Ours

Day: 27/28: In my Poli Sci lecture, we watched a part of a PBS documentary series about the African-American Civil Rights Movement called "Eyes on the Prize". I'd seen it before in other classes and at home so I had an idea of what was coming. When the professor asked if anyone had seen it, I was about the only one who raised a hand.

He didn't see me. 

The video started and I had an immediate reaction: gut-sick, angry, sad, frustrated, proud - all of them at once. I sat up in my chair, eyes glued to the screen, mumbling under my breath at times, wincing at others. I'm not sure that I could ever watch that or any similar documentary without getting emotional. I wanted so badly to yell but bit my tongue instead. 

And then I heard laughter. It was the tittering politely dismissive sort of laughter you'd hear when someone told a joke that didn't quite hit the mark. On screen, we watched as the Little Rock Nine were accosted and nearly hanged by an angry mob. The laughter started when one of the women in the mob began pushing at a crowd control barrier. 

When I saw that very same footage, my heart about stopped. When the woman began pushing at the barrier, I almost stood up. The Little Rock Nine were teenagers - children, really. And, still, I heard laughter from multiple sources when the narrator explained that the crowd was begging to be given "just one" child to hang. 

I told myself that they lacked the emotional or cultural context to take what they were seeing seriously. They took it as a given that things would work out. They saw it as inevitable that, even though things were bad, the good guys would win because the good guys DID win. So they laughed, in the same way that anyone laughs when they see Wile E. Coyote trying and failing to kill and eat the roadrunner or when they see Elmer Fudd trying with all his might to outsmart and murder Bugs Bunny. It's an ignorant, expectant, and outright insulting point of view that necessarily ignores the visceral human costs. As far as they knew, they were watching characters on film,  avatars facilitating an inevitable evolution. The Little Rock Nine were no more "real people" to the laughing students than a cave man using a bone as a tool for the first time. 

I sat there, feeling grateful, and humbled, and shocked, and heartbroken, and FURIOUS, and many other things. And I was, by no means, alone in how I was feeling or reacting. But that laughter - that tawdry ignorant laughter - threw me off. And it made me wonder if I wasn't overreacting, if maybe I was taking this a little too seriously.

Later, in discussion, our TA advised that we'd have to watch two more parts of the documentary. A girl leaned over to me and whispered, "I don't know why we have to watch that crap."

"Because it's our history," I said. She looked at me, as if seeing that I was black for the very first time, and blushed. 

I leaned in a little closer to her and pointed; first at her, then myself, then a few other students. "Our history," I said.

"Right, right," she said, and took out her cellphone. 

I let it go.