that you’re the problem and not them.

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphis writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis magazine, and The Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The White League

Two weeks ago, under the cover of New Orleans’ early morning darkness, construction workers wearing flak jackets disassembled the Battle of Liberty Place Monument obelisk, loaded it onto a truck, and hauled it away. A Reconstruction-era relic, the Liberty Monument was built to honor the Battle at Liberty Place, an attempted coup by a group of Confederate insurgents known as the White (Man’s) League. The White League rejected the legitimacy of Louisiana’s Reconstruction government, murdered municipal police officers, occupied government property for three days, and, ultimately, fought to disenfranchise recently freed black voters. In 1891, the city erected a monument to commemorate the 1874 uprising. White League supporters added an inscription to the monument in 1932, celebrating the coup and the reinstatement of “white supremacy in the South.”

The Liberty Monument has faced opposition in recent years. In 1970, Mayor Moon Landrieu erected a plaque acknowledging that the inscription did not accurately represent the politics of modern New Orleans. The inscription was fully covered by 1981, and in 1998, the monument was moved into storage until David Duke filed a lawsuit that forced the city to move it back into public view. After nearly 150 years, the monument has finally been removed for good and will be followed by the deconstruction of other monuments that celebrate the Confederacy and its heroes.

Liberty Monument

At the removal of the monument, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu released a statement, saying: “Relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, blame, or retaliation. … We can remember these divisive chapters in our history in a museum or other facility where they can be put in context — and that’s where these statues belong.”

Of course, this perfectly reasonable logic sent Confederate fanboys, “Heritage Not Hate” folks, and professional devil’s advocates frothing. They lined up to lament our national caving to the liberal/industrial complex and the legions of special snowflakes who would rather not be reminded of a time when their ancestors could be bought and sold from a market. “Think of the history,” they cried, their boots firmly planted on land forcibly ripped from its original inhabitants. “Those who can’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it” was their rallying cry.

Memphis has had its own monument struggles. In 2015, the Memphis City Council voted to move the remains and commemorative statue of slave trader and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest in the months following the massacre of nine black churchgoers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The council’s application to relocate the monument was denied by the Tennessee Historical Commission, citing changes to the 2013 Tennessee Heritage Protection Act (THPA). A few months prior to the council’s request, the THPA was strengthened by the Tennessee Legislature shortly following the Charleston shooting and the public conversation around the proper placement of Confederate monuments, moving from requiring a majority vote for changes to requiring a two-thirds vote.

“When we start removing these symbols, we take away that history, and they never have the opportunity nor the privilege to know about it,” sponsor Representative Steve McDaniel said in 2013.

The “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the History?” argument is old and tired, just like the folks who use it. The preservation of these symbols and monuments are about upholding a specific type of historical consciousness, one that reminds their mostly white and mostly male defenders of a time their state-sanctioned power was enough to keep the coloreds in their place. These symbols do nothing to teach further generations about history outside of representing the lengths to which these racist sympathizers will go to cushion their fragile egos and wrongheaded historical narratives. As historical artifacts, these monuments are usually devoid of necessary context, making them little more than a slap in the face to taxpayers who find these symbols representative of their continued oppression.

The history argument is also a lie. People who want to preserve Confederate monuments and symbols don’t care about history at all, or else there’d be monuments celebrating all of the groups that truly built this country instead of those who’ve profited off their bodies and their continued disenfranchisement. But we all know that these monuments don’t persist because of any dedication to historical accuracy. They exist because our country is full of racists who need the ghosts of Confederate fighting men to tuck them in at night. The “heritage not hate” argument may be a legitimate feeling for some, but for many others it is used as a shield to project pathological ideas and hateful rhetoric at black citizens. Why else would black Memphians be forced to gaze upon the visage of a man who massacred their ancestors, except to remind them of their place?

With the continued obstruction of the Tennessee Historical Commission and the strident bloviating of Confederate supporters keeping Forrest firmly enshrined in an area undergoing futuristic renovations, you have to wonder what is really keeping these people stuck in the past. Is it a fear of progress, or is it simple hatred?

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphis writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis magazine, and The Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Black Women’s Work

At the end of last month, a bunch of people learned about something that black women already have a ton of expertise in: discrimination. Twice in the same day, two impressively qualified, prominent black women were subjected to the same kind of stupid gender-based racism that many black women have experienced at the hands of countless Annes, Susans, and Bills throughout the history of the modern workplace.
First winner of the “disrespected by a white man” lottery unceremoniously held at the end of March was Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who was the target of consistent dumbass Bill O’Reilly, a man most notable in my mind for getting trolled by Cam’ron on his own show. After Congresswoman Waters waxed oh so eloquently in defense of those whose political stance is resistance against the Cheeto-in-Chief, O’Reilly chose to respond by attacking her physical appearance, saying she looks like James Brown. A masterful rhetorical stroke from a man who looks like a Ziploc bag filled with half-eaten mayonnaise sandwiches. He even has the nerve to work at a job where he exposes his pasty face to the American public.

Bill O’Reilly

Later that same day, Sean Spicer, chief manbaby for the Cheeto administration, spoke to White House Correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks April Ryan as if she was a child. “Please stop shaking your head” Spicer said, as if this is something you can actually say to an actual adult human being possessing decades of professional expertise in their field of work. Of course, as is expected of people who are systemically wronged, Ms. Ryan remained composed and professional in the face of condescending disrespect by a man who knows better. Ryan, you’ll recall, was first publicly disrespected by the current president, who made the age-old white-people assumption that all black people know all other black people and have the ability to ask other black folks for favors on behalf of whiteness.

This kind of disrespect is old hat to black women, who, for some reason, are the recipients of about 70 percent of all the unmitigated gall in the country.

Because this disrespect and discrimination is so common, black women across the country held a day-long discussion about it using the #BlackWomenAtWork hashtag on Twitter and Facebook, which was started by Brittany Packnett, a black woman who works on behalf of marginalized and oppressed people all over the country. #BlackWomenAtWork allowed these women to highlight true stories of work-related ill treatment at the hands of colleagues, managers, and society at large. The women participating in the hashtag discussion shared experiences where they were assumed to be underqualified for their positions, asked to perform menial service tasks even when they occupied high positions (or, in many cases, were managers!), and, of course, subjected to racial comments and improper physical contact. It’s like Solange didn’t even make an entire song about not touching black women’s hair. Y’all don’t listen.

Those of us who are not black women need to get it together. There are a lot of things that black women are not. Black women are not your best friend (unless they have explicitly said so). Black women are not your “sista girl.” Black women are not your maid or your stool pigeon or your Nubian queen or pets for you to touch without permission. Black women are not possessed of some inhuman amount of willpower that somehow makes them better able to endure stupid microaggressions. This is a good general set of rules to keep in mind for black women who are your personal acquaintances, but they are very necessary for you to remember when you are encountering black women in a work setting.

Black women are human. They usually work exponentially harder than the rest of us do, thanks to the super delicious cocktail of racism and sexism that they face on the daily. So when you encounter a black woman at work, remember that she has probably worked a lot harder than you to reach the same position that you’ve reached. Remember that she’s had to run a gauntlet of stupid comments and assumptions about her ability and outright discrimination since childhood. Remember that the weight of that gauntlet never really goes away no matter how accomplished she is or how much of a hardass she appears to be. Remember that this black woman has license to react to any crap that we subject her to in any way that preserves her sanity, and she doesn’t have to be nice about it. Remember that none of us, not you or me or the president of the United States, is owed black women’s labor, their time, or their kindness.

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphian and writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis magazine, and The Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Three American Stories …

These, too, are American stories.

She must constantly remind people that she was born here, born in the same land that her ancestors had occupied centuries before, during the time when America’s forefathers were striding Westward. Her ancestors had remained standing in opposition to the divine mandate of the no-longer-quite European colonizers, but they were not a match for the systems arrayed against them.

Many years later, she was born where they’d once stood, but her parents realized that the Dream she’d been sold wasn’t for people like them. They’d retreated South, and she spent her days after school feeding chickens alongside her grandmother or watching music videos on an ancient TV, the screen and speakers distorting the words and images she consumed.

Something draws her back. Perhaps it is her ancestors, calling through time removed, imploring her to understand that borders are man-made but birthright is forever. She returns, the lyrics she’s learned from American pop stars serving as her language training. She is born to lead; in a fairer world she would be a freedom fighter or a business leader. Instead, she works tirelessly to better the lives of her neighbors, her community. She spends long days on the phone with unfriendly agency representatives, completes applications for schools and benefits, translates medical instructions that somehow manage to be utilitarian and gibberish. She meets a man whose smile sets her heart ablaze. They decide that the struggle is sweeter together than apart, and their destiny leads them away from the land of her ancestors. He was not born here. His forebearers do not call to him from America’s soil, but he is a hard worker. He loves her and wants the best for them, loves that she dedicates so much of herself to those who need her. Thirteen years pass, bringing with them two children and, now, a new reality that threatens to upend her family. Clarity: She has become her mother, with complete understanding. The Dream has withered; is reviving it worth the battle?

He carries fear alongside him always and wonders if the constant companion is just the burden of fatherhood. The fear bleeds through his skin, announces itself in the twitch of his fingers, makes itself apparent in the sprinkle of sweat across his forehead and his upper lip. He is allowing himself a rare moment of excited joy: His son is very close to arriving to the United States, the culmination of a series of plans that he set in motion nearly 30 years prior. He himself had landed on these very shores in the days leading up to his son’s birth, missing the sight of his firstborn son’s emergence into this world. A small price to pay. At least he could leave the boy a name, the same name as his grandfather. He hoped it would bring the boy good fortune.

His life in pursuit of the Dream was work. Sweat was the great equalizer in the land of the free, and he was hearty, hale, and driven. Every day since his inauspicious arrival in New York City, he had worked. Long hours, thankless jobs. Sometimes he drove, contorting his lips and tongue to make jokes in English despite the distrustful stares and indifferent nonchalance of the corporate-styled passenger sprawled across the back seat. Money that he’d worked for but somehow wasn’t quite his to spend or save traveled across his palm, but he wrapped himself in the Dream. Work would see him through. He remained steadfast. He prayed. He skipped meals. He left New York because the rent was too damn high and the casual indifference had become outright hatred since The Attack. A friend had mentioned that the living was easier down South. Somehow he knew that this was best, knew that this move would bring him that much closer to his dream, to his son’s dream.

After 30 years of sweat, he finally embraces his son, who has become a man: He carries along with his luggage broad shoulders and a patchy beard. Twenty days after this embrace, chaos: a list, seven countries, a ban. His old burden — a gigantic wave of fear — slams into his chest as if to punish him for the audacity of joy; he feels as if he has been thrown into a freezing ocean. After a strained breath, he settles into the one thing that he knows will save him, save his son. He gets to Work.

© Les Cunliffe | Dreamstime.com

They tell her that she’s crazy to try for college when everything is falling apart around them. They say that it is not becoming for a woman to be so selfish, that she needs to dedicate herself to a family, that there are more pressing issues. That she doesn’t have what it takes. They say, they say, they say, but there is always a they and there is only one chance to follow your dreams, so she leaps and lands, all praise due to God, on her feet in a new country, the Dream in her sights.

She is 20, faithful, and unafraid. In this, she is not so different from the women who have made this leap before her. The theys are different when she arrives. They’re bowed beneath the impossible weight of the Dream: her brother, her cousin’s wife, a friend of a friend. Their message is more foreboding, their attitudes more urgent.

It is different here, they say. It has never been easy, but it has always been possible. Something wicked is in the air. They have only ever tolerated her family, but now they were whipped to hateful frenzy, removed from even the semblance of the love that they claimed to give to their neighbors. Had she heard about the man out West who had been shot and killed for simply existing near an ignorant and fearful man? Most of them think like the murderer, beloved.

She was not a black American (despite the incorrect assumptions of those who read her skin and lips), but she knew of their art. She had read their poets. She knew of Langston Hughes and his question that had been asked by the children of slaves well before he had articulated it clearly enough for all to understand. What happens to the Dream deferred?

She would not give up. There was nothing to do but try. She had been warned. They had explained. But she would persist.

These, too, are American stories. These, too, are Memphis stories.

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphian and writer whose work has appeared in the Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis magazine, and The Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Renaissance and Resistance

Toni Morrison said that art must be beautiful and political. Nina Simone said that the responsibility of an artist is to reflect the times. James Baldwin said that artists exist to disturb the peace.

Artists set the tone for their cities’ cultural presence, and their work creates a lens for citizens to engage with tough issues facing their cities and their worlds. Memphis has never been a city devoid of amazing public art and talented artists, but I can’t be alone in feeling like we are beyond lucky to be witnessing Memphis’ arts renaissance — and the attendant art/artist resistance movements — right now.

We all know that Memphis is music. Music is protest and power, and our city’s musicians are producing some extraordinary sounds. My own musical predilections trend toward hip-hop, R&B, and soul, all genres that my ancestors used to reason and reckon with their realities. Marco Pavé’s Welcome to Grc Lnd promises to be a soul-stirring, historical look at resistance and existence in Memphis. IMAKEMADBEATS and his Unapologetic crew have been working for years to provide some nextwave musicology to the Memphis scene, and his work is without peer. Collectives like the PRIZM Ensemble not only craft moving works of musical art, but give us a glimpse of an inclusive musical revolution. The Soulsville Festival and Memphis Slim House serve as incubators of new, grassroots celebrations of Memphis’ eternal musical spirit and the communities that bear that spirit. Angel Street, the Memphis Music Initiative, and the Stax Music Academy ensure that Memphis’ children will carry that spirit of musical reckoning and resistance onward.

Art of resistance

Memphians’ artistic commitment to resistance goes beyond music. A beautifully hued photo of dancers from the Collage Dance Collective recently went viral and showcases Collage’s commitment to inclusivity in their troupe. This photo, alongside their RISE performance, show us what dance as an inclusive form of artistic resistance truly looks like.

The Baobab Filmhouse and Hattiloo Theatre show the complexity of existence for people of color throughout history and dare to imagine stories for them that do not rely solely on their pain.

The Indie Memphis Film Festival brings a diverse array of films and filmmakers to our city every year. Spaces and collectives that focus on multidisciplinary works of art — like the CLTV, Centro Cultural, the Memphis Black Arts Alliance, Young Arts Patrons, and story booth — provide space for Memphians to engage critically with art that challenges their perceptions of their place in the world and of art itself. The events that these collaboratives present, such as the Young Arts Patrons’ Young Collectors event, Centro Cultural’s Tamale Fest, and the CLTV’s Black in Amurica, spotlight collective cultural resistance to forces that would erase or oppress not just artistic production, but the rights and personhood of these community members. Each of these spaces spotlights talented local creators.

Gallery spaces like the Orange Mound Gallery, Memphis Slim House, Crosstown Arts, and the Memphis College of Art allow for public consumption of paradigm-challenging work from artists like Fidencio Fifield-Perez, Kong Wee Pang, Vanessa González, and Darlene Newman.

Andrea Morales’ photography gives us an unabashed glimpse at what Memphis-style grit actually looks like, and Ziggy Mack’s ephemeral shots provide a vision of Memphis’ best people and our alternative futures.

Joseph Boyd’s “It’s Beautiful Where You Are” and Vitus Shell’s “Protect Her” center black women as subjects of and inspiration for our collective struggle (94 percent of black women voted against our current political quagmire). Siphne Sylve’s art graces various areas of the city and proclaims a deep sense of love and pride for Memphis. Jamond Bullock’s murals provide much needed whimsy and color to everything they touch. Michael Roy’s engrossing work can be found from downtown high-rises to coffeehouse bathrooms and grants his unique complexity to a wide range of subjects.

The written and spoken word is important in determining what resistance looks, reads, and sounds like. Dr. Zandria Robinson’s “Listening for the Country,” featured in the Oxford American, invited readers to take a trip into an emotive space that helps citizens remember their essential humanity as they struggle with systems.

Public readings like the recent Writers Resist event, The Word, and Impossible Language reinforce that Memphis is full of revolutionary writers. Jamey Hatley and Sheree Renée Thomas are award-winning authors who dare us to address our pasts and consider our roots. The works of Memphis authors and poets like Courtney Miller Santo, Margaret Skinner, David Williams, Ashley Roach-Freiman, and Aaron Brame help us discover how deeply our shared experiences and histories connect us. And the work of those who balance writing with community building, writers like Richard Alley and Nat Akin, help us to see a way forward.

During times like these, when every day feels like an assault on our rational sensibilities, art helps us make sense of the swamp. It is only right that we, as Memphians, do our part to support these folks whose works help us right ourselves, mentally and emotionally. Artists, and the organizations that support them, need your help. Pay artists what they are worth. There is no reason why our city’s most talented and dedicated creatives and the organizations that support them should face so many financial roadblocks, given how much they contribute to our city’s well-being. If your resistance does not account for our artists and their art, then you should reconsider your resistance.

Troy L. Wiggins is a Memphian and writer whose work has appeared in Memphis Noir anthology, Make Memphis magazine and The Memphis Flyer.