Posted by alexandra_k on June 3, 2020, at 20:52:45
In reply to Re: contempt, posted by alexandra_k on June 3, 2020, at 20:22:00
I went to a protest in Auckland.
It was a bit hard to tell what it was about / what it was supposed to be about.
I went because I saw it advertised as 'solidarity' for the wrongfulness of Floyd's death.
And because the thing that I found the hardest (that I never got over) about my trip to North Carolina (Chapel Hill in particular) was how there was only 1 black graduate student. 1 black (temporary, I think) Philosophy faculty. How the majority of black people I was were not actually chained together working the roads... But it wasn't such a stretch to imagine the actual chains in place (still) while they were still in fact working the roads...
How people jumped up for me when I got on the bus. How black men were afraid of me, yes.
I didn't like how that made me feel. I caught their feeling, you see. I don't like to feel afraid, like that. I don't like to feel that I am specially priviledged. I don't like to feel that I get the best seat on the bus because I'm a white female when that gentleman over there looks a bit frail and could make better use of it...
I have a Duke hoodie. Which is a bit weird because Chapel Hill was my actual sponser... I mean... THey are a bit of a system... But anyway... It was largely because when I was there I got to audit a course in graduate level cognitive neuroscience and I realised I really really really really really wanted to be doing the neuroanatomy summer intensive with the Med students more than anything else... ANd Chapel Hill wouldn't let me audit biology / biological psychology...
Anyway...
I wore it. Which was perhaps not the right thing to do. Because I suppose wearing 'team' things are supposed to enduce or inspire feelings of pride. You would wear things like that to a sports event or similar. And it wasn't the time to be feeling (or expressing anything that might be seen to be) an expression of pround to be anything much in America, right now...
I got a few puzzled looks. And I felt it was maybe inappropriate, I guess. If anyone had have asked me I would have said what I did about my experience of racism in North Carolina, though.
The guy who sold me his music CD for 10 bucks and a Marlboro -- because I could spare those things. And my conversation with him is probably the thing that stands out the most in my whole time there... How he asked me if there were 'people like him' in NZ and I said 'no, we don't really have African-Americans in NZ...' Though I think we actually do, now, I didn't know of any when I was growing up...
Someone wore a 'make American Great Again' cap and it got removed from him and burned. After he was... A bit antagonistic to an African American woman who asked him repeatedly to explain why he was wearing it. She was visibly upset and trying to rationally understand and he was dismissive of her upset and argumentative / antagonistic.
I would have turned my sweater inside out if anyone had have said they found it offensive in the circumstances. That wasn't my intent.
It took some time to unfold what the protest meant in NZ, I think.
I mean...
Retrospectively...
Because nobody waited for or expected the US consulate to send out a representative to speak to the crowd. That was clearly not the expectation.
So what we we doing protesting (violating level 3 lockdown) in this part of the world?
The largest banners were against arming the police in New Zealand.
THe Black Power (a NZ Maori gang) had a flag...
Sang the Haka...
Who is most likely to be the victim of armed police in NZ?
They are.
Rival gangs did not show up.
They didn't need to. Under the circumstances...
Apparently our pwn police statistics are that Maori and Pacific are 7x as likely to be arrested / tried in courts than non Maori and Pacific.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1110440
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20200325/msgs/1110464.html