I had planned to write about Martha Wells’ new Murderbot novel, Network Effect, for tonight, but I’m just not capable. There are times when events overtake us and now, despite three and a half years of particular political insanity, desensitizing outrage, and the concurrent resolve to keep up some semblance of normality, some sense that art is illuminating and consoling — even in the darkest of times — this is different. This is the culmination of a long slow burn. And not acknowledging that reality, not making space for it everywhere we can, is not just inappropriate, it’s disrespectful.
And yet.
It also feels wrong to speak out as if I know anything beyond the little that I do know. And that is this: I want to listen. I want to be quiet. I want to be supportive and to do whatever I can to help while not moving the spotlight one millimeter from where it needs to be. And I fear that this reckoning with systemic racism, especially as it’s manifested through law enforcement and the entire justice system, is in danger of being subsumed — on the right from terrorists who want to start a race war, on the part of Trump’s Justice Department as a cynical excuse to go full-out fascist and just in time for the election, but also by well-intentioned people who want to fold Black Lives Matter into a general movement for economic justice.
Our siblings, our brothers and sisters, are in pain, have been in pain for a long time, have been trying to get us to pay attention to their reality, their history, and their need for wholesale change. George Floyd’s murder is the flashpoint — it was so horrific, so callous, so deliberate and brutal, so dehumanizing — but this charge was primed by a litany of murders and brutalizations, so many that to begin saying their names means what we’ll invariable not say them all, all people whose deaths tore holes in their families and communities, all reduced to statistics, and to forget one is a terrible offense against humanity.
Although I spend a lot of time in the fantasy genre, I also do history. As in primary research right now. I’ve been doing some work on the history of Lost Cause mythology, which sends me down some rabbit holes. I’m deep in one right now, reading court records of a case from 1848, when two enslaved brothers, Matthew and Gabriel Becks, who had been freed by their owner’s will, had to sue for their freedom in court, because their owner’s son attempted to break his father’s will. The primary documents are astonishing. Because the brothers had no legal standing, they had to find an attorney from out of the area to take their case, and they were not allowed to speak in court for themselves.
I haven’t gotten to the resolution yet, but the legal definitions of freedom were so restrictive and social customs of the time were so horrific that these brothers appealed to the court to have the sheriff take them into custody and hire them out as laborers to keep the owner’s son from selling them before they could win in court. Think about how bad that is — the Becks were willing to go to jail, in the custody of the sheriff, to protect themselves from their old owner’s son, staking their narrow window for freedom on a court that didn’t even recognize their humanity.
I think they win. I hope they win. All of this ties back to the history I’m working on, and loops back into what’s happening now, in this inflection point when folks are sick and tired of being sick and tired. A friend told me that, when you study history, you’re not looking at a chain but a web of relationships.
This is where we are right now, caught in a web. So many of the people who should speak are being silenced, their realities effaced and subsumed in other narratives. I see it in the history I’m tracing; it’s happened in the years since the Becks sued for their freedom; it’s happened in both official channels and common society, as we white people retreat into defensiveness and fragility, unwilling to recognize our complicity, our advantages in the system as it was designed.
This is stuff we all know. We’re in crisis, and standing witness, doing what we’re asked to do in whatever capacity we can, feels like the best thing we can do. And listen. We need to listen.