Please stop silencing
By Melissa Rosario
Dear Justin Martinez,
When I read your wespeak last week, I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of
déjà vu. Did I just read a piece on “respect” or did I just watch the
investigative news report CBS’s “shame on you?” In your effort to “expose” the
dishonor of the not-so-post colonial “traitors,” you seemed to have missed the
overall irony of the fact that your article was a direct defensive attack on the
emotion and substance of performances/writings by Marta and Raquel; that your
piece read as the absence of respect and the presence of non-engagement. In
that, I believe it is most necessary to reiterate their statement that we
“…identify who is killing activism.” I think what Marta and Raquel wrote and
performed was less about themselves and “slandering” others as you call it and
more about disrupting the history of misrepresentation and homogenization at
Wesleyan which is taken to be the norm.
When this tendency was fought from within (both the community and the show),
your response to these actions is indicative of a belief that the norm
articulated is always “positive and empowering” and a refusal to take into
consideration that this is not everyone’s experience. In your terms, criticism
from within is disruptive of camaraderie and not a way to more fully express
camaraderie through difference. This is a limitation motivated by defensiveness
and self-protection. In designating properness and expertise as opposite to
actions motivated by emotions, you’ve silenced your fellow performers. Moreover
you’ve taken a patronizing approach to expressing culture.
This fact lies most explicitly within the trend I saw articulated in your piece
which is the removal/denial of the larger ways in which power operates. Again I
find a quote by Marta and Raquel to be instructive: “Proper activism must occur
in designated spaces, never demanding more power than the powerful are willing
to give up.” It is clear to me that by proper activism you as the “powerful
musician” designate it as the ability to perpetuate or folklorize the political
music of our ancestors. Perpetuating culture while representing music and dance
as benign erased the historical significance, the historical memory that is
necessary to truly represent artistic modes of being. In this the reference to
your band being “watered down” means it was removed of its political
significance and relationship to power i.e. making it consumable. Raquel was
trying to demonstrate this very thing in her piece. She was, after all,
referencing a piece of music and in doing so was trying to remind us of the
discriminatory nature under which these beautiful displays of culture (and even
our very own beautiful racial diversity) come into being.
In this there is an owner, an expert: it is the people who control the state
apparatus and your white skin makes you much more accessible in that right than
others. In your descent argument you say that this is your culture so you aren’t
in a sense appropriating it but you persist in ignoring the importance of
phenotype in understandings of race. I remind you that increasingly, power is
not about descent, it’s about pigmentation. In this, you should recognize that
you are a “white man.” In the homelands and even in our ethnic communities, the
most powerful and the most beautiful still fit within the ideology of
blanqueamineto. “…defined as the gradual ‘purging’ of black features from the
general population…not only encourages, but also enables dominant, romantic
representations of black communities as remnants of a by-gone era” (Godreau
284).
In conclusion Justin, the intention of this article has been a plea for you to
reflect on yourself and your position in the silencing of others. My citations
come from “Changing Space, Making Race: Distance, Nostalgia, and the
Folklorization of Blackness in Puerto Rico” (you can find it online in the
Identities journal Volume 9, 281-304 2002) I’ve got many more citations if you’d
like just email me at mlroasario@wesleyan.edu.
Rosario is a member of the Class of 2005.
|
|
