In defense of these hands

I will always protect Black folks' right to defend and protect ourselves.

Photo by SUNDAY II SUNDAY on Unsplash

“Now that you're a doctor, you have to stop fighting and selling drugs,” my mom told me at my dissertation defense at the University of Chicago back in 2019.

“Ha! Yeah right!” I replied.

I had no intention of retiring my hands then, nor do I now. And, while I never really “sold drugs,” I have been known to grow cannabis, share my harvest, and encourage others to partake. Here we are six years later and neither of those things has changed.

I grew up in Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. If that doesn’t do enough to provide a framework for the types of people I come from, maybe a quick description of the women in my family will. My grandmother often told the story of cracking a glass carafe over her drunken husband’s head, knocking him out cold. My aunt once stabbed the father of her children to within inches of his life after he abused her. My mother once fought an entire group of high schoolers who were jumping her because she had dark-skin. In my family, we had a gun that was passed along from woman to woman, a gun they used to defend themselves against men who were trying to kill them.

I come from Black women like that, raised in the City of Oakland. To be completely clear.

My Uncle Rudolph, who was one of the most notorious narcotics dealers in California in the 1980s, was locked up for most of my childhood. But, he was finally released in 2002. While I only got to see him alive for a few years (retaliatory violence claimed his life in 2016), I was able to spend time with him when it mattered most.

As a young child, I visited Uncle Rudy in federal prison regularly. One thing he always told me was that I had to fight. He encouraged me to fight for myself, for my mother, and for my family no matter what. I imagine some of this stemmed from his battle to free himself from incarceration. Once he was released, Uncle Rudolph stepped in to help parent me in meaningful ways. He taught me how to drive and set me up with a driving teacher for days when he wasn’t available. He bought me clothes when my parents were acting funny. And, he took me to my first boxing gym.

“Now, you can’t be no punk,” he’d tell me when my punches didn’t even sting his palm. “Don’t start the fight. But, you gotta hit ‘em so hard that the fight ends.”

I’ve carried that with me ever since.

One of my father’s favorite sayings growing up was, “You don’t like me? Well you can’t whoop my ass.” He passed over a decade ago and I still reflect on this thought. I imagine my dad learned to defend himself while growing up in the very white, deeply anti-Black Northwest as a child. His constant exposures to whiteness and the threats that come along with those exposures likely taught him self-defense at an early age. While he should have been playing softball or joining the Boy Scouts, my dad was navigating a world that already wanted him dead.

I’m no different from my dad and my uncle. By high school, I had already been in at least a half dozen fights, all with boys. Often over a simple miscommunication or a smudge on someone’s Jordan’s, rage and physical violence were like currency growing up. I was almost jumped in middle school because I was taller than the twin girls who had to puff out their chests and prove they were the strongest. I was hemmed up by nearly every boy I liked growing up at one time or another, often so they could fend off critiques and comments about how they were “dating a boy” or “switching sides” by liking me.

I will always remember being nine years old in elementary school, awkward, shy, and deeply uninterested in confrontation. There was a girl named Cynthia who I despised because she had the same name as my mother. She despised me, too. As the only two Black girls at this private school who were clearly from the other side of the tracks, we were pitted against each other daily. But, Cynthia took it more seriously than I did. One day, she decided she was going to lash out during a game of four-square. I swatted the bouncy ball and it flew off into oblivion.

“Go get my ball, bitch,” Cynthia said to me with her hands on her hips.

I knew better than to obey anyone who thought it was okay to call me that.

“No,” I stated plainly.

“I said, go get my ball you bitch,” she raised her voice.

“Stop calling me that,” I told her.

“Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch,” she continued.

I counted seven “bitches” and, for some reason, I felt like twelve was my max.

“I said, bitchhhhh, biiiiiitccchhhhh.”

That was nine.

I walked closer to her, reminding her that I was absolutely serious.

“Bitch I said get my ball! You dumb bitch,” she yelled in my face. Eleven.

“Call me one more ‘bitch’ and I’m going to slap the shit out of you,” I warned her.

With a grin on her face looking reminiscent of the Cheshire Cat, she curled her lips and said, “Bit-” Before the “ch” could make it’s way into the world, I reared back and slapped the taste out of her mouth. Aghast, Cynthia held her left cheek and began wailing. She ran off, crumbled by the experience.

“You gonna slap her, you better slap me, too, you bully,” an older girl named Angela began yelling. She was probably the most popular girl in school. She was biracial with long curly black hair. She wore cool scrunchie socks every day and rolled up her skirt at the waist so boys could see her sandy colored thighs.

Angela walked up close to me, rolling her neck and putting her hands in my face (fighting words where I’m from). All the requirements to fold her had, in my opinion, been met. I understood the assignment. And, I slapped her, too. Neither Angela nor Cynthia ever bothered me again.

I don’t say this in an effort to condone senseless violence. Rather, my point is that, for many Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, working class, and disabled people, we are exposed to harm and abuse early on in our lives. Those exposures are training grounds for self-defense. Most of us are raised to never start fights with anyone. But, that doesn’t keep the fights from starting. Most of the fights where I grew up were about protecting street cred or defending masculinity. Either way, a fight was bound to happen but they never really escalated to gun shots unless a gang or turf loyalty were involved.

Violence in the United States is complicated, right? On the one hand, most people are non-violent, believing that there are better ways to solve confrontations. On the other hand, we watch the most violent movies, carry the most guns in the world, move about the public in constant fear of '“the other,” and allow police officers to kill people indiscriminately. For us to be so supposedly non-violent, we have ended up becoming the most violent nation on the planet.

That’s probably because we aren’t actually non-violent. People with road rage flick everyone off, yelling out of their car windows, honking obsessively, and flashing their lights when they can’t physically hurt another driver. School teachers in the South have long used paddles to punish children for simply being children. People watch football religiously as (mostly) Black men pummel each other, bang themselves into concussions, and cause irreparable damage to their brains. On social media, many people scroll past images of headless Palestinian children who have been slaughtered by Israel’s soldiers and maimed by US-made bombs. But, the key about all of these forms of violence is that they don’t actually require courage or standing up for anything. Many white Americans are totally fine with these daily violences because they don’t require bravery, real might, or personal investment.

In many ways, that means that the only people who are expected to be non-violent are people who aren’t white. Violence, in the US, is theirs. It belongs to white people because they (think they) get to decide when, how, where, and why it is being used.

One of the first places in the US where violence became the domain of white people was on the plantation. They had whips, chains, and other machinations of the “peculiar institution” while enslaved people were exposed to the elements, underfed, unpaid, and treated like barnyard animals, sometimes as even less than them. Enslavers used their power to connect pain to punishment and violence to identity when they structured slavery around fear, scarcity, and the constant threat of death. Any offense could draw the whip. Black folks’ tongues, eyes, toes, and fingers were all potential casualties to white dominance and power. But, if Black folk had the nerve to speak up, defend themselves, and stand upright in their own humanity, they risked being cut down on the spot.

I think about this regularly. About, how, in this place where we are marooned, we are pacified and socialized out of self-defense because the State says so. Nowadays, police officers can enact all manner of sexual and physical violence on people they deem “deviant” and near no one even bats an eye. People walk past unhoused folks struggling to survive on the streets with complete disregard. They get angry when protestors interrupt their morning drive to work after a community member has been killed by police. Most white Americans don’t actually care about the lives of Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, and immigrant folks unless those lives feel like interruptions to their own.

The rest of us don’t get to live like that. Whiteness is violent. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, they are all deeply violent. They are wielded to remove our rights and deny us citizenship. They are used to create policies that keep us from marrying our partners, raising kids, taking care of our ailing spouses, or deciding how our own families will work. Living in this capitalistic, anti-Black, heteropatriarchal world means confronting violence daily.

I think, for people who have always been or felt protected, it's easy to bemoan throwing hands. But, for those of us who know intimately what it means to navigate the world with little protection, with only our dreams of safety, and constant exposures to sexual, physical, and emotional violence, our hands often become our most reliable and available tool for survival.

Women like Cece McDonald (a Black trans woman who was imprisoned for defending herself during a transphobic attack) and Marissa Alexander (who was imprisoned for firing a single warning shot from her gun to protect herself and her newborn child from an abusive estranged husband) are examples of what happens when Black women, cis or trans, defend themselves. The State punishes us harshly. To them, we have no selves to defend.

This culture has wired us to accept all manner of verbal and emotional abuse. Most of us are so desensitized to the violence that we normalize it in our own lives. We expect to be abused because we always have been abused. Fighting against it often feels futile.

This is why I support Black queer and trans people, especially women, slicing people up for threatening them with violence. I support Black women with brass knuckles in their pockets, socks full of rolls of nickels in their purses, razors under their tongues, and house keys strategically placed between their fingers. I enjoy every video where a white person calls the wrong Black person (aka “the right one today”) a nigger with the hard “r” and gets their whole shit rocked. When Black folks on the Montgomery, Alabama riverfront beat the mess out of racist whites who were beating a Black riverboat captain (now known to us Blacks as the “Montgomery Boat Brawl”) thus redefining the meaning of the folding chair, I cheered. I posted memes and used names like “Jacquavious Phelps” and “Aqua Mane” to describe the young man who swum to the fight to jump in.

I am all for self-defense in a world that leaves us defenseless against their unbridled, racialized, targeted violence. I am deeply unapologetic about that.

I posted on Threads this week about Will Smith and the Oscars slap heard ‘round the world back in 2022. At the time, Rock was hosting the Oscars and made an awful joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s bald head. Jada has alopecia, which is very well-known. Will yelled from the audience, “keep my wife’s name out yo’ muthafuckin’ mouth,” before quickly climbing onstage and rocking Rock back to the Stone Ages.

Most of the Black people on the thread said things like, “Chris Rock deserved it,” and “I would’ve defended my wife, too.” But, there was one person who said, “I don’t condone assaulting someone else but I support Will.” The person was white, of course. I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself because I knew they were lying. I’ve never met a white person who didn’t condone violence and assault. I’ve never seen one white person stand up in public when a Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, trans, or disabled person was being assaulted by police or by another white bystander and say, “Excuse me, I don’t condone this assault!”

Not only that, it was white women at the time who were the angriest at Smith citing his “lack of decorum,” and “disrespect for the Oscars stage.” They immediately slid into the racist “step and fetch it” narratives wherein Black men are to be quiet, foolish, lazy, and well-behaved in front of mixed company. While many of them were completely silent about the violence of men like Donald Trump, and their own husbands and sons, they were outraged at this Black man misbehaving at their awards show. Smith went on to win Best Actor for his lead role in “King Richard” that night. Gravy for those of us who were unmoved by the slap.

That’s why Jordan Neely is no longer alive. An NYC subway passenger held Neely in a six-minute chokehold after he asked for food on a busy train. No on stood up and said, “I don’t condone this assault!” They just sat there because the violence against Neely’s body was imperceptible to them. He had no body to defend.

I refuse this. All of this. I refuse to go quietly into the night. Zora Neale Hurston once said, “if you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Audre Lorde said, “So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.” We have to speak up and disrupt the rules of engagement in this country that make it okay for everyone to abuse, harass, erase, and kill us.

I’m not giving up my hands. No matter how many books I write or degrees I get, these hands will always be rated “E” for everydamnbody. And, I’m not waiting on permission from white folks to use them.