Arnoldo Garcia
Blinded by Color, Unbound by Place: Trayvon Martin
Dedicated to my children and our future together
To the youth, the boys and girls in my neighborhood struggling to live and to their present together.
We must defend ourselves,
you and me, from whiteness, white supremacy.
George Zimmerman was
Latino? Was Zimmerman a white Hispanic? No. Zimmerman is a Hispanic/Latino mask
with a white soul. There are no such humans, Latino, white. (There are
Hispanics, but he isn’t one.) Additionally, there are few if any Latino or
Brown on Black killings. This is another subject we have to talk about, when
our Mexican youth hurt and kill other Mexican youth, when our African American
youth hurt and kill other African American youth. Where is the outrage, the
breaking of windows, the marches, the call for responsibility and safety, the
disarming of the violence when Norteño kills Sureño? Black on Black, Brown on
Brown violence is also police violence. Where do the guns and ammo come from,
who licenses the arms and weapons that flood our communities, who regulates and
distributes the guns, rifles, the violence and coercion that make our
neighborhoods unsafe?
The Zimmerman murder
of Trayvon Martin was a racist murder, a white violence that is terrorizing us
all, a white supremacy that has hundreds of years of violent practice in
violent subjugation and genocide and prisons and schools and the mentalities
that permit them. Whiteness is not an illusion; it is very real and yet it is a
delusion.
We are all very
specific, concrete people. If you consider yourself white and antiracist, you
are still part of the racist problem. If you consider yourself Latino and are
antiracist you are still part of the racist problem. I feel troubled when I
hear partner activists, who are progressive and still say they are white.
Whiteness must be berated and negated, not the people who claim that identity.
We have to separate the whites from the whiteness and that will take some real
work. Whiteness has caused and continues causing harm and trauma to our
communities of colors. Whiteness is a bipolar world, i.e. insanity with state
power and institutions that make us believe, coerces us, imprisons us in cages
or classrooms, that whiteness is the ultimate form of humanness.
White is a color,
not a culture, not a people. The same goes for black. Black is a color, not a
culture, not a people. White, black, brown, these are the identities of
racialization, homogenization, which are the function and power of
colonization, empire and imperialism over our consciousness and communities,
the destruction of our very being and powers.
I am not oblivious
(or too ignorant either) of the historical nature of these identities. To
destroy and dismantle whiteness, it is not enough for us to call ourselves
people of color, Black, Brown. Whites have to stop calling themselves whites
and take responsibility for the legacy they have lived and are living under,
the privilege of racialized empire-building and the American dream.
Black is beautiful. So is white beautiful?
Brown is beautiful. Are those the
only colors of the rainbow and the natural world that are beautiful? Is beauty
in the gaze of the beholder? Is beauty a racial justice struggle like demanding
justice for Trayvon? If Zimmerman is Latino, does that change the nature of the
murder he committed against Trayvon Martin? Or must he be white, as I am
arguing, for the nature of the killing to change?
What the verdict
does not change and can never change is that a white man killed a Black,
African American teenager. This story will never change. This is the story that
we must change.
So many questions;
so much rage and so little time to answer all of them. And Trayvon Martin and
hundreds of other African America and Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan,
Honduran, Purepecha, Mixtec, Zapotec, et. al., are still dead from police
violence or zombies in perpetual prison or endless criminalization.
We are not
minorities either. Minority is a political project of colonialism and then U.S.
imperial designs. A minority is a person, a place and a people who lack
self-determination and vision – which are imposed by the so-called “majority.”
The U.S. plans the future of all peoples and that future is for them to become
minorities. (Note: if we count all whites the way whites count us in the
Census, whites would be the minorities: 5% German there, 5% Irish there [I
know, I know, Irish are not white, but who’s counting?], 5% Anglos here, 5%
French, 3% Scottish, 15% Indio or
Mexican – boom!)
We are not
undocumented. We have enough documents to proof our history and existence that
goes back at least 15,000 years. We just do not have the documents that prove
we are a minority that knows its place in the uni-polarized world of the U.S.
That is the purvey of immigration authority: you are not here and you do not
exist until we say who you are and that you exist to serve us, disposable,
deportable, guest worker, bracero,
immigrant.
I am not a Latino. I
am a Mexican. And even then I am a very specific type of Mexican, descended
from Palestinian and Purepecha black and indio
roots.
In the struggle for
liberation and clarity in revolutionary transformations and reforms, civil
rights and human rights and neo-liberalism, I have been dubbed Mexican, white, Mexican-American,
Mexican American, Chicano, Hispanic, Latino, Brown (another color of
racialization, etc.). Now we have the choice of Hispanic. Oh, I am not nor ever
will be from Hispania.
In another country
in the Americas, for example, you can buy your whiteness, literally, without
changing your color. You have money, you buy a document that declares you
white.
You can do the same
thing in the U.S. You can get your whiteness in the U.S. in one of two ways:
With money and with identity (or both). What we are called, what we call
ourselves, is the struggle for a new type of self-determination and liberty.
First strategy: Get
rich (or die trying?) – or at least become part of the stable working class,
i.e. middle class. And you buy your way into the gated communities or at least
afford to live in the gentrified neighborhoods or districts where at least
12-15% of the residents are white. Violá – you are not white but you have
bought the trappings of safety and wellbeing that whites enjoy without even a
second thought about how they got this way.
How do you know you
live in a gentrified neighborhood or district? Call the police for assistance
and see how long it takes them to arrive or if they even show up.
The second way to
buy whiteness is through identity.
Call yourself
Hispanic, Latino. Poof you are white. Hispanic, Latino means: “Hey, you can’t
deport me! I pay taxes; I work legitimately. I am not ‘Black.’ I am hard
working, tax-paying family man. I am not a criminal!”
Agree to forget your
history and your past and delude yourself into thinking that you are not the
color of your dark skin, that you are not from here, and no one else will
notice because you say who you are and you live in the right neighborhood.
And both of these
and other ways are delusional. You are not white, you are black. You are not Hispanic,
you are Mexican.
You are not Mexican,
you are an Indio, an Indian who has
been here longer than anyone else who is NOT Indio.
Your are not middle
class, you are not rich; you are hand-to-mouth, paycheck to paycheck working
class bum, filled with anxiety and worry that you will become unemployed,
unemployable, homeless and black or worse end up in the barrio or ghetto.
I am not a Hispanic.
Note: There are Hispanics, people
who are from Spain or descended from Spanish who settle her in colonies and made
colonization a way of life; who spoke Castilian, the language of the
castle-imperial kings/queens. There is a 350+year old Hispanic community that
settled and continues living in a region straddled by New Mexico and Colorado
in the U.S. southwest. The royal academy of the Spanish language has studied
this Hispanic region for years because 15th or 16th century Spanish
is still spoken there.
Hispanic is also a
synonym for whiteness; Hispanics are from Europe, hence white. To erase Indios and Mexicans from the U.S.,
sometime in the 1960s and 1970s, the state power decided to count us Hispanic.
Poof, you’re gone.
When dark-skinned
Mexicans want to delude themselves, they say they are Hispanics, when they are
indigenous and have been here longer than anyone else, free or slave, black or
white, European, Asian, African.
Hispanic is a very
recent creation, a tool of subordination, domination and soul crushing
destruction of people. The Hispanics themselves, Spaniards, Spanish, created
this identity to crush the indigenous peoples of what is now Spain: Basques, etc.
I am not an American
in the U.S. “American” as an identity in the U.S. has been confiscated,
expropriated, corroded and made unusable for everyone except whites. In my world, América is a continent not a country.
American is a
synonym for whiteness and Americans barely tolerate anyone else using it. In
their imperial, neocolonial kindness, whites are doing to us what they did to themselves.
By changing their names, they gave themselves the authority to take whatever
they wanted, all for short-term gain and long-term, continual disaster upon the
world’s peoples and the natural world herself.
In the end, none of
this is important if we do not stand up for Trayvon Martin and hundreds, maybe
tens of thousands of other victims of racist violence. More critical, can we
prevent this from happening again? Will you befriend, mentor all the Trayvon
Martins of my neighborhood or are you afraid of Black and Brown Buffalo youth,
boys and girls, men and women, hooded and unhooded, middle class or homeless?
I do not want to see
another movie of our tragedies made. Why didn’t anyone make a movie of Oscar
Grant when he was alive? Why didn’t we care nationally or even locally about Trayvon before he became
Trayvon? What about Zimmerman? He is still the killer and will be for all time. Will
he find redemption? How does he continue living with blood on his hands? How does the U.S. continue functioning with so much war, blood, injustices and suffering at home and abroad? Will we prevent another Zimmerman from appearing? Will I
throw myself in front of the bullets meant for my Trayvon, will you?
*
P.S. we must talk, all of us of all the colors and pigments. We must talk to say who we are, where we are at and where we are going. We can exist without this world, we can thrive as communities in a different relationship. The U.S. formation is not the only world possible. Our language, our vocabularies, our self-determined beings, our relationships can change to make good our lives; we all want to be in a better relationship than the ones that permitted the emergence of Zimmermans and the criminalization of the Trayvons and the violence and coercion that codified it. We are the ones who can make this possible by being different and sometimes just by being who we are supposed to be.
Notes, Oakland, July 14, 2013.
