This diary considers the Republican party and its relationship to white hegemony. So Momma D comes to Washington. Disenfranchised, traumatized, rightfully exasperated, and equipped with too many stories to recount, she arrives to the Congressional hearing ready to air her concerns. Rep. McKinney is receptive, and Momma Dee understands McKinney to be responsible for this rare opportunity to articulate her concerns. Momma Dee showers her with gifts.
Equally outraged, McKinney prefaces the inquiry with three words whose resonance falls on the deaf ears of her Republican colleagues: poverty, war, inequality. And she repeats: poverty, war, inequality.
McKinney desires to address the New Orleans's residents concerns, but these concerns, she not so tacitly admonishes, are the products of three vectors of oppression currently operative in American society: poverty, inequality, war. But Mr. Christopher Shays, a vulnerable Republican from Connecticut, chooses to invalidate the five New Orleanians sitting before and below him in an egregiously categorical manner. "All of you are under oath," he begins, and "I just can't believe what I have heard."
The interrogation begins. The white man with his pallid skin, flaccid cheeks and balding head stares down at his black victim, an elderly, syballine woman bedecked with a purple wrap. He asks, "Can you see the breach from your home?" She struggles to respond, explaining how she heard an explosion while sitting on her porch. "Kaboom," she yells. "Kaboom." "And what is a breach?" That they do not share a vocabulary astounds him. I guess Mr. Shays does not understand inequality.
Mr. Shays smirks. Of course he knows better. Of course this is just another invalid form of knowledge articulated by a paranoid black woman. She is probably affiliated with the Nation of Islam; she is a follower of Farrakhan. So he smirks and asks again: "Can you see the 17th Street Canal from your home?" Momma Dee attempts to answer once again, explaining the sound, explaining its relative distance from her house in relation to her post office box. She also explains she is old, but he will have none of it. "Only the facts, ma'am." "Knowledge is defined by me. How you rationalize the world is irrelevant."
No, he did not say this, but if he were honest he would have. Mr. Shays never interacted with an African-American woman from New Orleans; he never had to interact with someone who does not enjoy his educational background. So he becomes aggressive, and he almost mocks her, rendering her into an insane, doddering fool not to be trusted. Remember, he "just can't believe what you have said." And he is not about to have his presuppositions challenged. So they struggle with one another, reach a quick impasse, and he in the end dismisses her. He simply lacks the patience to try to establish a mutual understanding with a woman whose mode of speaking and perceiving radically differs from his. As Momma Dee says, "You ask me if I can see the canal. I do not even have glasses, and you are asking me if I can see." Poverty, inequality and war. And Momma Dee refuses to wear his white glasses. She refuses to have her vision shaped by white hegemony. And yes, war: a war of modes of knowledge production, but we all know who will win in the end. And the man in the pink shirt and blue tie knows this as well.
So Mr. Shays does not know how to interact with a voter unless this voter is a white woman from Connecticut. I guess he is committed to his district, just as the inpatient is committed to an insane asylum. If you are African-American, a woman from New Orleans, you better have a private school education. Otherwise, you will be made unintelligible. We all remember Anita Hill's testimony before Congress. She was made into a spectacle, a spectacle for the white, hegemonic gaze. The African-American woman whose knowledge is not to be trusted; the African-American woman whose emotions are uncontrollable; the African-American woman whose perspective is to be systematically invalidated by her oppressor. And Clarence Thomas is now on the bench. Do not even try to acknowledge the master's recognition, slave. Acquiesce immediately, and do not contradict his controlling and overly restrictive mode of producing facts.
But Momma Dee is too smart, and she showers Mr. Shays with rejoinders. And her comrade is also too smart, and she explains to Mr. Shays how offensive he finds his mode of interrogation. She explains how her experience was indeed an experience: it etched memories into her mind that will remain indelible. Mr. Shays rolls his eyes, and Momma Dee's compatriot explodes: "If had to walk in my shoes for one hour, you would believe what I believe too."
Mr. Shays has never had to walk.
Yes, belief, and how belief is shaped by experience. And how belief can make that which we and our science may view as improbable utterly factual. How malleable belief actually is. So yes, Mr. Shays, a woman's five-year-old girl and her two-year-old boy had guns pointed at them. And yes, Mr. Shays, they were forced to genuflect before soilders as if they were bowing before a god. Yes, Mr. Shays, an explosion was heard, and water rushed into the city. And yes, Mr. Shays, those in critical condition were allowed to die under the gaze of your military. And yes, Mr. Shays, anyone who saw the levee collapse did not live to describe it. But Mr. Shays, never having had to endure any adversity, just cannot accept it. "Not in my America," he thinks, but he will invoke 9-11 when it is convenient to justify a vote he made in bad faith when on the House floor.
So Mr. Shays is incredulous. He does not understand empathy; he does not understand the relativity of knowledge production; he does not understand the power of that subjective juggernaut we call belief. Only his world exists, and these African-Americans are undereducated confabulators. He decides to move on. White rationality must reign. And Momma Dee must be made into a spectacle. She must be made into so much televisual entertainment pumped into the white, suburban living room.
And then we get Mr. Miller. The mustachioed Southener tries to empathize with Momma Dee, and he engages with her amicably. But then our young outspoken woman with a college education refers to the causeway and the dumping ground in which she and many others were forced to sit as the "Causeway Concentration Camp." CCC, if you like. And yes, I like it. The CCC. It evokes the KKK, and much of what she described sounds like a nightmare the KKK conjured and brought to life three days after Katrina arrived.
But Mr. Miller, the white, Christian, mustachioed Representative from Florida, will have none of it. "Would you be offended if I asked you to not refer to the causeway as the Causeway Concentration Camp?," he quizically asks. Our college educated woman explodes. She describes the seperation of mothers from their children; she describes the segregation of bodies based on their skin color; she describes the shunting around of bodies with artillery; she describes forms of torture, including but not limited too: sleep deprivation, verbal abuse, squalor, starvation and thirst, overexposure to the sun; she describes how some had no idea what their destinations were. But Mr. Miller says there were no "gas chambers." It therefore was not a concentration camp. He then has the audacity to ask our college educated woman if she knows what a concentration camp is.
So the Southern white man wants a "gas chamber." One is not allowed to describe what appears to be the abuse and seperation of bodies in conditions that resemble a slave auction as a concentration camp. One cannot raise the specter of Nazi practices unless the gas chamber is deployed. "Only 1,000 died, Madame. Until millions are reported dead, you have no right to claim you have been oppressed."
So she too is systematically invalidated; she too is cast as the irrational object of white ideology before the Congressional Committee; she too is an Anita Hill. Mr. Miller wants his gas chamber, and he refuses to empathize with a woman's pain unless her population is nearly decimated.
And we are left to explain the arrogant behaviour of Mr. Shays and Mr. Miller. We are left with the task of trying to understand how two white men when confronted with the specter of racism, war and inequality can become so hostile and so incredulous. We are also forced to ask ourselves how our government can function when its representatives do not know how to interact with everyday Americans. McKinney and William Jefferson certainly knew how to interact with our friends from New Orleans.
Why is that the case? Do they interact with their constituents? Do they hold townhall meetings? Do they engage with human beings? Why is it impossible for Mr. Shays and for Mr. Miller to practice empathy? Why is it impossible for them to forge a mutual understanding with their interlocutors?
This is the Republican majority: white men who have no idea how to engage with those who are the victims of war, inequality and oppression. These are men who have no idea how to deal with epistemologies radically different from theirs. These are men, and woman, I might add, who believe America should have a unified experience to be shared by all. They have a fantasy of white hegemony, and if you refuse to cooperate, then you must die. And if you do not die, you will be humiliated, rendered into a televisual spectacle, so much entertainment.
So nothing will done for the people of New Orleans. The white Republicans who handle our money just refuse to help those who have been forced to live a life radically different from theirs. Mr. Shays and Mr. Miller entered hostile and left hostile, and they refuse to acknowledge these good peoples' existence.
If this is unfair, I apologize. But after watching the Congressional hearings on the treatment of African-Americans during Hurricane Katrina. I cannot help but be outraged. And in turn, I desire to humiliate the white fools who are named Mr. Shays and Mr. Miller. How dare these men reduce our fellow Americans and their modes of producing knowledge to so much nonsense. How dare they invalidate these womens' mode of producing and disseminating knowledge. But this is their Republican America, and unfortunately we will be subjected to it too, unless we choose to confront it now.
Mr. Shays and Mr. Miller must go.