The murder of George Floyd came after the US had been thrust back into this cycle of pain with the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. It had been some time since the murder of a Black person at the hands of police had made the national news, so naturally people's minds (and social media accounts) had been occupied with other things at the time of the two latter-mentioned murders: the Coronavirus, the economic reopening, Tiger King, etc. and did not already have an anger present in their lives. People did protest and march and organize around their deaths, and in the case of Ahmaud Arbery, even found justice, but they had not stoked the fires of the nation just enough to inspire people to take to the streets the way the have this past week. It feels as if the murder of George Floyd was the straw that broke the country's back.
Immediately following Floyd's murder, outrage spread across the country and led to protests in multiple major cities, most with cases of their own to demand justice for. The murder by police of Tony McDade, a Black trans man in Tallahassee, FL, also drew further attention to the rates at which trans people are killed, shining light on cases like Nina Pop's, a trans woman who was stabbed in Sikeston, MO and the 10th trans person to be killed this year.
Protesters have since turned social media into a tool for distributing information and updates about the way protests were unfolding. The average social media feed of someone even remotely connected to an affected or mobilized community would be filled with countless reposts of bail funds, mutual aid funds, and legal resources alongside how-to's and best practices for dealing with common riot police tactics, such as the use of tear gas, stun grenades, and so on.
While some organizers have utilized their social media for the purpose of gathering supplies and support for protests, others have taken to sharing literary resources for people who may not completely understand the reason why others have been taking to the streets with such passion and consistency over the last week. Texts covering subjects like prison abolition, defunding the police, and dismantling the structures of capitalism have been shared widely in pdf form, and for free, on various Instagram accounts. Some activists have created micro-guides in 10-square image form for Instagram distribution that explain everything from the racist history of police to the various forms of racism, and how they exist in our communities under our very noses.
One particular form of racism in these guides, that is very prevalent in the Rio Grande Valley, is anti-blackness. It refers to racial prejudice toward Black people coming from non-black communities of color, because the use of the term 'racism' has become very complex over the years, and other terms are necessary to describe various forms of prejudice for which the term 'racism' does not easily apply. Over the last decade, the word "racism" has been appropriated by white people to describe the prejudice they experience from people of other ethnicities (especially in communities like the RGV where white people are a minority), and has been used to be a catch-all term for prejudice against any one people by another for decades. However, the core elements that make up racism as a construct involve recognition of power; who holds power, who has power over others, how that power has been wielded over time, etc. So, when 'racism' is applied to the prejudice isolated white people experience from communities of color, the power dynamic present in that scenario reveals that, while white people may be the minority, they still hold power over said communities of color in historical, cultural, and overall institutional contexts. Therefore, said prejudice is not racism.
For example, when most of the RGV's elders were growing up, the Valley was already overwhelmingly Latinx/Mexican-American/Chicanx/etc, but the language they were required to speak in schools was English. Many of our elders can vividly describe instances in which they were punished for speaking Spanish in school, despite that being the most spoken language in the region. Furthermore, while a majority of the people in the region are not white, the leadership of the region (local government, law enforcement, school teachers, authority figures in general) were white; the control of this community of color was largely in white hands. This was the case for every community in the country, and in the case of the Valley, remains that way to this day. Sure, we have Latinos on school boards, as City Commissioners, Judges - even our famed resident shadowy millionaire, Alonzo Cantu, is Latino - but they've all been playing ball with the white people in power, sustaining that same power structure all these years.
Given the fact that this power structure has been the norm for so long, it's easy for people in the Valley to feel as if the problem of racism has ceased to exist. We see faces that look like ours in positions of power, amassing wealth and influence, and that's all it takes to make us forget about racism and the impact it's undoubtedly had on our cultural framework. The very fact that people in the RGV refer to the place as an area that is "predominantly Latino, with a little bit of White in it" proves that we have erased other communities of color, as well as our own ethnic and racial diversity from our self-image as a largely Latinx region. Our very definition of ourselves essentializes a proximity to whiteness, debatably as a cultural aspiration, and erases the distinction of Afro-Latinx and Asian-Latinx people with Latinx identity.
According to data gathered by the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey in 2018, the Valley's racial demographics were divided up as such:
Hispanic/Latino: 92.15%
White: 6.55%
Black: 0.58%
Asian & Pacific Islander: 0.53%
Native American/Indian: 0.18%
This data does not include the distinctions of people who identified with more than one race, and could not possibly speak to the number of people who may be mixed race, but have chosen to identify with only one of them.
So this brings me to my main point about the Valley. Non-black Latinxs/Chicanx/Mexican-Americans, whatever we want to be called (because it differs from person to person), have a learned racist bias against other communities of color. How many times have you heard someone in your family refer to an Asian or Pacific Islander as a "chino"? How many times have you heard someone in our community refer to a Black person (including afro-latinxs!) as a "mayate"? You don't have to dig very deep to find examples of racial prejudice in people you see and talk to every day. What do you think 'colorism' is? What do you think your tía means when she tells you that you should straighten your curly hair? Or when your family celebrates the birth of a baby with a light complexion, blonde hair, and blue eyes? Where is the space for Afro-Latinx people in the traditional Latinx umbrella? As of yet, the further our appearance is from blackness, the more value non-black Latinx in the Valley place on themselves. These are some of many examples of deeply-rooted anti-blackness that are prevalent in the Rio Grande Valley.
Let's look at another example for a moment. Even though non-black Latinos appropriate Black culture, they only seem to do so at the surface-level. If they truly wanted to embody Black culture, they would also try to understand the racial prejudice that has for better or worse, shaped Black culture. Yes, I'm talking about the infamous use of the "N" word by non-black Latinos. The idea that you can appropriate all of what it is to be Black, including the reclamation of a racial epithet, is absolutely ignorant, and rooted in anti-blackness.
Now you must be asking yourself: how can the appropriation of Black culture also be done while being anti-black? I'll tell you! It's one thing to appropriate stuff like clothing styles and music, especially when coming from similarly oppressed communities in a racist country. Even the appropriation of language is considered normal by now; historically, most of the slang in our country has been developed through the appropriation of culturally Black language (look at TikTok for 30 seconds and you'll see what I mean). But it is an entirely different thing to appropriate a reclaimed slur, something that did not occur naturally in Black culture, something that was forced upon Black people by White people, defined by literal centuries of pain and suffering, pure violence, and oppression in the air they breathed...that is not something a non-black Latino can ever understand, because they have never been Black. We have our own history of oppression with its own set of slurs and obstacles, but it's not the same thing, and does not grant us any privilege to use a word that - by its very function when used by someone who is not black - means existential violence to Black people. To ignore that obvious detail is to deny Black people the full agency over their lives and history. It is disrespect of a fundamental nature, and an assumption of power over Black people; an assumption that Black people don't deserve to own something that they alone reclaimed. That. Is. Anti. Black.
The denial of agency that non-black Latinos in the Valley demonstrate toward fellow communities of color is more than clear. We are not only anti-black, we are also anti-asian and anti-Native American (regionally, our native people are the Carrizo-Comecrudo tribe). This has led to a culture that puts all of the forces that have oppressed communities of color and protected whiteness throughout history - the police, border patrol, and prisons - on a pedestal. We have a huge population of Blue Lives Matter supporters down here, many of which made their presence known in 2016 when a trio of Black organizers, siblings Aimaloghi, Ohiozele, and Ohireime Eromosele hosted a Black Lives Matter march in McAllen. Guess what: not all of the Blue Lives Matter folks were white.
So, when a solidarity protest was organized this past Saturday in Edinburg to call for justice in the case of George Floyd's murder and to support the value of Black lives, word spread quickly, drawing in thousands of people to the protest's event page on Facebook who said they would be "going". Almost as if on cue, the Valley's anti-blackness reared it's ugly head, leaving comments stoking fears of it turning into a riot, condemning the destruction of property as a form of protest (I won't get into that here, look it up) in Minneapolis, and claiming that - because racism "doesn't exist in the Valley" - there is no need to hold a protest calling for justice in the extrajudicial execution of an unarmed Black man by police. Some even said that supporters "just wanted to be a part of something happening outside the Valley", as if that was a bad thing. Perhaps most damning of all were the handful of threats made by young non-black Latino men to shoot up the protest; posts of these men driving around in their cars while carrying firearms and paintball guns were uploaded to social media and subsequently distributed among supporters of the protest.
I wish this could come as a surprise, but even the Valley's own history of protests against police brutality have been wiped from the public consciousness. The Pharr Riot of 1971, for example, has only lived on in the memories of those who were there and their children. There was a TV special produced about the riot, but short of this brilliant article put together by the Valley's own barrio historian, Eduardo Martinez, there hasn't been much work done by local governments to make the event part of the public consciousness. As such, we as a region have forgotten what it's like to be oppressed, having spent so much time as an oppressor without even knowing it.
In response to the violent reaction from opponents, the organizers of the protest decided to reschedule for this coming Saturday, June 6th. This decision was met with further aggression, except this time coming from people who were enraged about George Floyd's murder and the issue of police brutality, and were enthusiastically looking to demonstrate their support for the cause. When one of the protest's organizers took to Facebook Live to explain their decision, the comments ranged from claims of cowardice to outright homophobia and the all-too-common theme of "the Valley sucks". In the end, supporters of the protest decided it would be best to attend and show solidarity with the other protests happening around the world, and from what I saw, it went well and nobody got hurt.
That being said, in response to the Rio Grande Valley's anti-blackness at a time when we should be supporting Black people and uplifting their voices, I have decided to not speak on this episode of the show. Instead, I've put together a playlist of Black artists I admire, and whose music I am inspired by, and letting them have the entirety of today's (and this week's) runtime. I've included two freestyles performed by George Floyd himself back when he was a part of DJ Screw's infamous Screwed Up Click up in Houston. At the time, he was known as "Big" Floyd, and appeared on several of Screw's releases, which you can find on YouTube in their entirety. Closing the episode, we have a message from George Floyd from sometime earlier this year. It's a clip I found on YouTube - presumably grabbed from a social media account - where George talks about the plight of young Black men falling into the trap of gun violence, and offering support as a community elder. The media has been using it as a prop to critique the violence from protesters across the country, because the media is disgusting.
It ends with George addressing fellow Black men who disagree with his message, saying "fuck you, my heart hurts".
My heart hurts for you too, George. I wish you hadn't gone the way you did, and I hope your killers are brought to justice, by any means. You deserve that. Your family deserves that. Your community deserves that. Your daughter and her mother deserve that. Rest in power.
AS
