Abolish Everything

Symbolism often rings hollow. Racial inequity is like a chasm, a pit with a bottom so cavernous it hasn’t seen light in centuries, if ever. It’s as deep as it is because shovels and axes have been picking away at the cement and dirt for as long as people have been able to swing tools. Instead of applying the labour and sacrifice it would take to supplement that depth, some would rather drape a tarp over it and call it a day. They would rather plant flowers around the edges of the chasm, and put a piece of plywood over the hole to avoid the obstruction entirely. Beautiful emblems that speak to a problem, are rarely ever satisfying solutions, and yet that is largely what is being offered those of us asking for systematic change. 

Listen, it doesn’t matter what you label a street corner, I can still get my ass beat by cops on Black Lives Matter Plaza. Painting “Black Lives Matter” in sprawling letters and vibrant colours down the middle of a road is a nice gesture that gives artists a unique opportunity  but it doesn’t doesn’t change the fact that if a black person walks down that street, they’re more likely to be stopped, arrested or killed by a cop than their counterparts. 

Symbolic victories are vacant upon slightest interrogation, scrape at the layer of varnish and the rust is still there. The recent spark of racial altruism was always going to be hindered by everyone’s urgency to atone for their racism or indiscretions. The problem is that urgency, in matters this delicate, often leads to carelessness. It culminates in everybody doing everything they can to cover their tracks or outright erase them. There is no fundamental change, there’s a fresh coat of paint. 

The most ubiquitous demand ringing across the nation is the request that Breonna Taylor’s murderers be brought to justice. Instead we got a mural, a literal fresh coat of paint. It’s purpose is symbolic and ultimately temporary. How many murals until we arrest her killers? I’m guessing there isn’t enough paint in the world.

This isn’t to say that certain changes aren’t welcome, but they’re far from solutions. Not a single Black person cares if realtors say “master bedroom,” we didn’t care about street signs, we didn’t really care about syrup mascots, or voice actors because those are symptoms of the greater disease that is racism. Perfunctory changes in art, media and advertising, in order to appear less racist and placate protestors ultimately hinders the pursuit of material change. Iconography does virtually nothing to abolish the systems responsible for violence against people of colour. Defunding police, abolishing prisons and redistributing wealth are all things that require much more than cursory amendments. 

We asked for police departments to be defunded and what did we get? They considered banning already-banned chokeholds. We asked for government officials to back systematic change and what did we get? A bunch of people kneeling in Kente cloths. We asked for gun reform and what did we get? The pistol emoji changed to a water gun. We asked for an overhaul in media in terms of representation and creators and what’d we get? White voice actors stopped voicing non-white characters and any problematic episodes were erased. You see the pattern here?

It’s certainly touching, if a little uncomfortable, watching people and institutions contort themselves to atone for their racial shortcomings. I applaud them for their effort, but that’s not what we asked for. It’s hard not to seem ungrateful, but these kinds of off-handed fixes should’ve been done in the first place, not because everyone is reevaluating their biases and fuck ups. If these things really mattered to you, you would’ve rectified them long before a massive racial reckoning. So, thank you for not voicing those characters anymore, but I’m still going to yell about what I was asking for in the first place. 

I would hope that requests for radical change would result in exhaustive introspection, and not institutions demolishing their catalogues. Look, not to be repetitive, but we had specific demands, none of which included erasing episodes of television that included blackface. I’d rather you keep the episodes up, and let people interrogate why blackface has been so weirdly common in recent decades, instead of scrubbing anything remotely racist from streaming services so Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon or some other entertainment corporation feels safe from scrutiny. Going as far as to take down episodes that aren’t even racist (looking directly at Golden Girls) because you don’t trust your audience to be able to identify a mud mask. Take a page from the Looney Toons and put a disclaimer before your shows, holding yourselves accountable instead of expunging the horrific, ignorant decisions of powerful people. 

It feels like people and institutions are performing as if they’ve learned a lesson, instead of accepting their culpability. In the same vein as ‘master bedrooms’ and Aunt Jemima, Black people didn’t care about problematic shows from decades ago streaming on Hulu or Netflix, so removing Community’s D&D episode is a completely empty move given that its an utterly unrelated solution to what was requested. Outright erasing instances of racism does nothing to address the actual violent plight that plagues people of colour today. If Netflix truly cared about racism, they could donate some of their billions in revenue to help aid and advance the Black Lives Matter movement, instead of spending time removing episodes no one had a problem with in the first place, to cover their own ass.

This circus of charades is ultimately fraught, because when people feel like they’ve done their part, being asked to do “more" becomes a nuisance. One of the many symptoms of racism is making equality seem like luxury and assertiveness seem like whining. If people make a change to something that no one was pressuring them to change, they still feel like a need has been met when it hasn’t. So when we have to ask for what we wanted in the first place it seems like more. It makes it difficult to address the initial demands. That’s how asking for confederate statues to be taken down suddenly becomes a debate about removing the Lincoln memorial. People start to ask, when does it end? Well, you know where it ends, and where it begins, we’ve told you from the start. 

We can’t conflate the removal of racist symbols with the dismantling of racist systems. Removing statues of Christopher Columbus or renaming the Washington professional football team is important, but so are deconstructing the foundations that allowed slurs and hate symbols to permeate our popular culture. Both forms of change can be had, but we can’t celebrate them as if they’re equal. We can’t be satisfied eradicating tangible racism, because racism isn’t sensory. It’s not just what you see or hear, it’s far more insidious. It’s an anchor, it’s a distraction, it makes calls for equality feel like a chore. After you topple a couple statues and change a street sign it makes you ask, “what more do you want?” Luckily, there’s a simple answer, all we want is what we asked for, and given the length of time that Black people have been asking for equality, and considering the stubbornness of those trying to block those efforts, I think it’s more than fair for us to say thank you, but that’s not what we asked for.