Post Racial America Is A Dangerous Lie That Can Kill Optimistic Blacks

Remember the black Michael Dunn juror Creshuna Miles, who tried to claim the case was not about race and said she thought Dunn was a “good guy” who made bad choices? Well one of our favorite Salon writers Brittney Cooper did a really great analysis about Miles where she claims that it’s this idea of “post-racial America” that’s got Miles all twisted and she argues that the whole time Creshuna was at the trial think race had nothing to do with it, her own race was speaking volumes.

Check out a few excerpts below via Salon.com:

Post-racial thinking is insidious not only because it gives lie to the very real and continuing material consequences of racism in this country, but also because it seduces young, optimistic, idealistic black youth into identifying with the very systems and people who would kill them without a second thought — and then go order a pizza and a take a nap.

Creshuna Miles is not just a black woman. She is a big, dark-skinned black woman, who rocks honey blond highlights in her hair. Her unmistakable, inescapable, culturally ethnic blackness is part of the unspoken but visual narrative of this trial. Just as Michael Dunn came upon a car and visually assessed threat based upon the color of the young men inside, the visuality of Creshuna Miles’ body absolutely influences how her testimony is understood.

In some ways Miles is a perfect foil for Rachel Jeantel. In Jeantel’s post-Zimmerman trial interview, she discounted a juror who claimed race hadn’t mattered in the trial, telling Piers Morgan, “Let’s be honest. It’s racial.” In this case, Creshuna Miles, just one year older than and visually similar to Rachel, comes along and says just the opposite. In both cases, black America saw the bodies of these two women and cringed. Internalized self-hatred coupled with violent conditions for black men is always a dangerous brew for black women. So I have been less compelled to jump on the “critique Creshuna” bandwagon, because so much of it is rooted in the unreasonable expectations that we have for black women to know how to outwit a system that is designed to work against not just black men, but us, too. Still I see Rachel and Creshuna and a certain knowing emerges for me.

I know that when you live your life in an unmistakably big black body, of the type that Rachel, Creshuna and I share, a body that is often seen as aggressive and threatening, two types of coping strategies emerge. One is a kind of aggressive embrace of one’s own blackness and a refusal to take any isht. That seems like how Rachel rolls. The other relies on a rejection of the truth about race as a form of triumph over the impenetrability of racial discourse. In other words, maybe Creshuna Miles felt more intelligent and progressive, by taking a contrarian position, by not holding the views that people assumed that she, as a black person, would hold.

When I look at Creshuna Miles, it is clear to me that her racial analysis is far more akin to that of her peers than different. All of these young people want to believe that they have the right to assert themselves and their rights and priorities in the same ways that white men retain the prerogative to do. Through the most brutal of lessons, they continue to learn differently.

I hope Creshuna Miles learns differently. I remind myself that she is only 21 and that she did vote to convict. But racial innocence won’t serve her well. I hope she knows that she was chosen as a juror because of the combination of her black body and her whitewashed racial views, not despite them. And I hope time gently rather than harshly teaches her that post-racialism won’t protect her from her own blackness any more than it protected Jordan.”

Race really does matter. Cooper makes some really excellent points. Now, when do you think it will become safe to trust the ideal of “Post Racial America”? Will that day EVER come?

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