Challenge The Narrative

The narratives that dominate our media landscape are about us but not by us. This profound disconnect continues to inflict harm on the disabled community in palpable ways. As someone who has dealt with chronic illness for more than a decade, the reduction of protections reinforces that my life does not matter, that disabled lives do not matter, that we are all disposable. 

The disability community has been screaming about covid’s mass disabling event since the beginning of the pandemic – they warned the world about the dangers, and no one listened.

One of my autoimmune diseases severely affects my muscles, which become stiff and painful during a flare-up and limit my ability to walk. Mornings are, without question, harder on me. However, because local policy lifted mask mandates, I can no longer shop when it is best for my body to do so. I must go early in the mornings in order to limit my risk of exposure. If I am having a good day and have managed not to pull a back muscle while carrying my groceries from my car, I nearly collapse from exhaustion and pain by the time I open the front door. Part of me feels like I just conquered the world, but I sigh because I know what the rest of the day has in store for me. 

I know what it looks and feels like to navigate a health care system that would rather label you with “anxiety” than getting to the root of your health issues. Those now suffering from long covid are propelled into a system that crumples, shuffles, and discards people like old newspapers. This type of experience I do not wish on anyone, including those actively working against measures to protect people from this treacherous virus. 

My own family mocked my illness for years. I eventually stopped going to family functions and avoided showing any pain or sickness I was experiencing around them. Not only did my own family not believe that I was sick, they mocked and made fun of me for it. Their ableist response assigned my illness to a personal weakness. I was not eating the right foods, doing the right exercises, and taking the right supplements. I internalized these notions, so much so, that I started to downplay the actual progression of my illness. Had it not been for my daughter who witnessed my physical deterioration, I could have ended up much worse. 

In my case, it took almost 13 years, several specialists, hundreds of tests, and thousands of dollars to receive my diagnosis. I know I am one of the lucky ones. Many of us live with debilitating and painful conditions that go undertreated, ignored, and undiagnosed by medical professionals.

My immune system is consistently compromised.

So when people argue that masks are an infringement of their freedoms – think about what that says to people like me. 

All I am asking is that you see me as a person.

#DisabledLivesMatter -Imani Barbarin 

The century-old assertion of body autonomy does not wane when pressed against harsh policy designed to diminish it. Despite the historical shifts in customs and legislation, abortions will not stop. Women will break the law and subject themselves to dangerous, even fatal procedures, to procure it.[1] The recent Texan outcry raised under the guise of morality is not about the procedure itself. Though, their unilateral response, however, dictates who has access to it. 

Texas has cemented a policy that disproportionately targets specific individuals. This abhorrent racialization and class inequity means that these women will be the ones that are “butchered and maimed.” [2] Deputizing wayward citizens monetarily incentivized to enforce an unconstitutional practice, ensures the terrorization of women exercising self-determination. 

Decades ago, trailblazing women like Shirley Chisholm pointedly addressed the underbelly of the beast, demanding that society truthfully reckons with what reproductive restrictions really mean. She argued that the issue is about the kinds of “abortions society wants women to have – clean, competent ones performed by licensed physicians or septic, dangerous ones done by incompetent practitioners.” [3]

I understand that Covid-19 is wholeheartedly a separate issue from abortion. However, because it is the undercurrent of our reality, it warrants a reevaluation of the types of questions we are asking about it. If you are anti-vax and anti-mask, how can you logically justify and participate in enforcing such a law? Is it the assertion of body autonomy that ignites this level of citizen policing? If we follow that logic, should we then place a legal bounty on people whose actions directly endanger school-aged children and other vulnerable populations? I didn’t think so.

Body autonomy is rejected for reproductive health, yet simultaneously applauded for anti-vax and anti-maskers. 

The regulation of a woman’s body is nothing new. However, the excuses charged with archaic restrictions shift politically and socially depending on people holding power at a particular time.

This stark juxtaposition reaffirms that the issue is not about abortion, it has never been. It is about body autonomy and punishment to those who assert it. Abortions are a privilege society affords to specific populations while simultaneously denying them to others.

[1-3] Chisholm, Shirley. “Facing the Abortion Question.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought, 389-395. New York: The New York Press, 1995.

George Washington reigned over his plantation at Mount Vernon, enslaving hundreds of people, when he took office as the first president of the United States. A cabinet position that abruptly uprooted him from his southern plantation and propelled him to Philadelphia in 1790. Despite northern practices and laws in opposition to slavery, Washington sought to keep people enslaved whatever the cost.  In fact, Washington hide his ambitions as a slaveholder, and preferred to “deceive the public if necessary.”^[1] The intervals in which he rotated out enslaved people in Philadelphia, was a concerted effort to subvert local law, ensuring that “his property” could never legally seek a path to freedom. Washington realized the danger of relocation and wrote that, “if his slaves knew that they had a right to freedom, it would make them insolent in the state of slavery.”^[2] Despite Washington’s careful selection of those identified as “loyal and less likely to runaway”, the move to Philadelphia spawned their attempts to do exactly that. Washington’s unremitting pursuit of escaped enslaved women by the name of Ona Judge, reveals his cunning character, one he sought tirelessly to hide from the public.

This Washington, the man who stood as the first president of America and led the unrelenting crusade of Ona Judge until his very deathbed, is the Washington that stands on the campus of Miami University.

In order to understand how a statue of Washington ended up on the Miami campus, a fundamental dive into America’s fascination with Civil War imagery must be examined. The current debate over Civil War iconography may appear complex and hotly contested, but America’s fascination with Confederate imagery is simple: unwavering fixation to white supremacy.

If a visual representation in the form of monuments can be used as a tool to shape the public narrative, what happens when these statues pervert history? What happens to the American consciousness when its iconography serves as a deception to our past?

It is no coincidence that the saturation of confederate imagery occurred during two pivotal periods in American history. Confederate statues littering our nation’s landscape, immediately followed Reconstruction and again during the Civil Rights Movement. The acceleration of public architecture symbolized the concerted effort to reinsert and resurrect white supremacy, when public sentiment had witnessed it wane. Both eras confronted the legacy of racial animus and the devastating political, economic and social impact that it fueled in its wake. The thinly veiled principles that held African Americans as inferior were not erased from public memory after the Civil War, they flourished. Former enslaved man by the name of Frederick Douglass foresaw this danger and warned that white supremacist principles would endure, “in what new skin will the old snake come forth?”^[3] These beliefs of white supremacy evolved into a national crusade to mask racist systems and structures upholding them. Monuments were displayed across our nation in jubilee, solely intended to inflame the racist convictions deeply rooted in the foundation of this country.

America had an opportunity to reimagine a society after the Civil War, to create a system outside of slavery,^[4] but instead promoted it’s return. The political, social and economic gains African Americans made during the late 19th century threatened the very infrastructure of white power. A framework that, if weakened, could endanger both the power and status of Northern elites and the planter class in the South. Therefore, these gains had to be disemboweled. The backlash of Reconstruction and reversal of Black political power delivered state sanctioned violence and extralegal terror to enforce it.^[5] An integral part of manifesting the principles of racial inferiority was to take control of the historical narrative of America; to conjure slavery and the confederate soldiers who fought to maintain it, as noble men. Spewing the myth of nobility into what became known as the Lost Cause had reverberating effects across the nation.

The cult of the Lost Cause gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and has fostered more than a century of racial violence and disenfranchisement of African Americans. It was a political message extolling the fable of confederate virtue. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates described the reunion after the Civil War as a “comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence” a story of the “white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport which could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor and elan.”^[6]

The process of downplaying the horrors of enslavement spurred a new era of noble cause imagery. The reality of rape, torture and exploitation took a backseat to pictures falsely reimagining slavery. But, the revisionist images of slavery, nor the barbarous ways in which African Americans were depicted were not sufficient on their own, the corroboration of monuments proved indispensable to their mission.

Laws are just words written on paper if they aren’t upheld by society.  The decades of Jim Crow, well-maintained by white communities at large, designed to strip African Americans of basic human rights were, once again, being confronted across America. This new surge of monuments was a direct retaliation for a number of legal victories Black Americans gained during the Civil Rights Movement. Because the legal battles challenging racial discrimination triumphed in court, manifestations of de facto practices materialized throughout the country. Historian Dr. Williams stated that these statues are not, “harmless remembrances of an honorable war but our deepest shame as a nation”… And we cannot “celebrate those who denied freedom to others.”^[7]

The statue of George Washington at Miami University cannot escape this same historical scrutiny just because he didn’t live during the Civil War. He was inextricably tied to slavery as a slave owner and denied freedom to hundreds of people. These monuments must come down from our public landscape because, as Dr. Williams said, “there are no two sides about it.”^[8] However, the principles fastened to their origins of construction cannot be erased. They must shape our pedagogical approaches to American history, spill out into the words of textbooks, and into the lesson plans of teachers. Removing these monuments does not remove our responsibility as educators, as citizens, and as individuals from our obligation to dismantle the racist structures and systems that erected them in the first place.

These racist tropes do more than muddle our national landscape, they preserve the very symbols of hate, terror and inequality^[9] that America has struggled to resolve since the foundation of this country.

George Washington, founding father, first president of the United States, and avid slaveholder.

History must be told in all its complexities, not just the parts suitable for a particular audience.

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^[1] Dunbar, Erica A. Never Caught: The Washington’s Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

^[2] Dunbar. Never Caught: The Washington’s Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.

^[3] Why are there some many confederate monuments, season 2 episode 26, PBS, 2019.

^[4]  Why are there some many confederate monuments.

^[5] “The Defining Moment: A Conversation with Sherrilyn Ifill and Bryan Stevenson”, Lecture, Legal Defense Fund, 22 Oct 2020.

^[6] Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

^[7] Williams, Yohuru. “No Two Sides about It, Confederate Statues Must Come Down.” The Progressive, Aug. 8, 2017.

^[8] Williams. “No Two Sides about It, Confederate Statues Must Come Down.”

^[9] Williams. “No Two Sides about It, Confederate Statues Must Come Down.”

In a discussion with a new acquaintance of mine who holds steadfast to proclaimed progressive views, while simultaneously participating in gentrification living in Denver’s “Harlem of the West”, race relations in America came up. And the conversation quickly spiraled into his own personal crisis with white identity. For him, a black sports newscaster on ESPN serves as both a trigger and an outlet to spew his racial animosity. From “why can’t he call white guys brother”, “I have a black friend”, to “I can’t even listen to him, I change the channel.” 

What he did was forcefully insert his presence to center the conversation around whiteness. In a visceral fashion, the immediate response of where, when and how to voice dissent quickly became prominent. Stealing the narrative and distracting from the message using antiquated tools of white supremacy is a century old protocol. After 30 minutes of an uninterrupted rant, when pointedly asked, he could not recall the context of the newscasters message because it was his “delivery” that he was hung up on. I am interested in the message – not in the tone or the delivery of it. This circular conversation unequivocally proves another iteration of whiteness is as strong as ever simply because the message wasn’t palatable for his liking. 

Repeatedly voicing, “it is about delivery, the tone, the way the message is being delivered. All he does is complain and bitch instead of talking about solutions… the message is getting lost because he’s angry – I am just tired of it, it’s not like I owned slaves.” 

While I understand there is a lot to unpack, I do not have the time to unravel it – so I will summarize. The white community always attempts to place itself at the forefront of these conversations, proclaiming they are for racial equality, while simultaneously criticizing, vilifying and outright dismissing the black community for the way in which the message of structural, cultural and institutional oppression is delivered. What he views as complaining and bitching, I see as historical violence and the perpetuation of intergenerational trauma rooted in the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and racial oppression. 

It is moments like these where Toni Morrison warned that, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” Until we can have an honest conversation about the legacy of racism in this country, and as Bryan Stevenson pointedly said, “we can’t recover from history until we deal with it.”

Interactions like this, reaffirm how critical and important this work is. We still have a very long way to go.

And no I don’t hate white people, but I will be the first to call you out on your bullshit.

As I drove into Dearfield Friday morning, I couldn’t help but imagine just how different it might look had America held true to the promises of life, liberty and freedom – for all its citizens. Dearfield should not be viewed as a failed township, but rather a monument of love, innovation and triumph. Though currently a ghost town, the significance and contributions made by Dearfield’s residents cannot be overlooked. The legacy of Dearfield shines brighter than the remnants of its remaining standing structures. Dearfield serves as a metaphor in the struggle for racial equality on a local, national and global scale. Despite countless setbacks, overwhelming and insurmountable odds, the community of Dearfield’s determination proved immeasurable. Their innovation, success, strength and unity as an independent township resonated in the hearts of all its residents. And their collective message of love and perseverance continues to transcend across generations. Dearfield is a testament to the power, beauty and cultural heritage of the Black community.

Dearfield reminds us of the importance of understanding how the past informs our present, in order to see that where we are now is a direct relation to where we have been. The aim of H.R. 40 begins by holding America accountable, and not solely for enslavement and our crimes against humanity, it is much deeper than that, but for centuries of customs and policies that continue to perpetuate racial inequality, which serve to maintain conditions tantamount to slavery. That is where we must begin.