Grieving Racial Violence in a Woke America
How Madison's hyper-wokeness is a violence unto its own
Greetings from the thick of the semester! I come to you having written an entire chapter of my thesis, and also having received feedback on said chapter of my thesis… which is to say, um, I essentially come to you with .28 of a completed thesis chapter. Academic writing is hard, y’all! I’m barely here for it.
The last two weeks have been a blur: I got sick, I grinded pretty hard on this thesis, I wrote a few articles, and of course, spent much-needed quality Galentine’s and Valentine’s time with my beloveds. I’ve also interviewed and applied for a bunch of jobs, which has been its own kind of exhausting. Having to juggle timelines of various lengths (the thesis writing timeline, the job hunt timeline, the week-to-week lesson planning timeline) takes a lot of prioritizing and multitasking and it can get overwhelming. I haven’t been doing as good of a job delineating work and rest hours as much as I could/should be (the dangers of freelancing and having the singular task of writing a thesis, I suppose), which is going to be my goal for the next few weeks. If you have any tips and tricks, please let me know. Ya girl is hanging on by a thread (Also, I won’t try to speak French anymore because my boyfriend informed me that I spelled c’est la vie wrong last time. Oops.).
THE WEEK IN GRATITUDE
You can take the girl out of New York, but Lady Liberty will follow you wherever you go, it turns out. This past weekend my friends Meg, Mandy, and I went to go see Lady Liberty, not by ferry but by frozen lake! The installation on Lake Mendota is apparently an annual tradition that started out as a prank, but has continued on much to the joy of locals and um, me. I saw so many small kids in snowsuits fall on their butts. Luckily, I didn’t.
Charcuterie Boards: Just like, the concept of them. I won’t tell you how much cheese, crackers, and jam I consumed this past week. Not because I’m embarrassed, but lowkey it was pretty expensive (very worth it though)! This past weekend was spent in Galentine’s galore, and what’s a little wine night without an exorbitant amount of carbs and dairy? I do live in the cheese state, after all. Many a Lactaid were consumed in the making of these boards, but I just might have found a new calling (see below).
On Valentine’s Day, I got the best gift of all by way of a surprise FaceTime call from my baby cousin Rei. He called me using our grandma’s iPhone and told me he called because he wanted to “surprise me” and if I could please come home so that we could play together. Booking my ticket now, BYE!
A QUICK FAVOR
If I could interrupt your bi-weekly reading for just one second, this brief interlude is dedicated to promoting my GoFundMe to help me pay tuition for the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop this summer! This year, one of my resolutions was to go after the things that I want, which is to say, to go after and believe in my writing with every fiber of my being. It’s what led to the creation of this newsletter and my new gig at Madison365 among other things. I applied to Kenyon on a whim and to my utter surprise I was offered a spot in one of their creative non-fiction workshops this summer. If you could spare a buck or two, or if you feel generous and want to spread the word, I’d be infinitely grateful! <3
POEM OF THE WEEK
I’ve been thinking a lot about grief lately, not only in light of recent current events but thanks to my thesis, which revolves around themes of grief, strategy, intimacy, and survival within empire.
“I always knew that grief was something I could smell. / But I didn’t know that it’s not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.” OBIT by Victoria Chang is without a doubt one of the greatest poetry collections about grief and its many, many manifestations that has come out over the past two years. Taking the format of the obituary and paying homage to grief’s many faces, Chang meditates on loss in visceral, mesmerizing, and cyclical ways, with the central wound being her mother’s death. The piece “OBIT” is one of the dozens of iterations of grief that she writes about.
It’s been a tough week—somatically, emotionally, psychically. I haven’t been able to walk the short distance from my house to my car at night without feeling like something bad was going to happen. I haven’t been able to go to new places, like the doctor’s office, without wondering if I was going to meet my demise. I haven’t been able to lay in bed and let out my anguish without fear of judgment or the overpowering dialogues of “wokeness” to drown me me out. I haven’t been able to grieve properly.
Below are the maybe-not-so-coherent thoughts and feelings I’ve had since learning about the murder of Christina Yuna Lee earlier this week. They’re things I’ve thought about for a long time but still obviously have trouble putting into words.
It’s hard being a person of color in Madison. That should, one would think, need little to no explanation. There are obvious reasons why people of color would be uncomfortable in a predominantly white town. There’s the microagressions. There’s the macroaggressions. There’s the encounters in the work place, at the grocery store, on dating apps. There’s the second guessing and the triple guessing if an encounter was racist, or if you just made the whole thing up in your head. These are blatant and identifiable instances of discrimination, exoticization, and gaslighting. They’re practically textbook. But then there’s the Portland-esque hyper-wokeness mixed in with a dash of Midwestern nice that’s both ever-present and hard to put your finger on. That’s where things start to get real weird real fast.
Madison is a largely blue city in a very red state, one of the few liberal pockets in the region. It’s a point of pride for many of its inhabitants. We’re not like other Wisconsinites, we say with our electric cars and COEXIST bumper stickers. And our Black Lives Matter yard signs. And our rainbow flags that hang from our porches. Our receipts, if you will.
To some degree it’s a welcome change. Living in openly racist spaces wears you down, doesn’t sit well in the body. It changes the way you move around, whether or not you feel welcome or safe. It’s how I felt moving around Copenhagen when I lived there. But I’ll give the city one thing: At least it was blatantly honest about its racism.
Living in a progressive space like Madison can oftentimes feel like living in a constant state of negotiation. More often than not, I tell myself that so-and-so is white, but they’re a “good white”—a pass that makes our friendship possible despite the systemic oppressions that make our lived experiences astronomically different.
The thing about Madison is that it encroaches on being a post-racial bubble—not because racism doesn’t exist within its city limits (take Quadren Wilson, an unarmed 38 year old Black man, being shot and seriously injured by Dane County police officers just last week), but because its white inhabitants have “educated” and “theorized” themselves so thoroughly that there’s seemingly not much left to do to advance racial justice. And yet, none of these efforts to be “more woke” have done much to decenter whiteness in everyday conversations and encounters.
Overheard conversations between white people around town often sound like podcasts on white guilt, the perfected monologues that rehash pivotal moments in their lives where they realized their white privilege, often times at the expense and danger of their friends of color. Their revelations sound rehearsed, awkward in their efforts to fit a particular script and in their use of one-too-many social justice buzzwords. These exchanges often occur between white people themselves, either because they know that a person of color would not sit through that shit or perhaps more plausibly, because it’s actually their white peers’ approval that they crave. He who hath achieved the zenith of wokeness can then knight others with this same hollow badge of honor.
There are moments when the echo chamber simply becomes too loud. One of these moments occurred this week, when I learned through Twitter, of all places, about the murder of Christina Yuna Lee, a 35 year old Korean-American artist who was violently murdered by a man who followed her up her six-story apartment in New York City. Lee’s murder follows the equally horrific murder of Michelle Go, a 40 year old Chinese-American woman who was pushed onto the train tracks in Time Square last month, and just barely precedes the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings which happened on March 16th of last year, where six Asian American women were left dead after a former customer went on a killing spree across three different spas.
In the few times that I’ve brought up Christina Yuna Lee’s murder, no one has known what I was talking about. Not even my friends of color. The only other people in my life who have had even an inkling of the incident were fellow Asian American women, who were all suddenly reminded of just how much danger we can find ourselves in because of the specific intersections of our race and gender and the stereotypes often ascribed to us—meek, subservient, easily dominated. In other words, we’re easy targets.
How do I grieve the brutal murder of Christina Yuna Lee when I am surrounded by a misdirected hypervigilance towards shows of racial progression with no actual follow through? How do I grieve when the white people I’m surrounded by are consumed with the theoretical assault of my body rather than its real and actualized forms? How do I negotiate my grief in a space when everyone around me is more concerned with the inflated sense of hypothetical danger that white woman might face instead of the actual dangers that women of color face daily? How do I even find a place to put my grief down in a space where white women mistake my moving shadow for an assailant trying to break into the apartment, but don’t even bat an eye when they hear news akin to Lee’s murder?
We’ve seen the works of Missing White Women Syndrome and the obsession with white female purity play out countless of times over history, most recently in the case of Gabby Petito, a 22 year old white travel influencer who went missing (and was later found dead) on a cross-country road trip with her boyfriend. Amidst the hundreds of thousands of people devoted to finding Petito, many “woke whites” were also quick to point out Gabby’s whiteness as the reason for national outcry, trying to appear sensitive and cognizant of unacknowledged violences like the trafficking of Black girls in Milwaukee or the countless missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people (MMIWG2S) in the Midwest and beyond. They used the example of Gabby Petito’s overwhelming media presence to demonstrate the need for attention on what has been purposely made absent, not realizing that naming hyper-awareness of the issue, instead of actually making material change to address them, is nothing but empty rhetoric. Even more hypocritical is the deafening silence around Lee and Go’s murders, which have barely received national coverage and are on no one’s lips but me and my friends’, apparently.
This Woker Than Thou bubble is maddening in so much as my visceral grief then feels inappropriate—if everyone knows that something is an issue and is allegedly on the same page about it, then why make a fuss? In spaces where everyone equates masturbatory and performative articulation on issues of racism as actually addressing that issue, to join in with genuine expressions of sorrow and terror feels like a moot point. It doesn’t feel safe to fully express the weight and extent of my grief for fear that the woke whites around me will take that anguish and make it their own, centering their own “pain” and intellectualizing mine in the process.
I don’t know what the solution to any of this is and I’m tired of white folks turning to people of color to solve the issues they themselves have created, as if every demonstration of emotion must come with a what-to-do guide for them to take and run with. I’m asking you to see me, to see my pain, and to give it the space it needs to breathe, to be loud, to be whatever it needs to be.