Sex and Death Revisited
Sex and Death Revisited
by Yolanda Carrington
If anyone were to ask me what my mother, Ethel Patricia Ann Bridges Carrington, died of, I would tell them that it was “Black woman’s disease‗heart disease and hypertension. Heart disease is now the top killer of women in the United States, with African Americans like Mom being at the greatest risk.
If anyone were to ask me what one of my childhood heroes, Kurt Donald Cobain, died of, I would say “White man’s disease‗depression-induced suicide. In the US, European American men are more likely to attempt or commit suicide than any other constituency. The most privileged group of human beings in the nation is more likely than anyone else to end their lives forever.
If yet anyone else asks me what another one of my childhood heroes, Tupac Amaru Shakur, died from, I could just as easily say it was “Black man’s disease†as I could say what the real cause of death was—homicide. Given the statistics, I would be right too.
Many people would argue that the early deaths of Mom, Kurt, and Pac are symptoms of the human condition, and that things like these happen in a danger and illness-fraught world like ours. Other people would argue that these people—three of the most important people in my life—made choices of their own volition that led them to an early grave.
I don’t.
I know that death happens to all human beings. Anything that lives will eventually die. For most of us, we have no idea when or how we will meet our deaths. That is the way the game of life works.
But in my twenty-eight short years, I’ve been struck by how similar most of us on Earth die. Of all the ways that a human being can expire, there seem to be a small number of methods that emerge again and again and again.
Death in childbirth. Death by state execution. Dead from alcoholism. Died of heroin overdose. Died of a stroke. Died because of contaminated food and water. Died in the famine. Died while starving herself skinny. Died because prostate/breast/lung/colon cancer advanced too far. Killed by her abusive husband/boyfriend. Shot to death by his battered wife/girlfriend. Murdered by her pimp. Killed in self-defense. Shot to death by the police. Shot to death at checkpoint by accident. Blown apart in family’s house from aerial bombing. Caught in friendly fire. Died while being tortured for information. Died while awaiting rescue from the flood. Died while waiting for medical attention—for five days.
Died by his own hand.
Died from gunshots sustained in drive-by a week earlier—no witnesses.
Died of a heart attack, or a broken heart.
Again and again and again and again and again.
Maybe you read this list and see the human condition. Maybe you see the consequences of neglected social problems. Maybe you see personal irresponsibility, or wonton risk-taking, or laziness, of lack of willpower, or excessive hedonism. You may see government chicanery or global politricks at its worst. You may see Godlessness, or the Devil’s work, or the coming of prophecy as stated in Revelations.
I see race and gender.
I can read about a death from anorexia and guess with relative accuracy that the decedent was a White woman. I often guess correctly that the victim of a shooting death in Durham, North Carolina was a Black man, usually under the age of twenty-one. I’m usually right when I say that a woman who has killed her husband was either beaten or raped by him. I know that most lethal-force shootings by police are instigated by the police. I know that most people executed in the United States are dirt-poor drug-addicted child abuse survivors of color who end up there cause some district attorney or governor needed to stand for reelection.
Now there are more issues at stake within the subject of arbitrary human death than gender and race. There is class (of course), global resource distribution, political empowerment, political entitlement, levels of geopolitical engagement, geoeconomic concerns/crises, global policy, ecological concerns/crises—hell, the list is seemingly endless. But none of these issues/problems can be divorced from gender and race, because it is gender and race that frame our perspective and approach.
When I think of death, here is what I see.
I can see the Black or Latina single mother who neglected her own health to make sure her children had what they needed. I see the woman forced to sell her body after a lifetime of abuse and addiction. I see the gay kid who got shoved and called a faggot everyday before he was bludgeoned to death behind the school gym. I see the woman who is raped and murdered after the bastards discover her penis and scrotum. I see the many people—sick, elderly, children—who died outside the New Orleans Superdome in the hot August sun. I see the twelve-year-old girl who is forced to marry some dude old enough to be her grandfather to pay off the family debts, who is then killed because she can’t fuck.
I also see that man who drinks himself into a stupor everyday, and then gets in that car to drive himself home. I see the rich kid who tried smack to be cool but now shoots up everyday so he won’t get sick. I see the poor kid who joined the Army so he could pay for college, but he will never go to school ‘cause he bled to death in Basra. I see the suburban housewife who tried crystal meth for kicks but who’s quickly being destroyed by her addiction. I see the man who beats the shit out of them punk-ass sissies after he fucks them. I see the most popular girl in the whole school who pukes up her lunch so she won’t get fat. And I definitely see that man who hates bitches so much that he is shot to death by the one he once claimed to love.
I can see all of it, and I can’t ignore it.
People, I don’t pretend to know the all the answers about life and death, and I seriously doubt that any human being does. But I do know this: Kurt and Pac did not have to die when they did, and their deaths were neither natural nor predestined. Neither was my mother’s.
But the roads that led to their deaths were paved for them the day they were born. This is true for you and me as well.
I’m getting off this road. Will you join me?
Consider this, my friends:
If Kurt had been a successful gospel singer who juggled her career while raising a daughter, or if Pac had been a marginally-talented Hollywood starlet who made the papers after every little breakup, or if Mom had been a high-powered executive at IBM with a stay-at-home wife to raise his three daughters, they may all still be dead.
But would they have died by the same methods? You tell me.
Julian Real:
Hi Yolanda.
Thank you so much for that excellent essay. That is EXCACTLY what folks need to be directly dealing with: how race and gender shape our daily lives, and, as you note so eloquently, so powerfully, our daily deaths as well.
My guess is that your beloved mother had the least access to life-enhancing resources of the three people you named, and that this is probably so because she was both African-American and female inside a deeply racist patriarchy. I am sorry for your loss, Yolanda. My dear father died suddenly of a heart attack, when I was nineteen. I have never gotten over it. I imagine you are carrying her memory warmly in your heart. One of the most helpful things I read once, after my beloved maternal grandmother died, was a quote that went something like this: In my grief, I will take the shards of my shattered heart, and from them build an altar to your memory.
What the most privileged among us are learning, if they want to (they certainly do not have to) is this: poor women of Colour, globally (and not White corporate business men), do the most work for the least money—often for no money at all, as “women’s work” is often unpaid, and the work of the poor if paid, is paid at such a low rate that the best they can do is rise to be… poor. And those among us who are poor women, and especially female children, worldwide, are disproportionately exploited and terrorised sexually. The U.S. media is obsessed with sexually exploited White boys, forgetting that their sisters, including their sisters of Colour, are almost twice as likely to be sexually abused as they are. This doesn’t mean those boys don’t deserve our love and attention directed at them, and our rightful rage aimed squarely at the perpetrating individuals and institutions. The point is that the incested and raped girls certainly deserve no less attention and love, and their perpetrators deserve no less rage.
What middle class or creative class White men committing suicide in the U.S. says to me is this: ethnic and gender privileges and entitlements allow one to purchase many things, including women and girls, but do not create inner peace or bring joy, on the soul level. Engaged caring friends, healthy functional sustainable rooted culturally and spiritually rich community (and I’m not talking about patriarchally atrocious religious community here), access to meaningful life-enhancing resources that do not require the destruction of the Earth and the rapid disappearance of many of its non-human creatures, are needed, and fast, if we are to know, you and me, Yolanda, and everyone else, a meaningful degree of peace and love and joy, founded on justice, in this lifetime.
Privilege means the far too young to die (and intensely talented) Kurt Cobain, and other White creative men, in pain as humans, are living complex real lives shaped significantly by their gender and ethnicity, which, as I think you well expressed, inform the kinds of pain they are in, far more than society is willing to realise.
Privilege has at least two edges, some duller than others: John Lennon would not have been allowed to PERFORM in some of the clubs he played in, were he not White—it is a credit to the Beatles that they refused to play in segregated venues in the U.S. in the mid-1960s, and spoke out at that time about the wrong, the stupidity, of socially politically economically enforced racial segregation. Privilege means that however much those two White men suffered, and I have no doubts they, and Tupac Shakur, DID suffer, they ALSO got some relief from the discrimination and hate, in some ways, and in ways that allow some folks to stay alive a little or a lot longer. Not that being alive means one is living, of course.
What mostly class-privileged, heterosexual White girls starving themselves to death tells me is that privilege is a complex issue, and one of the prices some of us pay for privilege, when coupled with mandated self-contempt and internalised rage, is lethal pain. More power to Black girls, and other girls of Colour (and White girls) who are boldly saying NO to Vogue and Cosmo and all the media-generated raced misogyny bullshit telling White girls to be thin, though starvation, in order to win social approval (a level of approval not available to many girls of Colour).
As a mixed ethnicity, raised poor, lesbian friend of mine once asked me: is it a privilege for heterosexual women of any class or ethnicity to HAVE to be intimately involved, throughout their lives, with those who are most likely to kill them? I do not know how to answer this question. Lesbians are discriminated against overtly, invisibilised or stereotyped in some media, and exploited in pornography, as has been discussed in another thread on Stan’s blog: Critiquing “lesbian†porn, filed under: General, Gender by Stan on 11/29/05.
But we also cannot forget that the pain of those without that privilege—those of us who are impoverished, working class, middle class, or rich African-Americans, and Asian-Americans, and Latina/o-Americans, and Arab-Americans, and, particularly, rurally ghetto-ised Native Americans, to name a few other ethnic/cultural groups in the U.S., as well as women of all classes, sexualities, and ethnicities, cannot escape certain forms of body-and-mind-crushing brutality and scalding invisibility. Those forms of cruelty and ignorance kill with great momentum and swift force, like a slow-rising flood of systemic intolerance or a sudden storm of bigoted rage, and leave people dead that the media, and the most privileged of the masses, never knew were alive to begin with.
Thank you again, for sharing your voice, and experience.
Julian
17 December 2005, 7:09 pmJosiah:
This is all so fucking true. And it’s not just deaths. When I think about the health problems of people I know and see, it’s almost banal how structured they are by race and gender and class. I think of my mixed friend whose Ethiopian mother, an underpaid nurse, suffers from diabetes and mental illness. think of my Indian muslim friend whose mother works as a cashier at Target and has diabetes. I think of the black school children I see in North Philadelphia eating junk because all the restaurants in the 5-mile radius are fast food. I think of my maternal and paternal grandfathers, who were both pipe-smoking white men, and who both died of tobacco-related cancer. (No lie.) I think of my half-brother’s biological father, a white guy who was a heroin addict and shitty to my own mother. (That’s why she met my father and then had four more kids with him.) I think of the how the super-polluted industrial park and warehouse district in my hometown, Seattle, is ringed by mexican, black and asian communities, while whites generally live on the other sides of the hill. And that’s not even touching the distrubution of arrests vis a vis who’s actually stealing and doing drugs. In my experience, middle-class whites do MORE illegal drugs than working class blacks, but the former do luxury drugs–XTC, mescaline, hydroponic marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, etc.–while the latter smoke blunts with mexican brick weed or smoke crack cocaine. But guess who gets locked up more? Guess which ones get to go to college, join law firms, get elected president, and which ones get locked up to be beated by guards and anally raped by fellow inmates? There’s structural white supremacy for you…
17 December 2005, 7:20 pmJulian Real:
Hi Josiah.
Thanks for sharing that!! I just found out that the penalties for possession of crack bring must stiffer penalties than possession of non-crack cocaine, which so obviously and grotesquely ties into race and class issues. And, what constitutes “crime” is a whole other subject. For example, is what the U.S. government did, in its lack of response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, going to be considered and treated as CRIMINAL? And, will the penalties reflect the degree of the horror of the governmental neglect resulting in so many, many deaths? And will the former FEMA director face any jail time for his incompetence? And what of the on-going State-sponsored genocide against Native Americans? Is that called CRIMINAL? Are too many men, and women, of Colour, and poor whites, losing chunks of their lives in prison, for possession of weed or crack or other recreational and/or self-destroying drugs? I think we know the answers to these questions. You are right: there is PLENTY of drug use and abuse in the middle class, and among the rich, but they, especially the rich, have access to the lawyers who can keep them out of prison, IF they even get caught. And talk shows only care about drug abuse when it hits white suburbia. The media is fine with letting poor and of Colour communities suffer and die due to the despair of their living conditions (of living more deeply in CRAP), often necessitating the use of SOMETHING (including, as you note, artery clogging food—the only food that is inexpensive enough or most available), to get through each day.
17 December 2005, 9:53 pmYolanda Carrington:
I checked out the comments last night, and I wanted to add some thoughts then, but I decided to wait until I was in a better frame of mind and a safer space.
You see, Julian and Josiah, when I checked out your discussion, I was at a costume party thrown by an acqaintance of a friend of a friend. It was the typical scene for twentysomething American parties: cool cynical people, loud downloaded music, and lots and lots and lots of booze. A bunch of young White folks who think they’re so cool ’cause they listen to hip-hop and techno.
Young American middle-class men are pretty damn predictable when they get drunk. Lots of cussing to be cussing, and invariably homophobic and misogynistic slurs. Every other word is “bitch.” Over the last four years, I’ve heard “bitch” used in so many contexts: a put-down, greeting, term of “endearment,” punchline, and of course, insult. When I was younger, hearing the B-word in casual conversation would offend me greatly, and I would feel threatened. Nowadays, I just shake my head. American men, like their brothers around the world, are a pathetic case.
More thoughts about Shakur and Cobain.
As my feminism has become more radical, my love for Pac has deepened. For me, he’s like a close relative who died before you had a chance to meet him. I stare at photos of him like I stare at photos of my maternal grandfather (a man who died fifteen years before I was born—of heart disease).
He’s not here for me to talk to, to argue with, to challenge. There is so much that I want to say to him, so many questions that he asked about women that I want to answer. He had a lot to teach me, and I did learn much, but I have a lot of insight that he could have used as well.
When it came to race and gender, Mr. Shakur was a hell of a teacher. (I can’t even put what I feel into words right now, but I hope to soon.) People then and now talk about his contradictions, but few of them understand that his contradictions are ours.
And now Mr. Cobain.
The White Men of America have taught me much. Those men that I know, those men who I’ve never met, and those men who I will never meet on Earth. When the first white boy in my life spoke to me, I listened. When those white boys called me “nigger” on the bus, I listened. When they ignored me in school, I listened. When they stepped on the stage, I listened. I’ve never stopped listening.
Kurt Donald was a new kind of masculinity for me. Shy and retiring. Self-deprecating. Low self-esteem, as low as that of my Black girls classmates who were getting harassed, who were getting pregnant. Self-hating. Suicidal, from boyhood to the end of his manhood.
To so many people, his brand of masculinity seemed kinder and gentler. But his masculinity was as corrosive and violent as the rest. Many people found out the hard way.
People are still finding this out the hard way, every day.
I call Pac and Kurt my heroes. But I hate this word. It deifies, elevates the human being above others. It’s also masculinist. But what else could I call these men? My older brothers? Would people think that too presumptuous?
They feel like older brothers to me. The brothers that were taken from me before I met them.
I feel cheated.
That old cliche is proven true: Wealth and fame can’t buy happiness.
The never-acknowledged truth is also proven true: Wealth and fame can’t stop oppression.
And privilege can’t keep you alive.
I’ve gone on for too long.
To everyone who is fighting oppression, wherever you are…I stand with you.
To Mom, I love you always.
In solidarity,
18 December 2005, 10:15 pmYolanda
Stan:
Some of us are listening back now, sister. Teach.
19 December 2005, 5:45 amJulian Real:
Yolanda, strong and tender-hearted Black woman warrior. That’s you. I’m in this fight with you, but you know that.
What you describe, at that party, I have experienced soooooo many times, it makes me sick now, and I cannot go to any social events where I know there will be social permission to be racist and sexist, so, well, I don’t go out much. And when I do, I speak my mind, always, unless there are specific reasons why I cannot, which did happen a few weeks ago, and I am only now finding my words, which WILL be delivered there, but not by me, because I’m boycotting them.
Onward. Towards peace founded in justice and freedom from all forms of tyraanny, sexual, racial, and otherwise.
23 January 2006, 3:08 pmJason:
I can only say that I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like to be black. I know black people. I employ them, occasionally. I know hispanics, too. And lesbians. I know them as people, as coworkers, as employees. Mostly, I know them by their roles.
Which means, I don’t know.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a jew or an indian, and yet I am half of each - as if race were a matter of parcelization.
I grew up in New Hampshire. It would be an understatement to say that we don’t have minorities here. We don’t have a “gay community.” We don’t even have the kind of graduated taxes that frame the debates around the allocations of funds and resources to those sort of communities. I am light skinned. And although, if I filled out a census form according to prevailing standards, I would be the most minor of minorities, I am in truth a White Man.
I went to private schools. I attended college until boredom and chemicals opened other avenues of escape. I played around, and although I’ve paid a certain price, I’ve never paid the cost.
I don’t have any practical experience with social costs. Sure, I homelessed in Boston for a while. I met non-Whites. We were different. But it had nothing to do with race, according to received wisdom.
Race cannot be separarated from class.
I manage a company. I can provide for my family with little worry.Those differences I first encountered in Boston, and later in places like New Orleans, Lynchburg, Charleston, Jacksonville, Virginia Beach, Baltimore and Richmond, were almost always economic and material. There still are material differences. I have access to and command of resources. My employees do not. And since, by and large, they are poor colored or white kids, they have come from places where the study of command of resources and persons - efficient management - was never on the curriculum.
I am, in turn, subject to control by a small aristocracy of considerably more well off White folks who own my company.
Who are, in their own turn, subject to the social and economic conditions of their class. Maybe they are aware of the differences. Maybe, they are even conscious of their control. But, like me, they don’t really know. They don’t know how their world works. They don’t know - on a visceral level - how a wage worker’s poverty is the other end of their affluence. They don’t know this continuum because they only live on one end of it. Their social and class reality doesn’t allow for any experience of this world, except as long distance charitable contributors to the temporary mitigation of their own equally long distance depradations.
I guess, I am like them. I don’t really know.
I’m not really saying much. I know this. And it’s probably only going to get worse, for some time to come. I’ll end up knowing less, because my skill set is reduceable to some charm, and understanding of applicable laws and regulations, and a massive national edifice of control that keeps my kids fed so long as I am willing to enforce the rules and the inequities at my own level.
I am willing to do this. And I guess the question you have to ask is why? What for, even? My own loyalties are easy. They are obvious. I know my children. I know what happens if I cannot feed them.And although I sympathize with you; although I am a leftist by any definition - I am still the enemy.
Because I have to be. You may have persuaded yourselves of the justice of your cause. You may even have persuaded me. But I will still sacrifice yours to take care of my own.
You see, in the end, I cannot afford to know anything. I cannot afford to know you.
And that is the battle you face. I agree with you. I support you. I might even want you to win. But you haven’t made the real case, yet. You haven’t given me any reason to change the facts on the ground. You haven’t shown me how we can afford the change. Sure, I know the results of global warming, bad diets, capitalist accumulation, corporate colonialism and war. I am not oblivious.
I will still go to work tomorrow and support that world order.
Your job is to make the alternative practical, and practicable. Or every one you have mentioned will have died in vain. Maybe every death is a death in vain.
I don’t know. Do you?
25 January 2006, 4:17 pmYolanda Carrington:
Jason,
Before I can respond to you, I have to understand what you are asking me. I’m not clear on what you are talking about. What do you see as my “cause?” I wasn’t advocating some nameless “cause” in this essay; I was pointing out that certain people meet certain deaths based on their race and gender. My words are very specific, and I appreciate specific responses to them.
And please don’t try to tell me what my job is, Jason. I know what it is: fighting oppression, especially gender and race oppression. This oppression exists, and I shouldn’t have to show you for you to know that it does. You can see all around you that this is true; in fact, you already have. From your own words, you seem to be well aware of your privilege as a White man. What are you going to do about that? Make no mistake: fighting white male privilege is YOUR job, not mine. I can’t do anything about it—if I could, it would have been gone yesterday.
In case you’re wondering, I don’t think any of the deaths I talked about were in vain. We can learn from the lessons of others if we just pay attention. It ain’t that hard. That’s why I wrote the essay in the first place.
Fighting the system is as practical and practicable as you want it to be. Ain’t nothing pie-in-the-sky about that.
Yolanda
26 January 2006, 12:16 amJason:
I am the on the ground agent of those repressive forces, Yolanda. With resistance. With shame, but an agent none-the-less. My children starve, literally, unless I do what I do.
If you choose to fight oppression, you choose to fight people exactly like me. And I am in accord with you. I agree with you. I am radicalized to a degree that astounds me. I still have to feed my children, which is a universal problem, a world problem.
Of course, it’s easier for me. I just have to make sure that others keep doing what I ask them to do.
If you want a man like me - a sympathetic man in the most affluent area of the country - to really take on the root of my relative affluence, you do have to show people exactly like me the ramificatios of supporting the power structures. We are, in part, slaves of our material conditions. These are the specifics. My neighbors are the specifics. George Bush makes sense to them. Tupac Shakur does not. A flat tax makes sense to them. A wealthy man killing himself because he’s wealthy does not.
I believe I understand your point. Race and gender roles - roles not so much enforced, but assumed under the pressures of a genuinely repressive cultural, economic and political regime - lead to deaths which, ultimately, follow certain sadly predictable trends.
And still, why should my neighbors care? Why should that keep me from feeding my children in the way I know and do best?
I don’t know. I guess, to repeat my question - I question I ask in good faith and with considerable admiration and respect - Do you?
26 January 2006, 11:23 amYolanda Carrington:
Jason,
Why do I have to show you anything? You know exactly what’s going on! Your neighbors live in a world of white supremacist patriarchal privilege! That’s why they can’t see past their own nose. They couldn’t even relate to a White alpha-man like Kurt Cobain, just because he’s from the working class. What does that say about their humanity?
You know that it is up to you and your “neighbors” (if you insist on calling them that) to build your own political consciousness. In fact, since you are their peer, why do you begin the important conversations with them?—especially the menfolk. That’s how mass consciousness is built anyway: having those important conversations with other folks about the material conditions of one’s life. Two guys shooting the shit in a bar can start a revolution. Don’t believe me? It’s happened before.
Brother Jason—I can’t tell your neighbors shit, and you know it. They ain’t gone listen to someone like me; they can’t relate to a person like me. I’m a working-class Black woman from the US South, with a consequential working-class worldview. I speak the language of poor and working-class folk; I know what it’s like to go to bed hungry, to sit in a government office all day to apply for food stamps, to spend three hours a day on a city bus just to get to a four-hour shift job, to run out of money in the middle of the month. Millions of people in the United States share this same experience.
That’s why Tupac and Kurt are my heroes to this day—they come from where I (and my mother) come from. They went through the same shit, if not worse. Their childhoods made them the men they were, and the unresolved trauma from those childhood/adolescent experiences led to their early deaths. That’s another experience working-class folk can relate to.
Sure, George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Richard Nixon or any ruling-class muthafucka (I DO NOT apologize for my profanity in THIS context) can’t understand the workers’ perspective, but so the fuck what? I don’t worry about that. Why should you? And that another problem: The ruling class don’t give A DAMN about you or your neighbors either. Think I’m lying? Look at all the corporations that have moved factories and facilities across the globe in search of oppressed workers to exploit. They know that folks thrown off the land (which is true throughout the so-called Third World) will take shit jobs at rock-bottom wages, which means higher PROFITS (the Holy Grail of capitalism) for them. Sure, they talk all that shit about “Made Proudly in USA,” but see how fast that song-and-dance changes when American workers get too expensive for their liking.
If you and your neighbors lose y’all’s cushy managerial jobs, how will y’all feed your kids then? Answer me that. Then what will your trusty GOP friends in Washington do for you? Yeah? That’s what I thought.
You gotta make the choice Jason, not me. I’ve made mine. I choose to fight for my people, the Ethel Carringtons and Tupac Shakurs and Kurt Cobains of the world, wherever they are. That’s why—if the Spirit sees fit—I’ll be marching down US Highway 90 from Mobile to New Orleans, right beside the survivors of this fucked-up system of ours.
Where will you and your neighbors be when we march?
27 January 2006, 5:16 pmYolanda Carrington:
And for everyone’s clarification: I still consider Messrs. Shakur and Cobain working-class, even as they were worth millions of dollars at the time of their deaths. Each man exuded a worker’s consciousness right up to his dying day.
Starving artists who make good are NOT capitalists, not by a long shot. It’s high time we blew this contradiction right out of the water—Oprah notwithstanding.
Yolanda
27 January 2006, 5:42 pm