On the Other Side of Freedom
Page 11
I wonder sometimes if in the way I can remember Joan without sadness there will come a day that I can look back on this America without the pain and trauma we’ve endured being so present. I too am often seduced by the false distance of history. I want to believe in a progress so sweeping that I can ignore how present the trauma still is. And sometimes the false distance keeps me sane. In the way that I had to re-remember Joan, I have had to re-remember my relationship with America. I’d like to think that I created a space for Joan and me to reconnect, and that we did reconnect was because she was making a space for me too in whatever way made the most sense to her, and that our spaces finally overlapped.
What we remember and how we re-member it shapes our future, shapes the way we move in the world. And memory is always a choice.
I have agency in how I remember Joan as time goes by and how I tell that story, to the world and to myself. We have agency about how we remember our collective past and how we allow those stories to be told. I hope that the truth, in all its thorniness, is what we remember.
NINE
The Friend That’s Always Awake
But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.
—ZADIE SMITH
On a hot spring day in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin did not know that she was making history. The people making history rarely do. But she knew that up until then, she had been presented with a false choice: either she could remain silent in the face of oppression, or she could challenge the status quo and become a martyr in her turn. But she knew that there was a third option, as there often is—there was a way to engage in resistance that could lead to a more lasting fundamental change. She was on a bus on her way home from school when it became crowded to the point that all the seats designated for white people were full. Inevitably, she was asked to vacate her seat for a white person who wanted it, and she refused. Her words describing the day she refused to stand still echo:
One of them said to the driver in a very angry tone, “Who is it?” The motorman pointed at me. I heard him say, “That’s nothing new . . . I’ve had trouble with that ‘thing’ before.” He called me a “thing.” They came to me and stood over me and one said, “Aren’t you going to get up?” I said, “No, sir.” He shouted “Get up” again. I started crying, but I felt even more defiant. I kept saying over and over, in my high-pitched voice, “It’s my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it’s my constitutional right!” I knew I was talking back to a white policeman, but I had had enough.*
Colvin, along with Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, and Susie McDonald were the plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court case that led to the desegregation of public transportation. Colvin’s story is too often a missing story, the story of a fifteen-year-old soon-to-be-unwed mother swapped for that of Rosa Parks, who, with seemingly less baggage, was a better fit to be the face of a movement. It took a Supreme Court case for her experience to be documented, for an author writing years later to tell her story. I think of her often when I think about the promise of the social media tools we have at our disposal. What about her story would have been told differently had it been shown live, or documented via text in real time? What of her fullness as a person, coupled with the bravery of her confrontation and its implications, would we have been forced to engage?
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PROFESSOR JO ANN ROBINSON knew that the conditions in Montgomery had reached a tipping point. In the middle of the night, she made a stencil and pressed over thirty-five thousand flyers that she, along with two of her students, distributed to high school students in Montgomery, Alabama, thus sparking the Montgomery bus boycott. In describing the feeling of victory when the bus boycott was successful, she noted:
We felt that we were somebody, that somebody had to listen to us, that we had forced the white man to give what we knew was a part of our own citizenship . . . and so we had won that. And if you have never had the feeling to feel that this is not the other man’s country and you are an alien in it, but that this is your country, too, then you don’t know what I’m talking about.*
Hers is another missing story. And while we can imagine the ability of social media to tell the story, one can only imagine what someone like Professor Robinson would have done with a series of tools that could instantly engage audiences far and wide, audiences not tethered to sheets of paper.
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HISTORY IS THE ACCUMULATION of our stories. Stories help us make sense of the choices we’ve made, of the choices we’re afraid to make, and of those choices made for us that define our lives. There is a reason we tell stories. The world we live in doesn’t always make sense. Or it is so unpredictable that we need tools, devices, and images to help us process its pace and flow. We tell stories to remember, to pass on what we’ve learned, to nurture the thread of progress. Our stories give meaning to moments and birth new ones. They organize what is exceptional in ways that are understandable.
As our stories were once passed on generation to generation via word of mouth, then written and read, then seen on screen, the internet has now changed our proximity to each other’s thoughts, putting us in unprecedented closeness with one another minute to minute. We now digitally chronicle the mundane and paramount aspects of our lives in ways that few predicted, and we are still coming to understand the consequences.
Perhaps because of this, the world feels as if it has moved quicker in the past decade than in all the years preceding it. The stakes feel as high as any I’ve ever lived through. In a political and social climate in which the fabric of our democracy has been laid bare, in all of its fragility, and the scaling back of hard-fought wins seems imminent, there’s a palpable urgency in the information swirling about us.
Sometimes the speed with which all of this information moves is our friend. It allows us to organize, to respond, to anticipate, and to plan better than we could have in its absence. It lets us discover and share new voices, perspectives, ideas. Other times, speed is our foe. Like a game of telephone, information can move so quickly that we gain a good story—at times the story we want to believe—at the expense of the truth. We’re in a time when fact and fiction, truth and lies, move with equal speed. And narratives can travel so far from the truth so quickly that we can become stuck between remembering and correcting. And too often lies outlive the truth.
The narrative gatekeepers have fallen. Tweets can lead to revolution. Instagram videos can give rise to careers. Facebook posts can register more voters than any party. And people can access and reinforce the stories they want to believe, and find a community of willing believers, in ways that are unparalleled in our history. The digital landscape has enhanced both our ability to tell stories and our responsibility to tell the truth.
In no uncertain terms, Twitter saved our lives. If it were not for Twitter, the elected leaders in Ferguson and in Missouri would have tried to convince you that we did not exist, that there were not thousands of us in the street night after night, refusing to be silent. We never had to wait for the newspaper or the nightly news to capture the events of the night; we could capture them ourselves. Critics of the movement have accused us of “chasing cameras” during the protests. I have to remind them that we were the cameras! For those of us who were there, we saw the power of social media platforms to allow us to do things that were unimaginable before, like moving crowds of five thousand people or mapping out actions across an entire city. The largest and most coordinated of all of our actions during the protests was Occupy SLU (St. Louis University), which was the brainchild of Dhoruba Shakur and Tribe X and executed by Kayla Reed, Leon Kemp, and a few others. On that night, we moved two crowds of approximately three thousand people to break a police barricade and to occupy a university all via Twitter and Vine.
We often think of storytelling in the oral tradition or in the written tradition, in books and articles. We think of the author telling us their account and then responses to that account. But the protests in Ferguson were the proof point that collective storytelling is possible, that many people all talking about the same event in real time is another way, a powerful way, to tell a story. It was no longer a matter of whether you trusted one person’s account or the news platform, but whether you were tuned in while thousands of people explained the world they were experiencing. Collective storytelling, though, is fraught with the same perils as every other mode of storytelling—sometimes the collective can fix itself to a narrative rooted more in imagination than fact. Russia’s ability to generate false stories that were seen by millions of individuals during the 2016 presidential election is a testament to this fact.
When falsehoods become accepted thought, there are real consequences for how we understand the world. We have a responsibility, and daily make a choice, to unpack and challenge the ideas that are carried in stories, to refine and inspect our language, and to correct false narratives despite the cost or discomfort. The things we upvote and the things we downvote, what we choose to click on (and not), and, most important, what we choose to share, now determine “truth.”
We have not always had a shared experience to highlight the danger of the false narrative. We do now. “Post-truth,” the Oxford Dictionaries 2016 Word of the Year, is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In the past year, we have seen the impact that a post-truth culture can have on both the lived reality and the psyche of communities. It’s tempting to think we have also seen segments of this country choose between a good story and the truth, with the good story often being one that appeals to emotion and personal belief despite the facts. But in truth we are all guilty of this to a certain extent. Those less educated among us may be more susceptible to it, but the desire to believe the story that aligns with what we already feel to be true is natural. Sometimes it is real work to get to the truth.
Trump is an excellent, insidious storyteller who thrives in the false narrative. Of course, he is not the first or only politician to take advantage of the ignorance of the American body politic, or to play on stereotypes or long-standing divisions. He is, however, the first president who has truly plied this trade using the tools of social media. His delivery of intentional disinformation* preys on his opponents’ steadfast commitment to the moral high ground even if it leads to their destruction; the public’s belief in a basic level of integrity; the collective lack of knowledge about governmental minutiae; and the latent racism that still undergirds so much of society. Like no president before him, he and his team use the tools of direct outreach, coupled with a television and radio infrastructure to be a direct voice to the people, telling them what they want to hear or feel at the expense of the truth. Trump has exploited the fact that the gatekeepers have fallen, and has used his stature to position himself as the truth teller in chief.
Trump knows, for instance, that the public are not experts on Defense Department procurement savings, the Guantánamo release process, or international taxes. This is why he can state that he was able to negotiate $600 million in savings on F-35 fighter jets, when in reality those cost savings were negotiated before he took office.* He can boldly proclaim that “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield,” when the truth is that 113 of them were released under George W. Bush, not Obama.* He has repeatedly said too that “we are the highest-taxed nation in the world,” when the nonpartisan Pew Research Center has consistently noted that American taxes are below average relative to other developed countries.* While these issues in and of themselves aren’t game changers, they are a vivid reminder that even the most demonstrably false statements can ring true for those who want them to be. And when policies or pronouncements that are unequivocally false are made true, it reinforces the notion that nothing is out of bounds. It highlights the choice we face as American people: do we accept that some things are true regardless of how they make us feel, or do we accept that there can be multiple truths—“alternative facts” with no bearing on reality whatsoever?
Under this president, we have endured an administration repeatedly and deliberately lying to the American people. To Trump, the narrative is always subordinate to the ideas being conveyed, and he will use any combination of facts and lies to anchor an idea. And he traffics in exclusion, employing racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy with a flagrancy not seen in recent memory. Whenever he references Obama, he is always suggesting that he has done better, already, than the black man who preceded him, as with the Defense Department procurement issue and the Guantánamo releases, despite them being lies. Whenever he mentions Chicago, he is actively linking danger and the need for increased law enforcement with the presence of black bodies.
Trump aims to distance us so intensely from the facts that in our attempts to find the truth, fatigue besets us. The daily task of truth finding is one that is often too much to engage in at the level that is now necessary. And so people accept statements as true until proven otherwise. By the time a false narrative has been identified as such, it has traveled far and wide. Trump’s strategy is to keep you on the defense, spending more time rebutting his lies than developing a plan to actually address his proposals and policies. He seems to have understood, quicker than the media or the broader public, that his base would reframe bold lies as all-too-rare moments of candid honesty in a corrupt political sphere. That they would read his racism as national pride; his sexism as just the normal behavior of powerful men; and his hypocrisy as the cost of being a businessman. It is the ease with which Trump lies with no semblance of self-inquiry or shame that is perhaps the most unsettling thing about him and his team. His very political ascendancy began with him telling a racist story that turned into the birther movement.*
We cannot forget that the media consistently gave platforms to Trump’s stories, only now realizing that they also gave a platform to the ideas that those stories carried. His rise is a case study in what happens when the media is controlled by those who have rarely, if ever, been victims of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and white supremacy; his ideas weren’t personally dangerous to them, and so they gave him a platform. In some ways, they are still complicit, even now, by pushing a soul-searching narrative for Democrats, suggesting that the party fundamentally misread the electorate while seeming to ignore the fact that Clinton won the popular vote by over 3 million votes, and that the margin of victory amounted to less than 100,000 votes spread out over a few key states.
They seem to simultaneously suggest that Trump was addressing the needs of the electorate and that Democrats are mistaken in their priorities. This is not to say that reflection and course correction are not necessary, but here the media is complicit in pushing the narrative that somehow Clinton’s inherent weaknesses, coupled with Trump’s lies, manipulations, and overt appeals to racist and nationalist undercurrents, should lead Democrats to fundamentally reassess their policies, practices, and relationship with key voting blocs, as though it’s time to clean house. That in a sense, she should have done more of what Trump did. For instance, that instead of apologizing for her “deplorables” comment, she should have doubled down. Or that she should’ve fomented division, demonized Trump supporters, and appealed to the most base instincts of her most ardent supporters. E
ven the Russian influence wasn’t taken seriously until recently.
If you’ve ever caught a liar lying and tried to ask them a direct question, they have likely responded with a story. Liars are master storytellers. It’s their power. They know that ideas travel in stories. We have a moral obligation to track and respond to lies. Indeed, in the face of false narratives we must always respond, because not to reply is to allow them to continue to permeate hearts and minds.
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IF TRUMP’S FALSE NARRATIVES reinforce the importance of constantly pushing back, the case of Dylann Roof reinforces the understanding that language itself serves both in determining and promoting the false narrative.
It is perhaps our arrogance that leads us to believe that we shape language, rather than the reality that language shapes us too. The stories we tell about perpetrators of violence, especially racial violence, function as their own type of power. Consider how the media covered Dylann Roof.
On a Sunday evening in June 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof opened fire in the basement of the historically black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine parishioners. “I chose Charleston because it is most [sic] historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country,” read a line from Roof’s racist manifesto, which was presented as evidence against him during his trial. He continued: