Nappy Headed Black Child

Recently in the headlines we have all heard of Omar Thornton. If not Omar Thornton on august 3 went to his workplace a beer distribution center and shot 10 coworkers 8 of them fatally before and before taking his own life called 911 and described his actions to the operator as taking care of the racists in his workplace. His wife relayed that Thornton had complained about a racist environment before the killings.

As I was reading up on this story and the reasoning behind it the DC Snipers were brought to my recollection. John Allen Muhammed in particular due to his similar dissatisfaction with the antiblack environment in america as well as his plans to start some sort of pure black colony in canada.

now the name who recieved top billing in todays blog Cross Damon. Cross is a literary character from Richard Wright's novel The Outsider. Cross is connected to these other two men because he too is directly responsible for the death several people and in the end feels a justification or as lewis r. gordon puts it a sense of innocence about the whole thing.

Cross serves as a foil to Bigger Thomas in Wright's better known work Native Son where Bigger finds himself in a situation where doing the right and human thing could potentially get him killed because he is a black man (think Shirley Sherrod). In these characters we see Wright making a commentary about how black people who attempt to do the right thing and in that action asserting their humanity are problems in this society because the dominant narrative of black people does not allow for such a thing. so the society seeks to force them back into their construct of inhuman and all the while holding them responsible for their actions. (now granted then it was racism is okay) Essentially its an epistemic closure that allows the society to maintain a false reality. Cross Damon is the bigger thomas who stops caring. Displaying that there is a certain responsibility that comes with asserting onself as human and that the inhumanity espoused by this society cuts both ways.

Omar Thornton and the DC Sniper are Cross Damons. In our streets are Cross Damons. And our society seeks to deal with the symptom and not the root.

Now for me this is more than a "them" problem because for me so much of who what it is to be black on this landmass is about asserting that humanity the right to be uniquely us. If in struggle we lose our humanity we've missed the point. Now thats not to say that violence has no place in struggle. They are obviously shooting at us. But I'm not okay with being indiscrimnate in our aim or excessive in our force.