Hounds On The Trail: Legacy of Jim Crow

'Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an 'unwritten law' that justifies them in putting human beings to death' (Ida B. Wells) There was a reason lynch mobs enjoyed the tarring and feathering of black men in Deep South America: for they knew the emasculation of the black man was the apogee in dehumanization. The soul-scars of his humiliation would remain an eternal reminder to his own people whilst the psychological flogging of his manfulness would garrotte him slowly, surely, mentally, physically. There was a reason lynch mobs engineered circus-try, torturing their victims publicly before the noose became their final relief and reprieve; To defile his spirit and castrate him before Kodak cameras was psychological warfare at it's most grotesquely effective; to tell the watching world, both black and white, that the Black Man could, after all, be conquered. They grinned at the camera lens, smiling and pointing at their prey to demonstrate that to snatch a black mans life without the foreplay of first raping him of his dignity would lessen the pleasure. Mighty black leviathans disempowered by yellow bellied invertebrates. Traumatised black carcasses, triumphant white egos. The penalty of minor infractions judged but never proven. When the LAPD pummelled Rodney King on a roadside captured by a shaky video camera (the very reason we know Kings name) officers issued some 33 blows and at least six fully-charged kicks. They swarmed like hyenas in the night, drunk with power, wielding phallic weapons. And just as the victims of lynch mobs were often hung from a noose after they're deaths (having already died of the injuries sustained from whips and kicks and boots and blows) as a brutal rubber-stamp of their prowess; King (despite being unable to move) was nonetheless placed in handcuffs and cordcuffs. Rodney King devoted the subsequent 21 years to leading a war on police brutality, he was a husband and father, he was awarded $3.8 million in court for his troubles. He was admitted to rehab to conquer the demons that ravaged his mind. He was found in 2012, aged just 47, drowned and pumped full of alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, and PCP. I say, the police killed him that March evening as they laid blows into his emasculated body. It simply took two decades for those 33 thrashes to reach his cerebral cortex where self-mutilating hatred finally took an addictive hold and whispered to him in suicudal symphonies. For the anguish of his hard-hearted flogging to shackle itself around his heart and plunge into the condition lying dormant in his arteries and stop it's beat. I've no doubt in my mind that Slager enjoyed the spectacle of watching a respected, loved, mature father of four run like a deer in his metaphorical hunters crosshairs. Many a lyncher has enjoyed revving their chainsaw, releasing bloodhounds, or firing shotguns into the weeping skies and watching their prey scurry into the woods. And as Walter Scott ran into the woods, my sinews wailed as he ran; a deer amidst trees that had once perhaps borne strange fruit. I balked at every bullet; bent down to hear his final sigh. I wept as they crouched down to cuff him. And left him there alone. It is not simply the murder of black men than wreaks of the lynching of old, it is the grimace, the grinning, the execution of an age old tactic in humiliation. It is the one moment in which Slager paused to eagle-eye Walter Scott scamper and scuttle before taking aim and shooting him five times that must surely Remind Us that lynching, in all it's cool-blooded, delivery and demeanour; in all it's bestial liturgies and rites; in all of it's seasoned venatics and big-game hunting ... Lives On. The memory of the United States of Amnesia might be conveniently sawed off and niggardly, but our memories must be long. 'My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps.' Maya Angelou)

A Note on Bleaching out Brownness

Subject: Modern celebrities are white-washing standards of beauty by bleaching out brownness. When a visibly paler-skinned Kim Kardashian sashayed her way through crowds in Paris this week, the paparazzi went wild for her platinum mane debut; my heart sunk. Not because I have a personal vendetta against blonde as a hair choice but because it is yet another feather in the cap for Aryan-ised trends. All the while, the features of black and brown women are becoming seemingly out of season. Just weeks ago, Zandaya was the subject of a fracas for brandishing a natural african hairstyle; the fallout of which included a so-called Fashion Police surmising that Zandaya smells of patchouli and weed. Yet as Kim Kardashian parades lighter skin and blanched tresses she is hailed as fashions unlikeliest yet most recent trailblazer. This once exotic, tanned, black-haired Armenian reality star has now banded a growing trail of paling celebrities. Beyoncé, Rita Ora, Amber Rose, and a myriad of others whom are endorsing a niche that is steadily diminishing brown features (Unless, of course, it is the sexualised Venus Hottentot inspired Africanesque derrière) from the modern teenage girls conceptions of comeliness. It is hard not to view this as a backwards step in the centuries -old battle for black and brown women to be recognised as natural beauties in arenas where blonde and blue-eyed standards have long been considered elite.