It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction. I think black people have always felt this about America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come.
James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
I sold books for drugs. Reluctantly.
As I approached the chosen used bookstore, I struggled to maintain a look of confidence. Dignity. I always felt more like Gregor Samsa, crawling up to the counter, bug-like, yet asking to speak to the supervisor or owner.
Here I was in 1993, a Black woman, already two years into my doctorate program in literature, being looked at by the whites in the bookstore as an intruder. Then when I opened my backpack to pull out the 15 or so books, I could feel the Look , even when I didn't look up for fear of catching those eyes, questioning eyes.
Did she really own Ethics by Aristotle? Or anything by Nietzsche or Hemingway or Conrad? Did she steal these books?
And no matter what I brought in, hardback or paperback, I seemed to receive the same crisp 10 dollar bill. I would make sure not to bring to these clerks and owners anything written by a Latina or Black or Indigenous. Guaranteed-- no deal! I could imagine how a reluctant prostitute felt. I needed enough for food for at least two or three days. Or enough money for beta blockers or for a visit to my cardiologist. I lived with Wolf-Parkinson-White, tachycardia, for 40 years, but couldn't tell but one fellow doctorate colleague. Preexisting condition! If I wanted to teach at colleges and universities offering insurance, I learned to appear and behave as "healthy" as possible.
Then a pharmacist from Walgreens would call: I was a week or two late in picking up those beta blockers. Did I talk with my cardiologist? Was I taking the beta blockers as my cardiologist prescribed? Did I understand the necessity of taking my medication as prescribed! Did I ?
Did Walgreens care about my health? Really? I had tried to explain how I was grateful to receive a fellowship paying full tuition and a stipend of $733 for a one-bedroom on the northside, over 400 dollars, blocks from Loyola University Chicago" but I would be cut off. The pharmacist didn't have time for this.
But for me, there was the business of food, I wanted to say. I was getting there. A package of hot dogs or lunch meat. Not both! Bread. A candy bar or two. Cat food for my cat. Enough for the two of us to reach the next stipend check.
Money for books too.
My cardiologist in the 1980s allowed me to pay him-- when I had the money. It was not unusual for me to to have an outstanding medical bill. And then the student loans. The loans"
In the 1990s, instead of three beta blockers per day, I managed taking just two. Sometimes, one. Worse, I had to manage a month or two without even one beta blocker because I had to purchase books for my classes.
But there was the Look from these white pharmacists! They had a job to do. They had to inform me. Warn me. The son or daughter's soccer game that evening or the dinner at 8:00 pm meant that it wasn't worth getting hot and bothered by a Black woman who doesn't have enough money to pay for beta blockers.
And they will attend PTA meetings with other like-minded people, talk among themselves about the history they would prefer their children to know. The history they've absorbed on those vacations at the foot of a George Washington or a Robert E. Lee monument or at the National Monument to the Forefathers. The great, the good, the heroic. That history that can't be taught by someone like me who can't even afford to pay her medical bills!
It's the lack of money not lack of intelligence: It's the economic system, man! But why bother. Often I enter a doctor's office and I can read on her face, a white, Black, or Latina face that I'm someone who doesn't need to be taken seriously. Even for the sake of the survey. Would I even have access to a laptop? I'm asked that now, age 71, with two laptops at home!
We live in a corporate world where everything is a transaction!
We receive services and we are to immediately provide "feedback" as to whether or not the doctor, the "provider," provided a poor , fair , good , excellent job delivering that service. Sometimes I'm not sure what the "service" is since, in my experience, doctors have misdiagnosed or played it safe by not saying anything at all. Just looking at you like some of those used bookstore owners did, wondering whether or not I actually owned the books I was trying to selling. With doctors, it was the Look trying to figure out if I was honestly suffering from some ailment or was I just seeking attention.
Nonetheless, back at home, I'm left wondering if I'm to give a "5" rating if during the transaction I received a smile, of sorts. If not for the corporate surveys, I wonder if I would be treated with respect and told, as I was months before I had a seizure and a tumor was discovered that I should see a psychologist?
This wasn't really long ago, but actually in 2014 when I suffered a seizure that revealed, once I arrived unconscious by ambulance to the hospital a meningioma tumor. The year before I complained to doctors and nurses at the same institution, and I was treated as if I were an annoyance, a person looking for attention, inferior. Not long before, I taught there that African American Women's literature, Dr. Nellie McKay's course, before two weeks after she died of cancer. The white chair, arrogant, in the way that white supremacy empowers him to be, didn't bother to inform me that no more classes would be offered to be, despite receiving solicited comments about how my course would continue their studies of African American works. Continue imagining freedom-- o nce back home in South Korea. Then, again, I suppose I'm revealing the problem.
This African American department, established by the late Professor Nellie McKay, was one of the first such departments in the US. By the time I was dismissed (with no classes offered to me) and sent to teach composition in the English department, there were four full-time professors in the African American Department. And this was almost 18 years ago-- long before Trump came down that escalator!
" Death by a thousand cuts" has long been more than a phrase and more of a description of life in the US if you happen to be Black. We live, as Baldwin has written in No Name in the Street , in a state of terror, facing "one's own death," as "life can be ended at any moment." And not necessarily, with a bullet! The hospital Meriter then, long consumed by the University of Wisconsin Madison, conducted three CT scans and an MRI before suggesting that I see a psychologist. Another one of those moments in which no one is listening. No one cares. And I'm not even asked to rate this experience! Do I give it a "5"?
Six months later, I'm having surgery to remove the tumor. Luckily, there was the social safety net from the department of Social Security. Benefits. Even though Medicaid dropped coverage after two more, I think, because I had, a "successful" surgery! Never mind about the medicine I had to take and tapper off for at least another two months.
Did I have to wait long? Was I treated respectfully by the staff, nurses, doctors? Did the doctor address my concerns?
What do you write?
White supremacy is so deep. It's in the DNA! The billionaires in Trump's circle aren't alone!
Everything is programmed to maintain the same results: whites on top and everyone else, particularly Black Americans, at the very bottom. No need to listen to objections or experience the anger of a Black American not receiving excellent services. That's what the police are for when it comes to Black people. Angry or not! How do you condense that history of US violence to a soundbite? Do you have them read Baldwin where he talks about the impossible-- that is, that there can be no dialogue, he writes in No Name , "between the subdued and the subduer, between those placed within history and those dispersed outside." And Baldwin adds, the "subdued and the subduer do not speak the same language."
And, as Black, I've felt like the subdued in a subduer's office. What's provided is yet another lesson in how white supremacy, in a dance with the oligarchs, situates the corporate world to systemically takes away our right to freely speak our concerns, even in the face of the Look. Even if a doctor or nurse practitioner entered the field to truly serve people, truly focus on the best health for her patients, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries are there to remind them that the primary and vacation houses, the cars, the private schools for their children, the soccer team for the son or daughter and the exquisite dinners will all disappear if they aren't obedient corporate servants.
Many doctors are trapped in the corporate box, wanting to be that doctor making a difference in the life of a sick patient. Many, however, are falling in line because-- who is doing the hiring? And firing?
Who is too arrogant, filled to the rim with corporate think! Actually showing empathy toward her patients! Actually listening?
The corporate world can't monetize empathy !
No one is listening today. Americans refuse to read.
It's no accident that the banning of books, specifically those focusing on the history of US violence and its relationship to people not checking off the box before the word, white , is happening now. It's actually been happening for years. I remember in Madison, used bookstores around the university campus purging their shelves of books written by people of color. Police shooting of unarmed Blacks continues to happen as if taking the place of lynchings. Hundreds of thousands of Gazan remains are among the rubble. Genocide is ongoing and we Americans are supplying the support and weapons. Stories about the callous-money-driven medical insurance industry refusing to treat children dying of cancer is barely noticed by the mainstream press.
Almost two months ago, I witnessed a man who left the pharmacist's counter, head, down, because he couldn't afford the medicine prescribed by his doctor"
I've taught in a state, at three institutions, in cities where white residents recently voted for Trump. I must say that I'm not surprised by the presidential election turnout. Across from the store, three blocks away, there were signs stated that a vote for Trump was a vote for safety . On the other hand, a vote for Kamala (not Harris!), was a vote for crime !
And in the midst of this distraction is the inequality; the dismissal of democracy, and the determination to see to a distorted idea of freedom, but one, nonetheless, that continues to deny freedom to Black Americans.
Where is freedom in the nightmare that is white supremacy?
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