| I know the experience of arriving in a city with the intention of putting your life in order, resuming your career (despite that others may or may not recognize what you have accomplished as a career) of teaching, writing, and community activism. An outgoing chair hired me to teach a course December of 2005, and, although I received an indication that a one-year contract could develop for the 2006-07 school year, by April 2006, it was apparent that a contract was not forthcoming. I found myself without employment during the summer of 2006 -- and worse, I understood that my experiences and expertise, my "perspective" was not welcomed. Madison's face greets outsiders as a town of liberal and progressive thinking residents while it presented its behind to Black Americans trying to live here. I know something about the progressive spirit. I know my "perspective" embraces the historical victims of injustice who battle and continue to battle for human rights. But in Madison, I have a difficult time distinguishing the "liberal" and "progressive" agenda from that of the country's right-wing fundamentalist agenda that operates to preserve the interests of a select few. In Madison, Blacks receive the town's message loud and clear: You are not welcomed here! Where are you from? Hello. WHERE ARE YOU FROM? Well, this was a complicated question. I would hesitate because I immediately arrived from Platteville, Wisconsin where I taught a year at the UW Platteville. Before that I was in Ethiopia and before that the UW Parkside with stops in between. I would have wanted to say Chicago eagerly but for the logistics. The question, however, where are you from, seemed accusatory, as if the individual already knows the answer and needs to verify suspicions. I am from Platteville! Platteville! I note the inquisitor's look of disgust. A Chicago (for the sake of decency) Black! Bessie, Muddy Waters, and Miles. "I hum... Chicago. I am from Chicago." I watch them seeing a form -- dark, monstrous, and threatening. But I see, too! Alexander yielding his sword in Africa, slave ships littering the waters of the Old World ruined and a New World to be devastated by a violent conquest of people and land. I see charred bodies swing above gleeful faces, water holes searing the skin of children, the dead bodies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and COINTELPRO. I see the burning of whole neighborhoods and the rise of condominiums, closed factories, outsourced jobs, the deaths of the falsely accused, a million stolen votes in a democracy, Katrina, military recruitment, the removal of Habeas Corpus, war, war, and more war to end all war so eventually there'd be no poor, working or middle classes, only Halliburton, KBR, and petrol dollars. In the light of day, signs "for white only" are visible to Blacks, and, as an "outsider," I have dared topoint to this inequality. I have dared to point to the "not important," as a property management referred to me, to those subjugated Blacks and their issues, the "not important" issues. The unstated policy against Black employment, against hip hop, against Blacks loitering, concealed behind concern for "safety," conjures images of Black people as disruptive invaders. At evening meetings among liberals and progressives, I disrupt the illusion of democratic concern for "diversity" when I point to the absence of Blacks, Latinos, and other people of color. Such discussions avoid recognizing this most glaring absence of the dying in Iraq and suffering here at home. "It's just Jean. Here she goes again." Night after night, the real disruption continues with young White adults engaging in indecent behavior only to humiliate me. A white woman would never experience this side of Madison. As a Black woman, I have an historical reference for this behavior from young White men. Like my maternal ancestors, I am subject to witnessing the regression of a community such as Madison rather than its progress. Thus, my complaints about young White adults who fear no punitive action from disturbing my peace and privacy seem to be business as usual here. The message is 24/7, and it is absorbed by the young people -- Blacks are not important -- ;who regurgitate it until it makes them sick. But they go on. " You are in, among us, but you are not welcomed. Go back to Chicago or whatever you come from!' No one will see or hear anything! After all, I am "not important." As a Black woman from the working class, I must conform to the status of invisibility where, to use one writer's words, this "imposed condition" to dump "shit" on the heads of Black Americans is accepted as the norm since we possess, as Black Americans, "inherent faults." Madison's "chosen" community need not see or hear anything from this Black, historically progressive community, deserted on the left. |
| Voices/Dr. Jean Daniels Where are you from? |
 |
 |