Too Close?

One of the things I've learned in the last 4 months, while working in a trauma hospital, is the non-utter-ability of present tense pain. Elaine Scarry writes:
"Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned." Yes. And let the record show: her thesis applies to emotional/cultural/psychological pain too. That being, of course, why in November I couldn't write about gay marriage, why the last month I haven't been able to write about my mom, and in the last 4 days I haven't been able to write about Oscar Grant. The too-closeness of it--whether it hooks into my body, my relations, or my home-town--slashes utterance before birth, shuts down communication by cliche-ing each word prior to speech. The formation of language somehow trivializes the experience of pain. This resistance complicates things though because as Merleau-Ponty once claimed, "all lived experience moves towards expression." To stifle the pain, by allowing the wordlessness to freeze over the heart, is sure death. There are forms of expression that do not necessitate idiom. For instance, one can cry out "injustice" or one can mimic the face down, arms spread, back vulnerable position of Oscar Grant to express the genuflection of police-committed manslaughter. You tell me which expressive act carries more weight in the arena of truth-communication? (I'm not arguing for a hierarchy of resistance strategies that pits word and deed against one another. Of course speech is integral to resistance. Just considering...) Tonight, perhaps because I'm not in Oakland, or perhaps because I didn't listen to trauma stories all day at the hospital, I want to write about Oscar Grant. About six months ago I had a classmate point out how unwilling white people are to talk about race and racism. As I look over Facebook tonight and see how many of my white lesbian friends are going to the Velvet Fundraiser for a hate crime against a lesbian and consider how many of them showed up at the protest for Grant's murder--zero--my classmate's words unfold (again) with new vibrancy. I have questions for my people. We care about a rape in Richmond, Palestinians in the streets of Gaza--and we should. Do we care about a cold-blooded, tax-funded murder of a black man in our own neighborhood? Is compassion color coded? Or again, is this a matter of things being too close? Does the white skin I wear make me too close to the cop who pulled that trigger? Is the invasion of Gaza somehow far enough away to warrant a cry that doesn't incriminate my flesh? Are we afraid that we'll have to confront what we share--white supremacy--with that crime and somehow lose our standing as activists absolved from any guilt for anything? On another friend's Facebook page I see a white man saying "Let's hold out judgment until the facts come clear; according to all the reports I've read, he wasn't yet handcuffed." Did he see the damn video? Is it that difficult to believe a white cop shot a young black man in the back just because? I guess so if you're busy trying to avoid the racism that lives and constructs the reality we (unequally) share. I guess so if you don't want to admit that it could have been you holding that gun, feeling that hate, shooting that man with 2 jobs and a 4 year old daughter. (Think racism wasn't a part of that crime? Ponder, for a moment, what Grant's daughter will stumble upon when she begins to question why someone who is supposed to protect and serve--why an officer of the "law"--killed her daddy.) It's hard to admit that what lived and moved in that cop lives and moves in me and my people. And I'll be damned if Oscar Grant's murder doesn't put that shared reality on blast. We share the reality. We share the responsibility. But white supremacy isn't the only thing brought out here. Another question. What makes the shooting of Oscar Grant in the back any different than the kidnapping, holding, stripping, and torturing of Arabs and Muslims by American GI's? These cops and military personnel are officials emboldened by an authority granted by the state. They are invested, with our money and our acquiescence, with weaponry and intent/cause to kill. When you pair these role-based investments of power with a white supremacist cultural ethos that needs racialized-othering and racially-based narrative to sustain itself, there's little wonder that the bodies labeled most "violent" are actually the bodies most likely to have violence perpetrated on them.