...[T]o pursue the 'good,' the enslaved must forsake the very real land of their birth for a dream and maybe a nightmare, an 'icy domain' that looms 'in the hazy distance' under 'flickering light... half frozen.' Douglass's freedom is not banners or anthems, but terror that he nonetheless, embraced.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message
She informed me that the foul odor was "skunk" marijuana. She was smiling. It's her trademark.
Usually when she isn't smiling, she talking with me about my happiness here as an independent senior resident of Saxony Manor.
Taken aback, I asked what she, as the manager of Saxony Manor, planned to do about the "skunk" pot user next door to me. Is it acceptable for whites (lessee, family, or friends) to smoke cigarettes and pot? Despite the lessee's signature on the lease stating that there will be no smoking of cigarettes and certainly no recreational drug use in this complex for independent and disabled seniors! Was I paying rent to be kept out of my bedroom because of the horrible odor?
Did I see him smoking?
Two months ago, the veterinarian diagnosed my youngest and newest cat with a throat irritation. After taking out a $150 loan and spending close to $300 total on vet visits, antibiotics, steroids, I notified this manager that my cat suffers from a breathing problem now.
No comment.
I tried to tell the neighbor himself, It's not me, he shouted before slamming the door. It's the hallway. It smokes skunk marijuana. Or, it's my imagination! Must be crazy if, with a PHD, I live here! Never mind how this smell irritates my stomach.
I'm almost 71, have cancer, but my white neighbor has "freedom".
The neighbor below, also white, has this "freedom" too. She's in association with a few other white women in the building and around the complex who believe that I might not be deserving of freedom. After all, I'm a member of the expert class, an intellectual who, now that she's among us, needed to be put back in her place.
So for her, I walk and I move furniture and the cat (one at the time) jumps. I have over 500 books on heavy bookshelves. Trust me, I can't move the bookcases!
The neighbor hears the laptop apparently when I type or view the news or movie. She hears the toilet flushing after 10:00 pm, and she has called the police and they have come knocking on my door to tell me about the toilet that she hears. Yet, I have been here two years and never heard toilets flushing.
I don't own a television or stereo, but the neighbor pounds and taps. The tapping is game playing. Or maybe I'm to imagine ghosts.
My cats are alarmed at the sounds she makes to disturb me. It's hard to explain to them that it's just the woman below and, by her own admission, she had a mental issue. She can't stand noise, she told me. This is an apartment building! But when she wants absolute quiet, on comes a ceiling vibrator at 10:00 pm or 11:00 pm. Becoming a "teacher" of sorts, she must remind me to never forget that my humanity is of no worth anywhere, let alone at Saxony Manor where she has friends in the building.
Where she has "freedom," mind you!
What do I have?
Violence-- directed at me, intended to deprive me of rest and sleep! Hurting me, hurting my cats! Violence. The use of a ceiling vibrator device to express her anger and hatred of a black woman, challenging and contradicting, contradicting and challenging, her right to freedom. The neighbor deliberately invades my privacy, violates my rights with impunity, yet, the manager, also white, remains me, by her silence, that my privacy, my rights, my freedom doesn't matter!
To those who also believe I don't have the freedom to exist, the manager likes to tell a narrative, familiar and historical, one that is echoed by the majority white tenants at Saxony Manor. I have been helped! I have been helped! In the two years I've been a resident here, the management has moved me from the 40-something Iraqi veteran, the tenant known for blasting his stereo, after 10:00 pm! This young man is a pot smoker. He's had flares of violence.
Before I arrived, he has shared with a tenant why he hates black people, and he, according to another tenant, responded to another tenant's complaints, by hitting the male tenant!
But, according to the manager, this former neighbor, is "harmless".
Why I, a woman alone, no family or friends in the state, an activist/scholar-- why I was placed next to this man to begin with, is the question ? Why did I have to share a living room wall with a man who hates blacks?
According to the manager, I complained about the Iraqi vet because I found out he was a military veteran! No mention of his racism! I found out he was a veteran!
Two deceased uncles were veterans. A deceased younger brother was a veteran. Two cousins are veterans. One cousin was an FBI agent. He died of cancer early this year. My No W ar sign in my apartment means I oppose war-- not veterans! But I'm the one opposing the freedom of this veteran. Complex thinking, be damned! There's a lack of knowledge about blacks, serving and dying in the Revolution, the Civil War, the World Wars I and II, the Spain Civil War against fascism, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and all others since. But in an anti-black atmosphere, where US history is taught in such a way as to avoid upsetting white children, the response will be a patronizing smile from the adults possessing a little bit of power to completely force the suppression of truth.
So, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I guess veterans are only white people? Is that it?
The second move to another apartment was no better. A Vietnam vet, in a hurry to die. PTSD? I would imagine. Both vets, if management cared, should have received help from agencies in town. But both were listed as "independent" residents. And then a third move and now the woman with a mental illness, already knows of me, since she would have seen me in the first building. Yes! Where, unbeknownst to me, she resided in a front apartment where she could watch me come and go.
A bit Twilight Zone-- if not for the seizure I suffered January 6, 2024!
Was it the skunk weed I was forced to inhale from the tenant next door? Or the pounding and ceiling vibrator from the tenant below? Ceiling vibrator and pounding from the unhinged. But also one with "freedom".
And the manager?
I just wanted an apartment to live in relative "peace" in order to restore my strength to face another day of racism. I needed another year or two with my cancer in "stable" condition, and I don't want to end up with it gaining strength like hurricanes over warm water.
I must be suffering from "anxiety", the manager told me this summer. No one else is responsible for your "situation". No one is harassing me. And that smile. That smile. The smile of someone who knows that she is shielded from reprisal whenever she discredit my witness. She freely encircles me in a narrative as the violent storm that slipped through and threatens the supremacy of whiteness.
Crazy! When she, a black woman, isn't angry !
Angry whites speak of "floating island of garbage". Puerto Rico! American citizens! There are for these angry people, Haitians eating pets and people flooding the borders from "s---hole" countries. Let's not forget that Kamala Harris was born "mentally ill"!
Evidence be damn! Unless I had to prove some white neighbor smokes skunk pot!
This is a management that couldn't tell the story of black veterans, in full uniforms, arriving back home, exiting a bus, only to be capture by law enforcement or a mob, and ultimately lynched. The management at Saxony Manor couldn't tell you of my ancestors, those black women, in the tradition of black thinkers and doers. They are devoid of the knowledge about the brilliant and strategic Harriet Tubman and Harriet Jacobs. They've never read Frederick Douglass' narrative, so they wouldn't know about that other tradition, the one in which white women committed violence against enslaved black women. They've never read W. E. B. Du Bois' The Black Reconstruction in America. So they wouldn't know how blacks fought and died in pursuit of freedom away from tyranny, running and marching, sitting in and standing up for freedom to build a promise land, a democratic society.
Enslaved blacks' labor made it possible for the US to capitalize on the global market and later former enslaved African Americans unwillingly furthered the development of exploitative methods employed by the US and other Western nations to rob the majority of the world of their material resources. How ironical that the first order of business of fascists wanting to build a home here in the US is to claim that immigrants, particularly those from Africa or South America or the Caribbean, are monstrous and dangerous. These are the people threatening peace in the world!
On the other hand, there is freedom to dominate others, to destroy the homes, schools, cultural institutions and artifacts of others; freedom to oppress, to maim at will, to rob others of their livelihood; freedom to determine who is or isn't worthy of life; freedom to determine who becomes dispensable and thus freedom to conduct genocidal wars; freedom to lie for the sake of sustain a myth of white supremacy.
There's freedom from learning anything about the conquest or slavery. Freedom from fully establishing a home where social justice isn't just two words on a website while in actuality supporting, even if in silence, the right for children and grandchildren to not be made "comfortable" by the disruptive powers of those who challenge a fascist atmosphere where it's made clear that whites are in control of whatever happens. In that atmosphere, there's no room for democracy.
We must fight to think on what freedom we want, from what "line of history" (to use Snyder's words) to we want to pursue a world livable for all.
A few weeks ago, a white woman tenant in my building, stood blocking my entrance to the office building. She saw me. Knew I was right behind her, but when I indicated that I needed to pass, said "excuse me," she asked me to "go around" her. Go around her!
So white Americans do remember something from the historical past! But that business was a little before my time!
When I told the manager of the incident, she seemed to defend the white woman tenant. Did I say, "excuse me"? Really! This is the year 2024! And I'm a full-grown adult. As a white woman herself, however, she must discredit anything I say. When I asked why she was defending this woman, she told me that she was "defending the situation". The situation!
I asked did she hear that part where the woman asks me to "go around" her? She didn't.
And what's the "situation" this manager must defend?
I must be to her one of Poe's "black clouds" that hover over white people, menacing them, reminding them that happy days continue to elude them. Millions and millions of deaths, they just can't seem to put behind them. All because of those who remain visible.
The idea of white freedom is in competition with my existence. It's Trump threatening to jail all protest from the "left". All the "evil" ones who have spoken out against him and against white supremacy.
Without understanding the past, how will Americans come to stand up for freedom-- the one minus the adjective? It's a question historian Timothy Snyder asks too.
In his new work, On Freedom, he writes that "freedom must be about possible futures", and "any possible future exists on a line from an actual past". Otherwise, Snyder continues, "how are we do draw these lines without history?" Individually or as a group or as a class don't stand outside of history, local, national, or global.
We must remember, Snyder adds, that "liberty begins with de-occupying our minds from the wrong ideas. And there are right and wrong ideas."
For freedom to be a reality, we need to know "what we value and bring it to life". Freedom depends on what we can do and that, in turn, "depends on others, people we know and people we don't". I would like to think that others have our best interest in mind, but in a world where fascism is an attractive alternative to democracy, for too many, I have come to expect, in the 21st century, people who could have easily attended the fascist rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939.
Well, actually, quite a few fellow Americans came to hear Trump speak at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024-- didn't they?
Depending on these people to share the same values and to know what's in my best interests would mean that I'm running scared of my own potential to defending an idea of freedom, like the one Douglass had before him. Or the one Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. died for. I would be running from this, running right to a lynching, a truly modern-day lynching in which I allow the erasure of that line of history that produced me, someone who sees the gaslighting and refuses to be erased.
Others want to make it difficult if not impossible for blacks, indigenous, and Latinx to vote since there are too many Americans who believe in the idea of white supremacy and see this land as a land for whites to live free from the likes of someone like me. Israel, it could be said, fights for a Palestine free from confronting the Nakba and free to commit atrocities against Palestinians, including unborn babies. Children.
White supremacy is a peculiar thing. It's okay to kill Palestinian children but women in the US must adjust to abortion bans. No killing of children here. Particularly not white children!
The anti-black atmosphere at Saxony Manor is about maintaining white supremacy. And the sad part is that the management is quite capable of lying and swearing to be free from people who are "troublesome" reminders of America's involvement in enslaving human beings. Ask if they've grappled with Douglass' argument for freedom? Well, you should know the answer to that question.
In the US, writes Snyder, Americans think of freedom from while those countries who think in terms of freedom to live better.
However, given the history of blacks in this country, I have witnessed freedom to as a white tenant telling a black tenant in 2024 to "go around" her, and a manager stating that she defends the "situation". I would think, such a "freedom" is linked to the any of exceptionalism. Both white women want freedom from me. Unfortunately, as of this day, November 3, 2024, two days before Americans decide to live in a democratic society or in a fascist society, approximately 49% of the country agrees with these two women here. After all, the two are family members within a community within a country where the fear of blacks and other people is historical.
This "freedom" I place in quotation marks is the kind that appears patriotic, bright, and cheerful. Confident. Authoritarian. Entitled. But I see this "freedom" wrapped in fear of racial difference, particularly fear of former enslaved blacks. In fact, this "freedom" is nothing if apart from the fear that gives it a definition as negative freedom.
Many of us have experienced separation from family and community, from our mother tongue, from those who vociferously advocated for our enslavement. Or who benefited, as they continue to do today, from our forced subordination.
Have we really come far from the days of our enslavement?
Perhaps, in these times, the "situation" isn't so clear cut. It may mean for my manager that people like me refuse to return to toiling with inferiority because someone else believes they hold power over us. Maybe, too, I think. I do so on the shoulders of my ancestors who believed that power of white supremacy to be mythical. It can be defeated! As Dr. King used to say, someone can't ride your back-- unless you allow him or her to do so!
Snyder is right to note how difficult it is for black Americans to deny "what they know". We must know to survive everyday. On the other hand, white Americans, Snyder acknowledges, live in denial. We, white Americans, turn "situations where we might all do better into situations where we all do worse". Relying on "negative freedom", we think of ourselves as "self-sufficient", in no need, for example, of government assistance. We whites will reject assistance, even healthcare, if "it means sharing it with black people".
At all cost, racial superiority is to be maintained! Blacks know this as we know that someday we won't even be a memory to anyone. But until then, as Snyder writes, "we are all responsible for creating the conditions that make it possible for others to become free".
It seems so simply. Seem as if all would want to be truly free.
I've been requested to attend at least four of what I call inquisition meetings with the local manager and her already-filled-in corporate boss from Mercy Housing. About the "situation", some fantasy to discredit me and deny an alternative way of living at Saxony Manor. I attended two meetings and, of course, I'm unhappy in my home. No lease violation. No smoking cigarettes or pot. No rowdy alcoholic. But something is off. Someone isn't adjusting so well.
Although my history in this US makes me familiar with fascism; nevertheless, I'm not at home in a fascist situation!
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