The Wake

In the middle of the night in a dark parking lot in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, I recently shouted at a complete stranger that I was going to rob him. My actual words were, “Man, I’ll rob your ass!” In a way, I wanted to mean it, although I have never robbed anyone in my life and do not plan to. In order to explain my vicious threat in the dark of night, I need to make a series of stops that will first take us through the world of college hockey, then on to postcolonial East Africa and finally to the contemporary American city.

Strolling through the sublimely withering terrain of the University of Minnesota campus one afternoon, I noticed a light swarm of people all heading towards the hockey arena for an afternoon game. Among the seemingly content mass of fans, there were a few troublemakers; a couple of young drunk men were passionately arguing over some sports related issue. I was concerned as they boldly staggered toward each as if to make a physical challenge. They never battled, but their masculine pride was shining bright as they shouted and puffed their chests. Although they restrained themselves, there was a terrible anger, even hatred in their voices as they argued about sports teams.

Their respective “side” suddenly became the paramount question, one that could potentially result in the loss of blood or at least pride. This engagement was formed around the object of sports teams, as the imaginary formation of “Gophers vs. Badgers” fueled a brutal passion. These kinds of identity formations can potentially generate themselves around any number of social identifiers or objects of difference. Every day, we are forced to ask: what team are we on? How do we conceptualize these groups? How are they defined and what is the nature of the boundaries between them?

Of course, these team designations don’t always come in the form of jerseys and baseball caps; in society at large, these designations often form around cultural, ethnic and racial lines. Many times, these cultural and racial discourses circulating in society are rooted in an ancient difference somehow stretching far back into time; consider the Jew-versus-Arab explanation for violence in Israel/Palestine. Certainly differences exist, but such extreme naturalizing discourses are problematic in many ways. One problem concerns the implications of such understandings, as they provide the epistemic base of modern political violence. A main feature of modern politics is the attempt to freeze these differences as a way to organize and control the population (the census categories, for example). The next step towards power is to put these seemingly natural categories into a hierarchy, with the pinnacle often being white, Euro, male and hetero. This was the scenario for modern colonialism, but the equation can be applied to any heterogeneous scenario.

The real problem concerns the way race and culture is understood to begin with. What often happens in these socio-political scenarios is that certain aspects of our multi-layered identities become crystallized as eternal. Race becomes the sole determiner of behavior and culture becomes static and unchanging. A more appropriate way to understand culture acknowledges it dynamism and constant transformation due to the constant interaction with other cultures. This is in opposition to people like Samuel Huntington who articulate absurd theories of the “Clash of Civilizations” (where the entire world is neatly divided into contained civilizations with certain characteristics) from which he draws troubling conclusions, especially regarding the Muslim world. The consequences should now become obvious, as this static understanding of cultural exchange lays the intellectual basis for the “war on terror” and other violent political projects. Think of the violence in Rwanda, for example, where these fabricated formations culminated in tragedy in the 1990’s. The identities of Hutu and Tutsi did exist, but they were sharpened and fixed as a part of colonial politics, laying the ground for further division and genocide.

In the context of contemporary American society these differences operate following a similar equation. Here, skin color has filled the role in a violently efficient way and forms a central aspect of the social power structure. Consider the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood here on the West Bank. The neighborhood is primarily dominated by East African immigrants, many from Somalia and Ethiopia, who are perhaps fleeing the instability and violence that continues to grip the horn of Africa. Postcolonial arrangements have kept these countries poor and underdeveloped, while Western governments continue to militarize the region due to its geo-strategic value. Cedar-Riverside has acquired a social stigma reflected in the derogatory nicknames that have been assigned to the high-rise apartments. Having lived in the neighborhood, next to the “crack stacks” or the “ghetto in the sky” as they are sometimes called, I have to question the deeper social meaning of these claims and attribute such “common knowledge” to a racism that continues to permeate our society still recovering from our own repression against the black population, as well as our current political scenario marked by a neoconservative government that promotes such problematic understandings of social identity.

Walking through the neighborhood late one night, I heard someone behind me. I calmly turned around to survey my surroundings as I would in any situation in any neighborhood. There was a white man on a bike who rode past and made a comment about my apparent awareness and how it’s good to watch your back in this neighborhood. I responded that one should always have their eyes open. He then comfortably suggested that here on the West Bank you have to be particularly careful of “the Somalis”, as to not be robbed. I challenged his comment, but he persisted with his racist stance. His friendly and casual tone struck me, suggesting that we were on the same team, the superior team of whiteness. This unification was a manifestation of the social forces that govern society and contribute to the reproduction of social relations. It was a fictitious unification that I wanted to resist and destroy, and in my frustration I shouted at him from across the parking lot, “Man, I’ll rob your ass!”

No one was robbed.

This scenario may seem random, but it reveals the racial tensions that exist in our city today. Even here in fair, kind Minnesota, racism quietly draws up borders between people who really have a lot in common. It seeps into our discourse, poisoning our interactions with others. It tells us what parts of town we can walk around in at night. It invents facts, figures, demographics, statistics, and other “concrete” pieces of information that we can use to formulate our opinions and identities.

The truth is that none of this information is concrete or factual. Identities and cultures are constantly shifting and changing as they grow, expand, meet other ideas and react to them, and we are shifting with them. If we, as a people, intend to reject the fictitious unifications and socially violent ideas thrust upon us by history and location, we must first recognize them for what they are: man-made ideas. Only then can we reject racism, classicism, sexism, and prejudice.

If, on the other hand, we continue to naturalize every social problem we come across, we will only perpetuate racism and prejudice in a never-ending cycle of social violence. If every black man or white woman acts the way they do because of their race, then we’re truly doomed. But we have a choice. We can reject these pre-conceived notions of identity and turn back social violence one interaction at a time. And we won’t even have to rob anybody.